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Articles 1 - 29 of 29
Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature
Comedy, Contagion, And Confinement In Bo Burnham’S Inside, Zoe Barclay
Comedy, Contagion, And Confinement In Bo Burnham’S Inside, Zoe Barclay
English
Bo Burnham’s Inside was filmed by the former YouTube star, stand-up comedian, and director entirely alone in his guest house during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and released on Netflix. The comedy special is a mixture of skits, songs, and monologues loosely stitched together that question the role of comedy, provide a critique of the current socio-cultural moment, and give the viewer a glimpse into Burnham’s mind. Inside and The Inside Outtakes both engage with the themes associated with outbreak narratives and explore current social questions regarding privilege, accountability, consumption, and capitalism. Like other works of comedy, Inside takes …
The Pen As Your Sword: Writing Through The Lens Of Depression, Chris Lownie
The Pen As Your Sword: Writing Through The Lens Of Depression, Chris Lownie
English
Tragedy is one of writing’s earliest genres, and yet, why do we involve ourselves in the subject and write our own grief for the rest of the world? This thesis explores the act of tackling the subjects of mental illness and bereavement through the use of memoir, and simultaneously to analyze the use of such subject matter in contemporary fiction. Through creating a memoir of my own charting my journey through mental illness, familial death, and suicide, and analyzing the memoirs and works of those who have been through comparable experience, this thesis illuminates how grief is depicted in the …
Girls In Wonderland: The Male Gaze, Disordered Eating, And Bad Women In Alice’S Adventures In Wonderland & Spirited Away, Arielle Westcott
Girls In Wonderland: The Male Gaze, Disordered Eating, And Bad Women In Alice’S Adventures In Wonderland & Spirited Away, Arielle Westcott
English
This project aims to examine gender as perpetuated in the “Wonderland” trope, paying specific attention to Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away. At the surface level, these works seem like they don’t have much in common—they come from different cultures, different time periods, and different social contexts. However, to say that these stories are too dissimilar to compare is simply incorrect as both deal with the transitional periods of young girls who are approaching adolescence. Because both stories contain an alternate world in which the main little girl character wanders into and journeys through, …
Decentering The Dictator: ‘In The Time Of The Butterflies’ And The Mirabal Sisters’ Outspoken Challenge, Elise Coombs
Decentering The Dictator: ‘In The Time Of The Butterflies’ And The Mirabal Sisters’ Outspoken Challenge, Elise Coombs
English
Julia Alvarez’s portrayal of the Mirabal sisters from In the Time of the Butterflies centers the novel around the sisters’ speech and humanity. This decenters the dictator, a figure who was often central to Latin American dictator novels. The first chapter will provide background on the dictator’s characteristics to demonstrate how the Mirabal sisters’ speech draws attention away from his power. The four times the sisters encounter the dictator Rafael Trujillo in the novel, their speech decenters him because Alvarez emphasizes their experience. In the second chapter, I examine the gaps between each encounter, focusing on Minerva’s speech development towards …
“We'll Make A Man Out Of You”: Steven Universe, The Bildungsroman, And The Redefinition Of The Male Hero., Ryan Badalamenti
“We'll Make A Man Out Of You”: Steven Universe, The Bildungsroman, And The Redefinition Of The Male Hero., Ryan Badalamenti
English
This paper explores how the various gendered characteristics of the Bildungsroman, the novel of formation, interact with the formation of the titular character in the cartoon Steven Universe, the coming of age tale of a boy’s work to defend the Earth from magical threats. Traditional cartoon studies identify distinct gender identities between male and female characters. Similarly, Bildungsroman studies tend to analyze male heroes, with contemporary studies coining the term “female Bildungsroman” to talk about the formation of female protagonists. This paper argues that Steven, the protagonist of Steven Universe, incorporates aspects of both the Bildungsroman and the female Bildungsroman …
A House Divided, Christian Burgos
A House Divided, Christian Burgos
English
Abraham Lincoln coined the phrase, "A house divided cannot stand." So how he would feel about the current administration's stances against individuals in minority groups, whose identities are already heavily politicized? This collection of short stories I’ve written delves into the lives of those individuals as they have been targeted and continue to be affected by the rhetoric and policy threats of this administration. Each story follows an individual who deals with the effects of this rhetoric, both directly and indirectly. The experiences of the individuals in these stories are not universal; these experiences illustrate the potential circumstances and consequences …
Finding Nemo, Findng Dory, Finding Ourselves: How And Why We Teach Our Children To Think About Disability, Stacie Klinowski
Finding Nemo, Findng Dory, Finding Ourselves: How And Why We Teach Our Children To Think About Disability, Stacie Klinowski
