English Language and Literature Commons^™

The Bard And The Word: The Influence Of The Bible On The Writings Of William Shakespeare, Emily Gray

Honors Theses

Widely hailed as the single greatest writer and poet of the English language, William Shakespeare is not only revered for the sheer quantity and wide-ranging genres of his writing, but also the exceptional written quality, well-executed thematic diversity, and ability to explore the timelessness of the human experience. With the 400th anniversary of the publication of the King James Bible occurring in 2011 and the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death following in 2016, scholarship on Shakespeare’s use of biblical material underwent a significant resurgence. The focus of much of this scholarship has been on simply identifying the numerous references rather …

The Separate Spheres Of Women And Science, Annie Hays, Barbara Huizar, Crista Johnson, Steven Le, Samantha Tate

Frankenstein @ 200: Student Posters

Through the 19th century ideology of separate spheres, Frankenstein shows how the exclusion of women from science is detrimental to science and destructive to society.

Frankenstem? Technology Ethics In Silicon Valley: Student Poster Session Program, San Jose State University, Department Of English And Comparative Literature

Frankenstein @ 200: Student Posters

Program of student posters presented as part of “Deep Humanities,” One-Day Symposium: FrankenSTEM? Technology Ethics in Silicon Valley, organized by Dr. Revathi Krishnaswamy & Dr. Katherine D. Harris, Department of English and Comparative Literature, San Jose State University on May 1, 2018, 10-4pm, Room 225, King Library, San Jose State University.

Dehumanizing The Human Body, Shelby Escott

Frankenstein @ 200: Student Posters

How does death affect the way in which the human body ceases to represent humanity?

American Space Monkeys: Analyzing Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club As A Transmedia Text Through Fan Appropriations And Commoditization, Danielle Bertolini

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

American Space Monkeys considers Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club in its relationship to changing iterative forms across media. It traces the narrative from its original publication in 1996 through the present day, examining the ways in which Fight Club leverages its status as a transmedia text to expand and commoditize the narrative; this is especially relevant when compared with another successful transmedia franchise, Harry Potter. Furthermore, in looking at Palahniuk’s independent and collaborative expansion of the narrative, as well as fan contributions and reactions to the text, this paper argues that, not only are capitalism and transmedia inherently tied together, but …

Resisting Borders, Resisting Control: Examining The Multiplicity Of Identities In A Map Of Home And The Girl In The Tangerine Scarf, Zainab Abdali

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

In this project I examine identities as they are expressed through the use of language in the novels A Map of Home by Randa Jarrar and The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf by Mohja Kahf. Both novels are coming-of-age narratives of two Arab and Muslim-American female protagonists that depict their exploration of identity as they undergo experiences of war, migration, displacement, and racism in their respective contexts. I explore the protagonists’ negotiation of identity in the face of familial and societal pressure to conform to clearly demarcated categorizations of identity, arguing that the protagonists recognize clear borders between identities as …

"Several Sigourneys": Circulation, Reprint Culture, And Sigourney’S Educational Prose, Amy J. Lueck

English

In her now-famous essay "Reinventing Lydia Sigourney," Nina Baym argued that Sigourney's literary range "inevitably allows for the construction of several Sigourneys who are unknown to modern criticism."¹ Since 1990, when Baym revealed Sigourney as a student of history and a writer of historical prose, scholars have filled the gap she identified with a variety of Sigourneys, identifying her "generic plurality'' as a means to "achieve multi-positionality as a woman poet," as Paula Bernat Bennett writes, and noting that Sigourney's wide-ranging oeuvre does not readily lend itself to a reading of the author as a sentimental poetess. ² Subsequently, …

They Say It Where I’M From: Using The Language Of Idioms To Compare The Characteristics Of Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Marissa Wiese

Theses/Capstones/Creative Projects

Idioms, proverbs and other metaphorical language are a base component to how people communicate that has to be mutually understood. Slang and common sayings are a fundamental part of language. With language being such a large factor of culture, it’s natural to assume that it would mimic cultural ideals and norms. This study focuses on the cultural dimension Individualism/Collectivism and if the orientation correlates to language usage. The goal of this research is to conduct an analysis of the use of idiomatic expressions in comparison to Individualistic or Collectivistic orientation and setting.

