English Language and Literature Commons^™

Failures Of Chivalry And Love In Chretien De Troyes, Adele Priestley

Honors Theses

Although chivalry and courtly love have been imposed upon society as a framework for social interaction, Chrétien’s five stories ultimately promote the idea that the individual is top priority, and when involved in courtly love and chivalry each person should remember that they are using these ideals simply as a way to promote themselves.

Illusion Of Control: The Struggle For History And Humanity, Samantha R. Nystrom

Honors Theses

Through the increased amount of documentation occurring in the individual’s everyday life, through the government, through social media, etc., the question of history’s place in contemporary culture arises—who is the author of history, how is the struggle over authorship played out within contemporary literature, and where does humanity fit within this struggle? I argue that the struggle for authorship within contemporary society has suspended history. Contending authors constantly rewrite the pre-narrative, the event history records, prohibiting society from moving forward. Whoever gains the ultimate authorial role, whoever becomes the author of history, controls humanity. To examine this occurrence within contemporary …

Reconstructing Violet Paget, Dash Wasserman

Colby Magazine

Phyllis Mannocchi (English) plumbs Colby archives to reveal life and times of an enigmatic writer.

Gender, Nature, And The Fairytale Structure In Robin Mckinley's Works, Molly Rogers

Honors Theses

Robin McKinley is an American fantasy author who uses fairytale structure to explore themes of gender and nature. Her first book, Beauty, a retelling of “Beauty and the Beast” was published in 1978. She continues to write fairytales and other fantastic fiction, utilizing the fairytale form and structure. She has won a few awards, including the Newbery Award in 1985 for her novel The Hero and the Crown. Her latest book, Pegasus, was published in 2010. Jack Zipes describes McKinley’s heroines as "self-confident, courageous young women who take the initiative in a world which they help to define with men…it …

Mediums Change, Fears Stay The Same, Lucy Wilhelms

Honors Theses

Although generally dismissed by scholars as being overly sentimental or superstitious, the gothic genre has survived for over four centuries and maintained significant cultural appeal, outlasting the sentimental novel and the travelogue as popular literature. What, then, makes this genre different? What is so special about the gothic?

In my thesis, I examine the evolving cultural appeal of the gothic genre that keeps it attractive and relevant for readers by tracing the gothic text, The Woman in Black by Susan Hill, through its initial inception and its subsequent adaptations. As a novel, The Woman in Black both repeats and revises …

Purpose Found: Conditions Of Meaningful Existence, Selfhood And The Role Of The Other In John Milton's Paradise Lost, Anna Sawch

Honors Theses

While Biblical interpretations of Genesis posit God as omnipotent creator and teacher, in John Milton's Paradise Lost it is Adam and Eve‟s relationship and interactions with one another that make them who they are and mold them into who they become. The Adam and Eve of Paradise Lost are true characters, and dynamic ones at that. Rather than serve an allegory or work to create a lofty moral lesson, Adam and Eve grow through speech, desire, and language, interfacing with one another in the spirit of true human curiosity and self-discovery. I first explored this observation that Milton's Adam and …

Shakespeare And Homoeroticism: A Study Of Cross-Dressing, Society, And Film, Leigh Bullion

Honors Theses

William Shakespeare’s plays cover an array of topics focused on sexuality, from gender reversal to adultery to beastiality. But perhaps the most consistent and emphasized topic is homoeroticism.This focus on homoeroticism proceeds from the prohibition of women on the English stage and the subsequent female roles young boys would play. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night each present different representations of homoeroticism yet complement each other. A Midsummer Night’s Dream focuses on the erotic potential of unrestrained desire and the tense relationship between female amity and dominating patriarchal and heterosexual interests. As You Like It …

My Teaching Philosophy, Marilyn R. Pukkila

Faculty Scholarship

This is my philosophy of teaching and learning, as developed during the ACRL Immersion Intentional Teacher Track in Nashville, TN in December of 2009

Reading Joycean Comedy And Faulknerian Tragedy: Exploring The Significance Of Location, Literary Influence And The Possibilities Of Heroism With Leopold Bloom In Joyce’S Ulysses And Quentin Compson In Faulkner’S The Sound And The Fury And Absalom, Absalom!, Colin R. Cummings