English
My project, a critical thesis titled “Finding Nemo, Finding Dory, Finding Ourselves: How and Why We Teach Our Children to Think About Disability,” investigates how representations of disability within children’s media transcend these texts and contribute to our society’s construction of disabled subjects. By first looking at historical traits of children’s literature in Grimm's Fairy Tales and The Trumpet of the Swan, I establish that the didactic function of this genre reproduces the values of the cultures in which they are written while it also attempts to instill social ideals that will guarantee 'progress.' Representations of disability in these texts …
Monstrous Souls Imprisoned In Monstrous Flesh: James Baldwin's Discourse Of God, Power, And Love From Go Tell It On The Mountain To The Amen Corner, Naomi Mcpeters
English
In the middle decades of the twentieth century, James Baldwin offered a critique of a corrupt church framework in a way that differed from other black writers and social activists of his time, particularly in how he deals with racial attitudes within the black church and white Christianity’s tendency to scapegoat black Americans. Baldwin’s first novel, Go Tell It On The Mountain, and his last work to deal with the church, The Amen Corner, show figures of power within the black church who have abused their positions and betrayed those under their authority. He exposes the failure of religious power …
How Documentary Poetry Imagines, Seunghyun Shin
How Documentary Poetry Imagines, Seunghyun Shin
English
As we face the end of the post-modern world at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the preceding decades of postmodernity can be seen to have led to a widespread underappreciation of reading and writing poetry in general. If we want to say that poetry is necessary in the world, how should literary scholars and writers defend its value? The value of reading and writing poetry owes to its socio-political efficacy. This research will highlight how poetry can be political through exploring the works of three documentary poets: Muriel Rukeyser, C.D. Wright, and Claudia Rankine. The goal is to refute …
Unveiling Fantasy In The American Gothic, Olga Jacqueline Neroni
Unveiling Fantasy In The American Gothic, Olga Jacqueline Neroni
English
In The Plague of Fantasies, Slavoj Žižek charts the relationship between theoretical ideology, fantasy, and ideology in practice. While ideology roots itself firmly in our lives—it crafts our very reality according to Žižek—it is a paradoxically fragile and self-destructive system of interacting symbols. We consume and perpetuate fantasy in order to elucidate and internalize the laws of ideology by placing these symbols into dialogue with one another. In turn, fantasy often draws these laws to their conceptual edge, granting bodies and voices to the underlying fears and desires implied by these symbols. Edgar Allan Poe’s “Ligeia” and William Faulkner’s The …
The Black And The Blue: Comedy, Laughter, And Deformity In Ellison’S Invisible Man, Olivia Grace Popiel
The Black And The Blue: Comedy, Laughter, And Deformity In Ellison’S Invisible Man, Olivia Grace Popiel
English
In Ralph Ellison’s novel, Invisible Man, comedy plays an important yet convoluted role. In his own rendering of the Blues Aesthetic, Ellison is able to present laughter and humor as a healthy and natural reaction to painful and distressing events. The significance of this technique, which builds upon double consciousness , is evident in Ellison’s many essays, where he suggests that laughter may be the only way for America to accept the crude reality of its foundations and move forward. In my thesis, I differentiate between four general types of comedy found in Invisible Man. These can be summarized as …
Breaking Bad: On The Western Genre And Audience Reception, Marisa Mazart
Breaking Bad: On The Western Genre And Audience Reception, Marisa Mazart
English
“Breaking Bad: on the Western Genre and Audience Reception” examines the recent TV series Breaking Bad making use of cultural scholar Stuart Hall’s encoding and decoding theories in order to better understand what meaning is imbued into the series and what meaning is extracted by the audiences. By treating Breaking Bad as a cultural artifact moving across what Hall defines as the parts of the circuit of culture – production, identification, representation, consumption and regulation – I will be able to answer the question of why the show is so popular and to consider the significance of that popularity. While …
The Sanity Of Furor Poeticus: Romanticism’S Demystification Of Madness And Creativity, Joseph Meringolo
The Sanity Of Furor Poeticus: Romanticism’S Demystification Of Madness And Creativity, Joseph Meringolo
English
Art and medicine have historically exchanged axioms for understanding mental illness, negotiating a lexicon with which afflicted artists can articulate their experience. This exchange, however, has been problematic. The mentally ill have had to conform to explanatory paradigms that are often inadequate, and cultural mores stemming from the scientific misunderstanding of “madness” have often stigmatized mental illness. These include misconceptions about the source of creative genius as residing in either the divine or the unconscious, the cultural fashioning of the “mad poet” identity, and the idealization of certain types of mental illness as “artistically valuable.” This study will show, however, …
