American Literature Commons^™

The End Of Everything: The Physical And Figurative Impacts Of Landscape On American Ideology, Wyatt Alger

Senior Projects Spring 2023

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

"Dream Police": Political Imagination In William Burroughs' Naked Lunch, Ethan Jg Haapala

Senior Projects Spring 2023

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

A Biomythography Of Mommy, Immanuel J. Williams

Senior Projects Spring 2022

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

Radical Folk Heroes: Anansi & Br’Er Rabbit’S West African Origins & Their Forced Pilgrimages, Sage Adia Swaby

Senior Projects Spring 2022

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

For Us By Us: Explorations And Introspections On The Poetics Of Black Language, Isis Pinheiro

Senior Projects Spring 2021

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

"She Believes She Is Herself, Which Isn't Complete Madness:" Becoming The Female Subject Through Womanhood As Relation, Isabel Rudner

Senior Projects Fall 2020

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

"Yells Of Life In Constant Change": The Sonorous Criticism Of Amiri Baraka, Jack Luis Mckeon

Senior Projects Spring 2020

My research engages intersections of the racial and the sonic in the cultural criticism of poet and playwright Amiri Baraka. Focusing primarily on his music and political criticism published between 1961 and 1971, I am interested in questions of vernacular performance, as well as tensions between the verbal and the vocal that arise in his work. This project began with an interest in locating and understanding the moment in Baraka’s work where he began to turn away from the poetic style of contemporaries such as Frank O’Hara and Gary Snyder, choosing instead to shift towards a style reminiscent of jazz …

Becoming Ourselves: Black Women’S Autobiographical Interrogation Of Tropes Of Identity, Christina L. Duncan

Senior Projects Spring 2019

A central premise of this project is that Black female identity has historically been seen as a fixed identity. Much of the imposed rigidity on Black female identity has been informed by conservative strategies for survival. Such conservative strategies include respectability politics, as racial leaders have found utility in upholding the principle that if they or others work hard, they can uphold the race. Only by maintaining these standards of respectability have Black women been deemed as worthy and able to uphold and reinforce positive images of Blackness. Many of the stories written by Black women generally fall into the …

A Return To The Region: 
Reconstructing The Past In Jewett, Cather, And Hurston
 (1896-1935), Anna L. Russian

Senior Projects Spring 2019

My senior project focuses on three works of American literature, starting from 1896 and ending in 1935. During this time period, the United States was undergoing drastic cultural and industrial changes, both of which indefinitely reshaped the American landscape. My project seeks to understand these changes through Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), Willa Cather’s My Ántonia (1918), and Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men (1935). All three works look beyond the city, and instead look inward toward small regional communities in Maine, Nebraska, and Florida. With the regional focus placed on the narratives, my project …

Bound To Rise, Morgan P. H. Bielawski

Senior Projects Spring 2019

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

Bound to Rise is a collection of short stories about people who discover themselves in the “fine drizzly rain” (or smirr, in Scottish lingo) of everyday life. They orient themselves and find some way forward, or they realize they have to. Thematically, it addresses a carnival (the carnivalesque), a demolition derby, multiple fires, photography, drinking, music, an eating disorder, and a birthday cake. It includes one original children’s story written in Russian and translated into English by the author.

It Seemed A Lucky Thing: The Self As Art In The Work Of Sylvia Plath, Evin J. Guinan

Senior Projects Spring 2019

“It Seemed a Lucky Thing” centers a discussion of author and self around the works of Sylvia Plath, primarily using her novel The Bell Jar and two of her Ariel works, “Lady Lazarus” and “Daddy”. Blending together various ideas of self-construction, ranging from Kierkegaard’s aesthetics to Foucault’s “What is an Author?” to issues of psychiatry as a method of social control, the work defines its principle term “self-authorship” as the purposeful construction of self-image inherent in both decisions within a lived life and in the process of creating written art.