Honors Theses

The distinct similarity between Joyce’s and Faulkner’s philosophical concerns (the affirmation of life in spite of its myriad difficulties), and the striking disjuncture between their aesthetic approaches (comedy for Joyce and tragedy for Faulkner), is where my interest in this project began. I sought to explore the lives and works of both writers in order to get a sense of how two artists could attempt to convey a similar message through such different means. The first thing I explore is a number of similarities between Joyce’s and Faulkner’s personal worlds (particularly their intimate connections to location) and their sources of …

Take A Deep Breath: On Not Losing The Turtle In The Technology, Marilyn R. Pukkila

Faculty Scholarship

Understanding media messages and selecting worthwhile sources of information require the ability to analyze and deconstruct messages.

Representations Of Grief In Akhmatova’S Requiem And Pushkin’S The Bronze Horseman, Hillary R. Smith

Honors Theses

Anna Akhmatova composed Requiem largely before 1940, but it was not published until the mid 1960s – after her death. It is now known to be one of her best works. Requiem is a cycle comprised of fifteen poems, the entireties of which are introduced by a personal reflection written in prose. Alexander Pushkin wrote his lyric ballad The Bronze Horseman in 1833 about the tremendous flood of 1824 in St. Petersburg and the involvement of the bronze equestrian statue of Peter the Great. Everything that the protagonist, Evgeny, cares for is destroyed, and he blames the Tsar for his …

Can’T Afford The Manolos? Buy The Book!: Chick Lit & Contemporary Consumerism, Allison Cole

Undergraduate Research Symposium (UGRS)

At the airport, across from the magazines at Wal-Mart, and probably somewhere near the front of local bookstores — chick lit is everywhere. One would probably recognize it from a distance as a sea of shiny pink1, the small glossy paperbacks cheerfully beckoning from their carefully constructed display. Chick lit has exploded into the western2 market over the last decade, captivating millions of readers with their tales of young, urban professional women navigating the worlds of careers, relationships, and of course, shopping. By the end of the novel, each of these components is generally resolved in somewhat formulaic fashion

Agent Of Change: Trickster In Ojibwa Oral Narratives And In The Works Of Louise Erdrich, Patrick B. Benton

Honors Theses

Change is not only a theme of Louise Erdrich’s work, but the paramount theme. Critic John Purdy concurs, writing that “the characters who people her pages are immensely recognizable to an audience comprised of many cultures: they exhibit all the frailties and strengths, the failures and triumphs one would expect for humans who face what we all – as individuals, as cultures, and as species – must face: change” (Purdy, 8). What is this change, though? And, who is the agent of this change? Casual readers of Louise Erdrich’s works may not be aware that her characters are informed by …

Apple And The Tree: Shakespeare’S Use Of Father-Child Relationships In Character Construction, Elizabeth Finn

Honors Theses

Before he stood the test of time, William Shakespeare had to survive the fire of the early modern marketplace. The surviving records indicate that Shakespeare was quite successful, not only artistically but also financially. In his home of Stratford-upon-Avon, he owned an impressive house, New Place, as well as significant amounts of arable land (Greenblatt 330). Meanwhile, he also became a part-owner in the Globe and Blackfriars theaters (Greenblatt 368). To accumulate such funds, Shakespeare had to write plays that would sell tickets; plays that would intrigue audiences and keep them coming back for more. Thus, he must have had …

Gendered Struggle For The Freedom From Violence Using Frantz Fanon’S Theory In Three Postcolonial Novels: Albert Wendt’S Pouliuli, Tsitsi Dangarembga’S Nervous Conditions, And Edwidge Danticat’S Breath, Eyes, Memory, Robin M. Respaut

Honors Theses

While studying abroad in New Zealand last year, I became intrigued by Albert Wendt’s novel Pouliuli, because it was my first literary view into Pacific Island culture. My interest in the novel was part of my awakening to the particular damage done by the west in Oceania. By attending classes on the anthropology and sociology of postcolonial Pacific societies, I discovered how the west had acted in the region to encourage progressive technology in ways that handled native traditional culture with unconscious disrespect. I was stunned to learn that Oceania is the most aided region in the world today, surpassing …

