English Language and Literature Commons^™

The Case Of Limbo: The Search For Identity In Sylvia Plath’S Short Fiction And The Bell Jar, Kristin Lyons

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Though Sylvia Plath’s poems and novel undergo frequent scholarly research, her short fiction is often overlooked. Plath’s journals influenced her short fiction writing, and her stories reflected Plath’s lived experiences. Plath’s short fiction, like her other works, explore themes of identity and detachment. Each of her protagonists exist in a personal limbo, and they strive to find their identities and to fit the roles in which they occupy. This thesis focuses on “Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom,” stories from Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams, and additional research from scholarly journals and biographies, with comparisons to identity struggles …

Journey Into The Self: Essays On Biculturalism, Heidi Moe Graviet

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis examines what it means to exist as a bicultural being and how one approaches creating and negotiating a multicultural identity in terms of names, war, religion, belonging, and loss. In Narrow Road to the Interior, Matsuo Bashō embarks upon a journey of transcendence and self-discovery into the interior regions of Japan. In doing so, he establishes a Japanese writing tradition that centers around introspective journey-taking and writing oneself into truth and being. This thesis examines, participates in, and expands upon this writing tradition as it follows one Japanese American woman’s attempts to selfhood. Ultimately, it proposes the idea …

The Face Of God: Imaginary Space In Pickle Green, Taylor Flickinger

Undergraduate Honors Theses

A foundational premise of adaptation theory is that novels, films, theater, and any other storytelling medium can tell the same story but must do so differently. That is, each medium has its own distinct “language” with varying strengths and weaknesses inherent to its form. However, adaptation theorists have recently started pushing back on the idea that a film “can’t” do the same things as a novel, for example, arguing instead that the language of film and literature is more a result of “habits that are grounded in the history of fashion, taste, and analysis rather than in any specific technical …

The Legacy Of Jazz Poetry In Contemporary Rap: Langston Hughes, Gil Scott-Heron, And Kendrick Lamar, Madison Brasher

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Langston Hughes wrote in “Jazz as Communication that: “Jazz is a great big sea. It washes up all kinds of fish and shells and spume and waves with a steady old beat, or off-beat.” In this paper I assert that the rap music of Kendrick Lamar contains the steady off-beat of jazz and carries out the rhetorical legacy of Hughes’ jazz poetry. By marking the key elements of jazz poetry and tracing their presence in rap music, I will show how these elements create a powerful aesthetic experience for audiences that primes them for the rhetorical messages of the artist. …

Seeking The Feminine Divine: Mormon Women's Religious Authority, Power, And Presence In Rachel Hunt Steenblik's Mother's Milk, Kaitlin Hoelzer

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Literary theorists like Hélène Cixous and other French feminists have written about l’écriture feminine, a deconstructive force which allows female writers more freedom from male-dominated areas. Because Christianity has been historically male-dominated, Christian women have long used this idea to great effect, using their writing as a space in which they are free to assert power and authority. Mormonism, which arose in the 1830s during the Second Great Awakening, has grown to reinforce a patriarchal model for both family and church leadership, making Cixous’ separate space of writing necessary for Mormon women of the twenty-first century. The Mormon poet …

A New Oral Poetry: Improvisation And Performance In Robert Lowell's Poetry Readings, Madelyn Taylor

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis examines elements of improvisation and performance in the poetry readings of Robert Lowell from 1955 to 1977 by analyzing audio recordings of Lowell’s readings and comparing them to his early drafts and published work. As a poet known for incessantly editing his poetry, Robert Lowell uses poetry readings as a venue for experimenting with his poetry before publication, for catering his work to specific audiences, and for memorializing his life in prose. The time period this thesis is concerned with correlates with a rise in New Oral Poetry in the U.S., which created popular new venues for poetry …

Power Struggles: Sovereignty And The Nonhuman In South Africa, Taelin Wilford

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis uses the theoretical backbone of Jacques Derrida’s The Beast and the Sovereign to look at the theme of the nonhuman in connection with sovereignty in three novels representing three major time periods in South Africa. Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness uses the nonhuman in the form of the supernatural to reveal the limits of sovereignty in Colonial South Africa. J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace makes use of the nonhuman in the form of animals to talk about the transient nature of sovereignty in post-Apartheid South Africa. Lauren Beukes’ Zoo City is set in an alternate future South Africa and …

Exploring The Truths And Fabrications Of Sir John Mandeville, Jake Sanborn

Undergraduate Honors Theses

The Travels of Sir John Mandeville presents a unique and nuanced perspective of the Eastern World during the time of the Crusades. By critically analyzing the still-unknown author’s depictions of the Eastern lands and their peoples, I demonstrate that it is possible to gain a deeper understanding of the status of Christianity during the late 14th century. The Travels comments upon the concepts of Eastern religions and cultural practices in a way that is remarkable and surprising — instead of reacting to such topics with hostility or aggression, the likely-Christian author of The Travels is willing to learn from those …

