English Language and Literature Commons^™

Queering The Ear: Podcast Aesthetics And The Embodied Archive In S-Town, Kira Schukar

English Honors Projects

Despite podcasts’ rising popularity over the last twenty years, literary scholars are only beginning to focus on their affective potential as multimedia texts. In this thesis, I argue that even mainstream podcasts are productively intertwined with queer theories and aesthetics of belonging. Using the 2017 podcast S-Town as my case study, I examine the aural aesthetics of queer failure, temporality, archives, embodiment, and desire as key elements in this complex medium. Putting these theories and aesthetics into practice, I describe my process of research-creation and present a podcast I made about my road trip to Woodstock, Alabama, S-Town’s place …

Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: Girlhood In The Creation, Content, And Consumption Of Victorian Children’S Literature, Betsy Barthelemy

English Honors Projects

The Golden Age of (British) Children’s Literature was famous not only for the proliferation of fiction it hosted, but also for how much of that work featured young heroine protagonists. Starting with the publication of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and examining two other fantasy works compared with three realistic children's novels from this half-century period, this project elucidates the differences between these genres and examines how authors used the characteristics of each to empower their heroines. It argues that these fictitious heroines influenced real-world readers to create progressive futures by providing examples of rebellious girl characters finding happy endings.

Bodies In The Margins: Refiguring The Rebetika As Literature, Sophia Schlesinger

English Honors Projects

This thesis engages a literary analysis of a corpus of songs and recordings known as the rebetika (sing. rebetiko), which prospered in the port districts of major cities throughout the Aegean in the early 20th century. Engaging the rebetika as literary texts, I argue, helps us understand how they have functioned as a kind of pressure point on the borders between nation and Other. Without making unproveable biographical claims about the motives of the music progenitors, I examine why so many have reached for the rebetika as texts with which to articulate various political and cultural desires. Using a …

How To Be The Perfect Asian Wife!, Sophia Hill

Art and Art History Honors Projects

“How to be the Perfect Asian Wife” critiques exploitative power systems that assault female bodies of color in intersectional ways. This work explores strategies of healing and resistance through inserting one’s own narrative of flourishing rather than surviving, while reflecting violent realities. Three large drawings mimic pervasive advertisement language and presentation reflecting the oppressive strategies used to contain women of color. Created with charcoal, watercolor, and ink, these 'advertisements' contrast with an interactive rice bag filled with comics of my everyday experiences. These documentations compel viewers to reflect on their own participation in systems of power.

Private Deaths: The Impossibilities Of Home In The Modernist Novel, Ava Bindas

English Honors Projects

This project examines novels by Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, and Nella Larsen featuring female characters who contemplate or commit suicide. Relying on a composite theoretical framework that weaves together geography theories of spaces as well as gendered theories of bodies by authors like Judith Butler, Rita Felski, and Victoria Rosner, I argue women commit suicide because their modern homes fail to accommodate their gendered bodies. Focusing less on the moment of death than on the conditions that make choosing to live impossible, this project tracks how, during a moment of supposed liberation, conceptions of gender, modernity, and domestic …

(Re)Constructing The Hybrid: Negotiating Transcultural South Asian Women's Subjectivity, Zoya Haroon

English Honors Projects

My project explores the transcultural South Asian woman as postcolonial hybrid subject. I do so by comparing two novels by transnational South Asian feminist authors (Jasmine by Bharati Mukherjee and Anita and Me by Meera Syal) and using ethnographic work to complement my literary analysis of hybridity with the lived experience of South Asian women at Macalester. I contextualize my project within postcolonial and women of color feminist theory. Ultimately, I seek to contribute to the existing literature on transcultural South Asian women’s subjectivity and to place their experience alongside that of other women of color.

Honors project in English …