“Nothing That Is So, Is So”: Indeterminate Language In Shakespeare, Matthew K. Crane

Honors Theses

The Shakespearean canon is characterized by indeterminacy. His world is one where nothing is as it seems; men pose as women, nobles as commoners, and sisters as brothers. The resulting confusion challenges conventional norms, questioning gender, cultural, and other social boundaries. The surface uncertainty extends beneath the costumes and performers to the very foundation of theatre—language—as spaces emerge between words and meaning, and what is said and what is meant. Shakespeare’s use of ambiguous language opens his plays to multiple interpretations, creating a constant but fluctuating separation between the reader and text, the literal and figurative, and the expressed and …

Dialectics Of Diaspora Space: A Study Of Contemporary, Diasporic, South Asian Fiction, Christopher A. Zajchowski

Honors Theses

In light of these continuing debates concerning immigration, national identity and belonging, re-examinations of immigrant and ethnic communities, often referred to as ‘diaspora,’ have become increasingly popular and prudent. Khachig Tololian, editor of Diaspora magazine, calls diaspora “exemplary communities of the transnational moment.”5 In an increasingly globalized world, where labor, capital, and resources are passed fluidly from continent to continent, diaspora are created by relocation or displacement of immigrant workers and their descendents.6 For these unskilled, immigrant laborers, middle class immigrants, and the children of both groups, adaptation to the culture, society, and life in a new ‘host’ country can …

In Any Weather : A Collection Of Short Stories, Stephen J. Plocher

Honors Theses

Short Stories

Messy Love: Collection Of Short Stories, Mindy Favreau

Honors Theses

Messy Love: Collection of Short Stories

Women Making Progress?: A Study Of Wide Sargasso Sea As A Response To Jane Eyre, Kaitlin M. Gangl

Honors Theses

I have always had a love for Victorian literature. Growing up I read Jane Austen, Louisa May Alcott, Elizabeth Gaskell, and many more Victorian female writers I could get my mother to recommend. Reading and writing has been a passion of mine since I was young, and female writers (Victorian in particular) were always a particular favorite of mine. Despite my interest in this genre, I found myself reading Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) for the first time just two years ago while studying in London. I was taking a Nineteenth-Century British Literature course, and while I appreciated the works …

Religion And Renunciation In Wordsworth: The Progression Of Natural Individualism To Christian Stoicism, Geoffrey L. Meldahl

Honors Theses

William Wordsworth was twenty-three when the French National Convention condemned the deposed Louis XVI to death, and France, under Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety, dissolved into abject violence. The disappointing results of the Revolution and the subsequent events in European politics began to work a change in Wordsworth’s personal political and ethical views that would greatly affect not only his own poetry but the entire Romantic Movement. Even still, his eventual apostasy from the radical republicanism of his youth affects the way in which people read Wordsworth’s work, igniting both sympathy and resentment. The Ode to Duty is …

The Other Side Of The Podium: Student Information Needs From Inside The Classroom, Marilyn R. Pukkila

Faculty Scholarship

A few things the author learned about students and research when she audited classes on her campus as part of her sabbatical.

Literary Love Making In Nicholas Sparks Novels: Finding The Balance Between The Writer's Life And Writer's Work In Bestselling Romantic Love, Ryan Spanich

Undergraduate Research Symposium (UGRS)

For almost a decade now Nicholas Sparks has been writing love stories. Not only has he been publishing his stories, but they have received high acclaim in each of their installments. Several of his novels have been made into major motion pictures and increased his popularity quite significantly. His status as a successful romantic fiction writer is undeniable, but the question is, why? What is it about Nicholas Sparks that makes his novels so engaging, and personally, what do I need to do as an aspiring novelist to try and acquire the same literary status? Sparks’s novels reach readers at …

The Tastes Of A Nation: M.F.K. Fisher And The Genre Of Culinary Literature, Melina Cope Markos

Undergraduate Research Symposium (UGRS)