Self-authorship and its complications are addressed both in context of …

"Becoming" David Foster Wallace: Media, Metafiction, And Miscommunication, Gordon Hugh Willis Iv

Senior Projects Spring 2018

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

William Wells Brown; Or The Spook Who Sat By The Cabin Door From Black Ex-Slave Narratives To White Abolitionist Fiction: Understanding The First African American Novel And Its Origins, Elijah Coleman Jackson

Senior Projects Spring 2018

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

Little Black Books: Exploring Modes Of Reclamation Of Black American Identity Through Afro-American Children's Literature, Aaliyah Armani Barnes

Senior Projects Spring 2018

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College

“I Wanna Be Like Mike:” A Synthesis Of Sports Marketing From Babe Ruth To Michael Jordan, Michael John Duffy

Senior Projects Spring 2018

This project examines the rise and development of modern sports marketing, as well as its impact on the economy, society, culture, and professional sports. The project explores sports marketing through the lens of two legendary athletes – Babe Ruth and Michael Jordan. Ruth and Jordan are two pivotal figures that were major catalysts for elevating the role of sports and sports marketing to new levels in each of their time periods. Ruth was the first major athlete to sign lucrative endorsement deals as he opened the floodgates, fostering the rise of sports marketing and changing the sports economy. Moving to …

South Side, World Wide: The Fusion Of History And Literature In Richard Wright And James T. Farrell's Chicago, Malachi Zachary Hayes

Senior Projects Spring 2018

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies and The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

After The Age Of Innocence: Reclaiming Edith Wharton's Satirist Status, Jeffrey Smith Daugherty

Senior Projects Spring 2018

In the decades following her death, Edith Wharton has been called many things as critical reception of her work ebbed and flowed: she has been labeled an elitist out of touch with the common man; an expat who fell out of touch with her American roots; a sentimentalist romanticizing the wealthy and conservative society she was born into. These assessments vary from somewhat accurate to entirely reductive. Wharton may not have been able to accurately depict rural poverty in “Ethan Frome” due to her affluent urban upbringing, but she could still capture the desperate ennui of a life lived without …

On Frank Stanford's "Battlefield", Clara Brigid Allison

Senior Projects Spring 2018

Frank Stanford's little known poem titled "The Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You" was published just after his suicide in 1978 and extends for approximately 17,000 lines. As the poem follows eternally 12 year old Francis through his dreams and twisted realities living in the south, it thrusts each reader into the farthest depths of disorientation using indescribably beautiful language. With no punctuation, structure, narrative, timeline, or distinction between the real and unreal, this poem exists on the far end of the experimental spectrum. My project, in response to Stanford's form, uses an alternative form of analysis and …

Back To The Country: America's White Working Class In Literature And Culture, Quentin Robert Lundstedt

Senior Projects Spring 2018

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Multidisciplinary Studies of Bard College.

Nation, Self, And Foreign Space: Exploring The Expatriation Of James Baldwin, Henry James, And Edith Wharton, Emily Monroe Weisman

Senior Projects Spring 2018

This project explores the expatriation of James Baldwin, Henry James, and Edith Wharton. Through their fiction and personal journeys abroad, Baldwin, James and Wharton seek to answer the question of what it means to be an American. This trio of writers chose to leave America at some point or another in order to find both literary and personal freedom from the confinement that was brought upon them by the space of America.

Baldwin, James, and Wharton explore the effects of race, class, and gender on an individual in the space of America versus the space of Europe. The novels that …

"Mirrors Can Only Lie:" The Search For Masked Self-Knowledge In The Work Of James Baldwin, Chloe Zeff Fields

Senior Projects Spring 2018

An analysis of hidden self-knowledge in James Baldwin's writing. James Baldwin is a political psychologist who seeks to understand the self through what it remains "innocent" to. I explore Baldwin's metaphors and concepts of "masked" knowledge, and argue that Baldwin translates psychological tropes into political ones.