The Isolated Self: A Re-Imaging Of The Individual In Mary Shelley’S Frankenstein And Mamoru Oshii’S Ghost In The Shell, Emily Wierzbowski
The Isolated Self: A Re-Imaging Of The Individual In Mary Shelley’S Frankenstein And Mamoru Oshii’S Ghost In The Shell, Emily Wierzbowski
English
Mary Shelley’s 1818 Frankenstein and Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell films (1995 and 2004) were both created in times of great upheaval in scientific communities, and show that the further away we get from the organic body, the harder it becomes to articulate what is specifically human through dualisms. Shelley was writing during a period of secularization. Human identity and relations were no longer strictly based on one’s relationship to God or one’s family’s standing. Oshii’s work comes in the midst of the arrival of the new digital age. Medical enhancements and the proliferation of communication technologies such as …
Riffing On The Past: Jazz And Signifying In Ishmael Reed’S Mumbo Jumbo, Kevin Wheeler
Riffing On The Past: Jazz And Signifying In Ishmael Reed’S Mumbo Jumbo, Kevin Wheeler
English
Jazz. A word that today signifies cool cats in dark sunglasses and black turtlenecks, a word that brings to mind the—predominantly white—big bands of World War yore, or that singular, immediately recognizable rasp of Louis Armstrong. It’s a word that reminds one of names like Miles, Coltrane and Coleman. Maybe even a man whose last name, for most intents and purposes, is the letter G. Many, however, do not associate jazz with racism, repression, and, perhaps most surprising, a disease that renders its victims hysteric and prone to fits of dance. But if they were to read either Ishmael Reed’s …
Ideology And Subversion: Linguistic Registers In Barbara Kingsolver’S The Poisonwood Bible, Natalie Wallace
Ideology And Subversion: Linguistic Registers In Barbara Kingsolver’S The Poisonwood Bible, Natalie Wallace
English
Effective colonial regimes have employed language to control and incapacitate their colonial subjects. However, anti-colonialist and Africanist authors have conversely used language as a significantly powerful tool in resisting colonial and neo-colonial discourses. Despite this subversive sentiment in contemporary literature about Africa, many scholars criticize Western authors, in particular, for their works about African nations, peoples, and struggles, noting their tendencies to generalize about a diverse continent, to project Western paradigms onto African contexts, and to disregard their own associations with colonial governments. Barbara Kingsolver’s 1998 novel The Poisonwood Bible has received much critical attention as a work that deplores …
Social Media Fetishism: The Substitution Of Life, The Disavowal Of Death, And The Zombie Syndrome, Ian Andrew Lepkowsky
Social Media Fetishism: The Substitution Of Life, The Disavowal Of Death, And The Zombie Syndrome, Ian Andrew Lepkowsky
English
Title: Social Media Fetishism: The Substitution of Life, The Disavowal of Death, and The Zombie Syndrome Statement: I am studying social media as a symptom within a culture of fetishism, where social media has become a substitute for human interaction under the concepts of fetishism outlined by Marx, Freud, Kaplan, Debord, and Baudrillard because I want to find out why people have fetishized social media so that one can understand how to rectify the underlying issues causing the fetish. In the past decade, social media has become fetishized by a select group of users, characterized by hours a day spent …
From Pulp To Webpage: Homestuck And Postmodern Digital Narrative, Austin Gunner Litwhiler
From Pulp To Webpage: Homestuck And Postmodern Digital Narrative, Austin Gunner Litwhiler
English
Homestuck by Andrew Hussie is a work developed entirely as an experiment in using the internet as a storytelling medium. In order to analyze this drastically new form of story, born and grown on the internet, I must initially analyze the two genres it best fuses; Homestuck is published serially and episodic, and largely contains media elements of the Graphic Novel. However, Homestuck also mixes into the story areas where reader choice and interactivity, animated cut scenes, and music in a fashion that imitates a video game. I’ll be examining Homestuck as a primary text, first inspecting its form and …
Walking Corpses & Conscious Plants: Possibilist Ecologies In Graphic Novels, Julie Ann Bingham
Walking Corpses & Conscious Plants: Possibilist Ecologies In Graphic Novels, Julie Ann Bingham
English
In “Walking Corpses & Conscious Plants: Possibilist Ecologies in the Graphic Novel,” I examine how graphic narratives have historically been used to express political concerns; I then rate the impact of two contemporary works which imagine planetary crisis in relation to this context. Working with Robert Kirkman's The Walking Dead and Alan Moore's Saga of the Swamp Thing, I aim to illustrate that the violent worlds depicted in each fiction attest relevant social critique. As a frame for this analysis, I turn to the work of philosopher David Kellogg Lewis. Using his model of modal realism, I argue that engaging …
The Role Of Magic In Fantasy Literature: Exposing Reality Through Fantasy, Martin Cahill
The Role Of Magic In Fantasy Literature: Exposing Reality Through Fantasy, Martin Cahill
English
No abstract provided.