This project works to situate this gastronomic revolution within a historical context, arguing at greater length that our contemporary food culture in the United States is in part the legacy of the body of food representations. Here we witness the evolution of a particular culinary sensibility that appealed to readers differently in different historical moments, as exhibited by the variety of ways that Fisher’s body of work was publicly received. By the end of the twentieth century, Fisher’s ethos reigned supreme, because Americans began to view food with less fear and anxiety as they slowly became more comfortable expressing their …

Man-Made Menopause, Madeline Horwitz

Undergraduate Research Symposium (UGRS)

In this study I suggest that there are three distinct time periods mark new developments in society’s understanding of menopause, Victorian America in the mid and late nineteenth century, mid-twentieth century America, and contemporary America. This is the case not only in terms of advances in biological science, but also the ways in which the medical establishment has viewed menopause has also changed, and in terms of changes in prevalent gender assumptions. In this paper I hope to expose the ways science, history, and society has medicalized menopause, and the ways in which menopause has been viewed by individual women, …

Let Us Now Praise Famous Women, Erin Rhoda

Undergraduate Research Symposium (UGRS)

Writing this collection of journalistic nonfiction has come at an appropriate time for me as I head out into the world on my own. I still don’t know if or where I’ll be working. I don’t know if I’ll be an intern or employee or if I want to go to graduate school in the future. The world is wide open before me, and that is a scary thing. However, these women have been assuring and guiding me. Meeting and interviewing them has taught me that life is subjective. They have shown me that everything we own can be lost …

The Family Novel In The Emerging Nation-State: A Comparative Study Of Ba Jin’S Jia And Lev Tolstoy’S Anna Karenina, Adil D'Sousa

Undergraduate Research Symposium (UGRS)

The theme of family in literature and in popular discourse occurs at times when the family as an institution is under attack. Attacks against the family coupled with defence of the family are viewed as the barometer of people’s satisfaction with the society in which they live. This outpouring of emotion, whether it is in defence of or attacking the family, is the result of the family’s position on the bridge between nature and society – a fortunate (or a detrimental) link between an individual and the units that make up a society. Across the United States and much of …

Modernist Success In A Postmodern Failure: Jackson Pollock And Abstract Expressionism, The Avant-Garde And The Ascension Of Late Capitalism, Art After 1945, Russell Gullette

Honors Theses

It is hard to imagine the magnitude of the events at the end of World War II. The thought produced in the face of a myriad of deaths is almost unfeasible sixty years after the fact, but the energy was integral to the changing social landscape. Because of the country's prominence in and fortitude after the war, the U.S. was left responsible for reshaping and rejuvenating the international landscape that was destroyed by the years of brutal fighting and vile contestation. The American establishment was granted a major opportunity to establish itself amongst the global leaders. Such a grand responsibility …

League Of Their Own: The Competition For Jewish-American Identity In The Novels Of Philip Roth, Rebeccah Amendola

Honors Theses

In his insightful and sometimes troubled contemporary writings, Philip Roth demonstrates a nuanced understanding of how the development of Jewish-American identity is a painful and often hilariously paradoxical journey of discovery as Jewish traditions intersect (and often collide) with the American ideal of vertical advancement. Since the successful fulfillment of the American Dream requires some measure of assimilation into the majority American culture known as Americanization, Roth's Jewish-American characters are continually and precariously ill-balanced between retaining and abandoning their Jewish heritage in favor of a new American identity. Thus, if Americanization necessitates Anglo-conformity and the abandonment of immigrant mores, the …

Literary Love Making In Nicholas Sparks Novels: Finding The Balance Between The Writer’S Life And The Writer’S Work In Bestselling Romantic Literature, Ryan Spanich

Honors Theses

For almost a decade now Nicholas Sparks has been writing love stories. Not only has he been publishing his stories, but they have received high acclaim in each of their installments. Several of his novels have been made into major motion pictures and increased his popularity quite significantly. His status as a successful romantic fiction writer is undeniable, but the question is, why? What is it about Nicholas Sparks that makes his novels so engaging, and personally, what do I need to do as an aspiring novelist to try and acquire the same literary status? Sparks’s novels reach readers at …