"It's [Not] Only Lines On Paper, Folks!": The Curious Literary Identity Of The Graphic Novel, Oona Blood Cullen

Senior Projects Spring 2017

Art Spiegelman's “Maus,” Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' “Watchmen,” and Frank Miller's “The Dark Knight Returns,” created waves in both the literary and comics communities upon their subsequent release in the year 1986. My project seeks to unpack the ways in which the “1986 Big Three” forge identities for themselves both within and without the designations of literature and comics, and ultimately to define the unique literary identity of each work. I examine the ways in which each of these works makes use of the history and traditions of the medium from which they emerge, including use of recognizable tropes …

“Report All Obscene Mail To Your Postmaster” Reading, Institutions, And The American Public, Post-Revolution And 1965, Connor Christopher Boehme

Senior Projects Spring 2017

This project attempts to understand how Americans are able to imagine themselves as a political public in two revolutionary moments: just after the American Revolution, and in 1965, at the heart of the Civil Rights era. The public, which the Constitution labels “We, the people,” is explored first in Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography, which postulates the institutional conditions necessary for its readership, the first generation of Americans, to form a political public. The project then studies the “We,” of the Constitution’s preamble and considers how readers can interpret who is signified by that “We.” 1965 saw a cultural revolution in America …

Ernest Hemingway And Alice Walker: Branding The Great American Writer, Shari Stiell-Quashie

Senior Projects Spring 2016

Ernest Hemingway and Alice Walker: Branding the Great American Writer discusses how Public Relations efforts have shaped the work of 20th century authors, Alice Walker and Ernest Hemingway through their respective stories The Color Purple and The Old Man and The Sea. The tactics of this field have created two of the most prominent literary figures of our time, writers who have both produced timeless works and summoned a global audience to pay close attention to their work. Understanding how this attention is garnered is vital to recognizing the way authorship is created, shaped, and consumed by the reading …

Stanza My Stone: On The Death Of God And The Nature Of Poetry, Ariella Joann Kust

Senior Projects Spring 2016

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

Following Racialized Motherhood From The Plantation To The Courtroom, Rachel Greer Parker

Senior Projects Spring 2016

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

Viewing The Whale: Space, Time, And The Imagination In "Moby-Dick" And Comics, Garrett Sterling Bond

Senior Projects Spring 2016

In defining ‘comics’ as a genre in his groundbreaking Understanding Comics, scholar Scott McCloud considers images in narratives more generally as operating within a representative space between the storyteller and the objects they describe. This project extracts from comics a structural theory of reading as a subjective visual experience, by comparing the framing of images in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick with that in works of graphic narrative, primarily Richard McGuire’s Here, Chris Ware’s Building Stories, and Matt Kish’s Moby-Dick in Pictures: One Drawing for Every Page. In order to consider comics as works of narrative, McCloud emphasizes the …

“Nothing But Blows”: Herman Melville And The Contagion Of Authority, Conrad Irving Brittenham

Senior Projects Spring 2016

In Chapter Thirty Six of Moby Dick, “The Quarter Deck,” captain Ahab rallies the Pequod’s crew behind his hunt for Moby Dick, met with no opposition other than from the ship's first mate, Starbuck. After heatedly bickering for some time, Ahab mentions in an aside, “Something shot from my dilated nostrils, he has inhaled it in his lungs. Starbuck now is mine; cannot oppose me now, without rebellion” (168). What follows is Starbuck’s “tacit acquiescence” to Ahab’s demands. Though it is unclear exactly what the “something” is that comes out of Ahab’s nose, it is clear that this one-track-mind captain …

Into The Parlor: The Persona Of Mark Twain As Architect And Satirist Of The Genteel Tradition, Morgan Ariel Oppenheimer

Senior Projects Spring 2016

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College

Castles In The Air: Thoreau's Theory Of Mind, Harry Deneen Trask

Senior Projects Spring 2016

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.