Back To The Future: The Mechanics Of Temporality In H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, Rebecca Matt
Back To The Future: The Mechanics Of Temporality In H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, Rebecca Matt
English
No abstract provided.
Aeschylus’ Tragedy Of Law: Kinship, The Oresteia, And The Violence Of Democracy, Grace Hobbs
Aeschylus’ Tragedy Of Law: Kinship, The Oresteia, And The Violence Of Democracy, Grace Hobbs
English
No abstract provided.
Mary Shelley’S Frankenstein: The Creature’S Attempt At Humanization, Noelle Webster
Mary Shelley’S Frankenstein: The Creature’S Attempt At Humanization, Noelle Webster
English
No abstract provided.
The Backwards Making Of A Heroine: Mary Cowden Clarke’S Girlhood And Its Importance In The Shakespearean Conversation, Jillian Caramanna
The Backwards Making Of A Heroine: Mary Cowden Clarke’S Girlhood And Its Importance In The Shakespearean Conversation, Jillian Caramanna
English
No abstract provided.
Without A Place But Always Trying To Be Placed: Between Hope And Impossibility In Samuel Beckett’S Molloy, Joseph Stepansky
Without A Place But Always Trying To Be Placed: Between Hope And Impossibility In Samuel Beckett’S Molloy, Joseph Stepansky
English
No abstract provided.
The Dynamics Of Male/Female Relationships In Jon Donne's Love Poetry, Amanda Boyd
The Dynamics Of Male/Female Relationships In Jon Donne's Love Poetry, Amanda Boyd
English
No abstract provided.
“Tragical History” And “Tragedy” As Inquisitive Vehicles: Examining The Implications Of Marlowe’S Two Faustus Texts, Joseph Sturcken
“Tragical History” And “Tragedy” As Inquisitive Vehicles: Examining The Implications Of Marlowe’S Two Faustus Texts, Joseph Sturcken
English
No abstract provided.
“A Woman’S Story At A Winter’S Fire”: Gender Performativity And The Intrinsic Power Of The Feminine In Shakespeare’S Macbeth, Whitney Sperrazza
“A Woman’S Story At A Winter’S Fire”: Gender Performativity And The Intrinsic Power Of The Feminine In Shakespeare’S Macbeth, Whitney Sperrazza
English
No abstract provided.
Our Greatest Want: An Examination Of The Rhetorical Tendencies Employed By African American Female Abolitionist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911), Lauren Deborah Nye
Our Greatest Want: An Examination Of The Rhetorical Tendencies Employed By African American Female Abolitionist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911), Lauren Deborah Nye
English
You are standing at the doorway of a church in Philadelphia. Looking in, you see a mass of heads, all turned toward the podium, waiting for someone to get behind that podium. Then you see her. She is an attractive African American with “a fair figure, long, lustrous hair, and facial features pleasant to behold” (Logan 49). You overhear one person comment that she looks like “a bronze muse” (Logan 31). A reporter will later write that she has “a strong face, with a shadowed glow upon it, indicative of thoughtful fervor, and of a nature most femininely sensitive, but …