Shahrazad In Appalachia: Surviving Violence Through Stories And The Support Of “Sisters”, Kaitlyn Hill

Undergraduate Honors Theses

When women are lured away from home, they become vulnerable and cannot survive the violence inflicted upon them by their ‘lovers.’ This thesis explores the ties between two distinct cultural regions, Arabic and Appalachian, to examine the violence against women and what allows these women to escape such situations by using Hanan al-Shaykh’s One Thousand and One Nights: A Retelling and three traditional Appalachian murdered girl ballads.

Many of the women in these stories die at the hands of their ‘lovers,’ regardless of their culture of origin. Once removed from their fellow women, they lack a support system that would …

The Roadmap: Exploring T.S. Eliot’S The Waste Land With World War One Literature, Matthew Bennett

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Through careful analysis paired with poetry, war memoirs, and novels from the same period, one can break down T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land to recognize the impact of The Great War on the world's modern memory while pondering the possibility of memory as a tool to overcome trauma.

Colonialism And Globalism In Two Contemporary Southern Appalachian Novels - Serena (2008) By Ron Rash, And Flight Behavior (2012) By Barbara Kingsolver, Jasmyn Herrell

Undergraduate Honors Theses

In this essay, I investigate how the historic and current economic structures operating in Appalachia from the 1920s to the 2010s are represented in two contemporary Southern Appalachian novels – Serena (2008) by Ron Rash and Flight Behavior (2012) by Barbara Kingsolver. Through the lens of postcolonial theory, I show how Serena represents Appalachia as functioning under the colonial model outlined by Robert Blauner and Helen Mathews Lewis in 1978. Then, still under the theory of postcolonialism, I explore how Kingsolver’s work depicts regional identity in response to a post-colonial environment and the ever-expanding global economy.

The Enduring Hold Of The Bible On Modern Literature: Exploring The Fall Narrative As A Conceptual Metaphor For American Literature In John Steinbeck’S East Of Eden, Lauren Stotsky

Undergraduate Honors Theses

There is no greater work of literature, perhaps, than the Bible. The Bible has shaped and influenced more literature, art, and culture than any other work in our time. The effects of the Bible’s words are still woven into modern literature today, illustrating that the Bible’s themes, allegories, parables, fables, metaphors, and characters are things that we humans are unable to depart far from even many decades later. One of the very first stories in the Bible, found at the beginning in Genesis, tells of Adam and Eve. Adam and Eve’s depiction as the first kind of our species and …

The Aesthetics Of Storytelling And Literary Criticism As Mythological Ritual: The Myth Of The Human Tragic Hero, Intertextual Comparisons Between The Heroes And Monsters Of Beowulf And The Anglo-Saxon Exodus, Daniel Stoll

Undergraduate Honors Theses

For thousands of years, people have been hearing, reading, and interpreting stories and myths in light of their own experience. To read a work by a different author living in a different era and setting, people tend to imagine works of literature to be something they are not. To avoid this fateful tendency, I hope to elucidate what it means to read a work of literature and interpret it: love it to the point of wanting to foremost discuss its excellence of being a piece of art. Rather than this being a defense, I would rather call it a musing, …

Who Owns The Bard?: P. T. Barnum, Charles Dickens, And The Shakespeare Birthplace Showdown Of 1847, Abigail Clayton

Undergraduate Honors Theses

In the twenty-first century age of globalization, debates over global versus national ownership of cultural heritage remain at the forefront of public consciousness. The cultural ownership of William Shakespeare, who is idealized as both a distinctly British icon and a global literary influence, has become contested ground; but, in fact, as I argue, this tension first boiled to the surface in 1847. In the spring of that year, newspapers advertised that Shakespeare’s birthplace in Stratford-upon-Avon would soon go up for public auction. Rumors immediately began circulating that the American showman P. T. Barnum, who had recently barnstormed through England with …

Adaptations: The Graphic Novel And Shakespeare's Hamlet, Candice Boren

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis covers three main ideas. First, there is a discussion of how an adaptation should be studied, using the film adaptations of The Lord of the Rings in comparison to the books written by J. R. Tolkien. This establishes what relationship an adaptation has to its original text and the capability of achieving fidelity. The second section focuses on graphic novels and the unique characteristics they possess, looking specifically at two graphic novels, Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi and March by John Lewis. This section ends with an analysis of how the graphic novel could prove to be beneficial to …