English Language and Literature Commons^™

Afflictionary: Defining Disability And Chronic Illness Through Poetic Dictionary Entries, Jaime Chernoch

Graduate Masters Theses

Afflictionary, Defining Disability and Chronic Illness Through Poetic Dictionary Entries is a poetry collection that uses the format of a dictionary to explore individualized experiences of both medical and non-medical words. The definitions and reference quotes that come before the poems come from the Oxford English Dictionary and various medical journals. The quotes act as a prompt or framework that helped shape the personal entries. They may echo the content in the poems, be placed in opposition, or complicate our understanding of the word. Some of the words list multiple years of personal entries which shows the chronic and recurrent …

Reshaping The Canon: How “Insta-Poets” Are Creating A New Literary Space For Readers Using Social Media, Hannah Salsbery

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

Reading and analyzing poetry can be an equally beautiful and frustrating experience. Interacting with a poem allows a reader to access untapped emotions through the words on the page; yet, when not given the tools to understand canonical poetry, young readers are often left at a loss. The rise of “Insta-poetry” gives younger generations of readers access to poems that are both relatable in experience and language. Using Rupi Kaur as a vehicle towards unmasking the importance of the rise of poetry on Instagram, this thesis highlights the importance of reshaping the literary canon to become a more inclusive, diverse, …

A Difference In Rhythm: John Burroughs As Rhythmanalyst, Jennifer Macdonald

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Nature writer John Burroughs wrote about the rhythms of life in nature, people, and places, sharing his experiences of his surroundings for readers to learn from, get inspired by, or escape through. In this literature review, using Henri Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis, in which rhythm is the “interaction between a place, a time, and an expenditure of energy” (Lefebvre, 2004, p. 15), I explore some of Burroughs’ writing, asserting that Burroughs himself was a rhythmanalyst. Burroughs is typically read as a literary naturalist who hoped to relay any scene as it truly was (to perfect the “art of seeing things” or …

Some Notes On Birds: Language And Attention In The Age Of Social Media, Aimee Lamoureux

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Technology, social media, and its affiliated distractions are now an ever-present part of our daily lives. Attention is a commodity, one which tech companies value because it delivers them bigger and bigger profits. Their products are intentionally designed to be additive, to demand more and more of our time and attention throughout our day. However, attention is not simply a commodity, but the way in which we connect with the external world and attend to our everyday experience. The world that we create in the mind is the world that ends up forming the reality of our everyday lives. Complex …

Mic Check : Finding Hip Hop's Place In The Literary Milieu, Victorio Reyes

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The study of Hip Hop poetics has been slowly gaining momentum as an area for scholarly inquiry. Accordingly, Mic Check rests on one critical assumption: Hip Hop is the most significant American form of poetry ever invented. To back up this claim, this project investigates Hip Hop lyricism from five critical angles: tradition, form, tone, medium, and practice. I argue that music’s foundational position in African American literature clarifies Hip Hop’s experiments with language, which operate within and extend an ongoing, centuries-old tradition of linguistic, rhythmic, and poetic experimentation. Comprehension of the longstanding literary/oral territory from which Hip Hop is …

The Poetry Of Revolution: The Legacy Of A Written Rebellion, Eva Erickson

Honors Theses

In Solmaz Sharif’s debut poetry collection Look, she incorporates United States Department of Defense terminology in order to simultaneously revolt against forced erasure and reclaim words that were once used for violent and oppressive purposes. This thesis argues that poetry is an inherently politicized, revolutionary tool that possesses the ability to radicalize and incite rebellion against silencing, dismissive power structures. Sharif’s identity, as an Iranian-American immigrant woman, is omnipresent in her own interpretation of familial trauma at the hands of American imperialist forces. In addition, the events of the late twentieth-century Iranian revolution that resulted in the deaths of many …

Decolonizing The Body, Daniel Miess

English (MA) Theses

The prevailing narrative about California’s history, and in specific the way that it discusses the Spanish Colonial system and the Gold Rush, glosses over the genocide of her indigenous inhabitants and the oppression experienced by those who survived these historical traumas. By focusing on the works of three indigenous poets (Deborah Miranda, Natalie Diaz, and Tommy Pico) who were born in Southern California and whose indigenous history predates White Settler Colonialism in this state, we can gain a fuller picture about the truth of California’s past. Through the lens of Indigenous Queer Theory, we can understand how these three Queer …

Wish In One Hand, Amber John

English Honors Theses

In confessional genre-blending poems, prose, and poetic essays, Wish in One Hand probes the reality of living in liminal spaces, and how that reality changes perceptions of identity and the home. Crossing three physical spaces that separate the works, the idea of home is shown to be fluid and multifaceted, frequently interweaving with ideas of childhood, memory, and the passage of time. From meditations on mice in the walls to visceral descriptions of swamp creatures, Wish in One Hand reflects the personal struggle to reconcile liminality with the concrete nature of our worldly experiences.

