English Language and Literature Commons^™

The Unwatched Pot, Grace Lyde

Scripps Senior Theses

From the inside out:

The staff of the Gell-Mann Zweig Library are going through it. Edith, who had been transferred to another branch has just been transferred back and promoted, bumping their ex, Augustine, down a step. On their first day back, Edith ends up turning their contentious ongoing flirtationship with Heidi, a different co-worker, into… something else. Meanwhile, both Green and Heidi’s chronic nightmares have taken a turn for the strange devolving into encoded messages and countdowns.

And Felix is there. Doing his best.

Slowly but surely the five of them are going to have to grapple with the …

Queer 'Paradise Lost': Reproduction, Gender, And Sexuality, Emily R. Kolpien

Scripps Senior Theses

In the span of this thesis, I investigate the queer nature of John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost, and argue that in spite of the biblical subject matter it is in fact a text filled with instances of queer transgression. I focus on preexisting feminist critiques of Milton in my introduction in order to ground myself within the academic field, and in order to illustrate how I will be branching out from it. In my first chapter, I discuss the queered nature of the poem’s landscapes, such as Chaos and Hell, and the specifically queer and masculine nature of …

Adaptable Monsters: The Past, Present, And Future Of The Vampire Narrative As A Metaphor For Marginalized Groups, Alexa Wei

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis paper gives a brief history of the vampire narrative and its role in representing the collective anxieties of an age as well as serving as a metaphor for oppressed peoples. It uses Bram Stoker’s Dracula and J. Sheridan le Fanu’s Carmilla as historical examples of how the vampire adapts to suit issues of the day such as reverse colonization and female sexuality, respectively. The latter part of this paper speculates on the future role of the vampire in literature and proposes that the vampire could be used to discuss transgender issues as well as challenge the gender binary. …