Voices Of The Wandering, Grace Manning

English Honors Theses

In Voices of the Wandering, Grace Manning explores the concept of belonging through the disconnect that exists when one’s home isn’t defined by structure or established in childhood, but rather a by constantly changing and evolving ideal. Manning’s speaker draws inspiration and comfort from others who are living between countries and continents, using their voices and emotions to try and understand her own. South and West African experiences investigate the confusion and suffering that is colonialism, from blame, to hurt, to lifelong guilt, she introduces the perspectives of those on either side of the racial wall built during Apartheid. Using …

Subversion Of Form: Mixing Poetry And Prose, Darby Alexandria Brown

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

My honors thesis project is called Subversion of Form: Mixing Poetry and Prose. The purpose has been to research how writers have interwoven poetry and prose, to write a creative nonfiction piece that uses both genres, and to improve as a writer through committing myself to this piece and solidifying writing as a daily practice. In my introduction, I outline the research I conducted on poetry and prose and my takeaways from the writers I read. I conclude that the purpose of prose is to tell, while the purpose of poetry is to search.

The piece that I have worked …

The Car Ride Home, Jonathan Rivera

English Honors Theses

The Car Ride Home explores the coming of age of a young boy into a queer man, searching and sifting through the trauma of home life, and realizing his mother’s addiction affects more than just herself, but an entire family. This realization coincides with views of masculinity, as he carefully watches the men around him. He internalizes these depictions of masculinity when exploring his own confusion and investigation of his own sexual identity and queerness. The poetry collection is broken up into two connected parts. Part one explores the illusion of childhood and nostalgia while introducing subtle glimpses and secrets …

The Lodge In The Wilderness: Ecologies Of Contemplation In British Romantic Poetry, Sean M. Nolan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation argues that contemplation is often overlooked in studies of British Romantic poetry. By the late 1700s, changing commercial and agricultural practices, industrialism, secularization, and utilitarianism emphasizing industriousness coalesced to uproot established discourses of selfhood and leisure, and effected crises of individuation in Romantic poetry and poetics. Closely reading poems and writing about poetry composed between the 1780s and 1830s by William Cowper, George Crabbe, Robert Bloomfield, Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and John Stuart Mill, I probe the relationship between aesthetic, ethical, and emotional responses to depictions of toil, idleness, and leisure. I argue that ecologies …

Disaster And Hope In The Comic Universe Of 'Gardening In The Tropics', Molly Mosher

Dissertations and Theses

In this paper, I explore ideas of dominion and how Western canon has helped propagate ideas of human domination of the natural world. Using Joseph W. Meeker’s The Comedy of Survival, I trace a line from the advent of the literary tragedy to the climate crisis. To contrast, I use his idea of comedy as the antidote to domination — a way of thinking that might inspire collaboration with the natural world. I will explore the comic with, predominately, Olive Senior’s Gardening in the Tropics, alongside Jamaica Kincaid’s gardening studies and Mona Lisa Saloy’s essay on environmental destruction. To …

"Bothe The Heye And The Lowe": Role Reversal And Medieval Animal Allegory, Rose A. Rugendorf

Senior Projects Fall 2021

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College

A Poet, A Teacher: Standing Still With Mary Oliver, Melissa Therese Benedek

Senior Projects Spring 2021

The poet Mary Oliver (1935-2019) once wrote, “Attention without feeling, I began to learn, is only a report.” How does Oliver teach the practice of paying attention to the natural world? This project explores observation as a form of attention in Oliver’s work and how it is implicit in her writing practice. The relationship between attention and feeling manifests in her poetry. Observations are both the foundation and definition of Oliver’s concrete images and incommunicable encounters with nonhumans in the natural world. For Oliver, the goal of attention is not to give a scientific account of details about specific animals …

On The Total Communicative Efficacy Of Music And Its Synthesis To Written Word Through Bob Dylan And Kendrick Lamar, Skyler Addison

CMC Senior Theses

In a social conversation, words spoken carry less than 35% of the interaction’s social meeting, with 65% conveyed by the non-verbal. While poetry relies on the word and it's subtext, songwriting may also weld the other 65%. By dissecting the dynamic communicative aspects of song, modern poets may find useful ways in which they can make their lines have more staying power with the listener, encompassing both the rhythmic catchiness of their lines to an all-encompassing emotive transfer. We may isolate the interwoven components of a song that dictate how a story is told in order to better understand how …

A Personal History Of Invasive Hands And Endangered Lovers, Samuel Paul Boudreau

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

I thought I could be ridden hard and put away wet, wet, wet. I thought death and rape and drunkenness and unrequited love were functions of a typical life, a this-is-how-it-goes kinda world. But, as I’ve emerged from hellish muck, there has been a realization: the way we treat each other and the soil, the aching earth, needs to change. “A Personal History of Invasive Hands and Endangered Lovers” explores the relationship between intimacy and pain through a history of ecology and consumption, a melancholy of sorts. It amplifies trauma as a call-to-action and refuses to sit and take it. …