Research of expressions and phrases has been done …

T.S. Eliot, "The Waste Land", And Yoga Philosophy, Jessica Cloud

Master's Theses

While pursuing his graduate studies at Harvard, T.S. Eliot put a year into deep study of the Yoga Sutras with renowned scholar James Haughton Woods. Yoga, defined in the Sutras as the practice of stopping “the fluctuations of the mind-stuff” (Patañjali 8), provides the possibility of hope and equanimity in Eliot’s poem The Waste Land (1922), which depicts a world seemingly devoid of meaning. Not only can the influence of the Yoga Sutras be seen in the poetic form, style, and voice of The Waste Land and in the explanatory notes to the poem provided by Eliot, but classical yoga …

Indicted Knights: Female Agency And The Adjudication Of Rape In Arthurian Romances, Jessica Carrell

Honors Theses

Although Arthurian Romance is a genre often thought to provide a somewhat idealized portrayal of the relationship between the sexes, there are a surprising number of instances of sexual assault represented in Middle English texts. In a genre styled towards women, it is appropriate to consider what cultural or social function the representations of such episodes serve. How, then, do such imaginative representations relate to the historical record of sexual assault accusations and adjudication? As this thesis demonstrates, examining past literary representations of the adjudication of sexual misconduct in Middle English romances such as Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur and Chaucer’s …

Naturalism And The New Woman: Fated Motherhood In Kate Chopin's The Awakening And Edith Wharton's The House Of Mirth, Lindsay J. Patorno

Honors Theses

Proto-feminist novels have garnered great critical attention in recent decades, largely owing to the reclamation efforts of feminist scholars from the 1960s onwards. These feminist scholars have remarked the fin-de-siècle emergence of a recurring narrative archetype: the unabashed New Woman, whose exploits in what were traditionally male-dominated spheres distinguished her from the domesticated matrons and sentimental bachelorettes of past literary paradigms. While the New Woman is now a commonplace among feminist critics, the following thesis uniquely interprets this feministic archetype in conjunction with the concurrent movement of American literary naturalism—a genre that proffers a deterministic worldview and is often regarded …

Resisting Borders, Resisting Control Examining The Multiplicity Of Identities In A Map Of Home And The Girl In The Tangerine Scarf, Zainab Abdali

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

In this project I examine identities as they are expressed through the use of language in the novels A Map of Home by Randa Jarrar and The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf by Mohja Kahf. Both novels are coming-of-age narratives of two Arab and Muslim-American female protagonists that depict their exploration of identity as they undergo experiences of war, migration, displacement, and racism in their respective contexts. I explore the protagonists’ negotiation of identity in the face of familial and societal pressure to conform to clearly demarcated categorizations of identity, arguing that the protagonists recognize clear borders between identities as …

Madness As "The Divided Self" In The Works Of American Female Authors, Katherine Sweat

Honors Theses

When R.D. Laing wrote The Divided Self in 1960, his goal was “to make madness, and the process of going mad, comprehensible.” Laing argued that psychosis was, at its core, an existential problem, driven by a sense of disconnection from the world and in turn, a fragmentation of the self. This thesis uses Laing’s theory of “the divided self” as a framework for examining how madness is constructed in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper (1890), Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963), and Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962). Each of these works offers a unique …

The Earliest Surviving Version Of Charles Chesnutt's "Rena Walden," The Short Story That Became "The House Behind The Cedars", Dominic Yarabe

Honors Program: Senior Projects (Public)

My research project presents an edited version, with an introduction, of the earliest surviving version of “Rena Walden,” the short story that ultimately became the novel The House Behind the Cedars. The novel is a passing story in which a light-skinned, mixed race girl enters white society to live life as a white woman. Interestingly, however, the short story on which the novel was based began as a fiction with no white characters whatsoever. As the manuscript of this story is often difficult to read because of hard-to-decipher handwritten revisions, I had to create my own editorial policy to …

Reading Charlotte Brontë Reading, Madhumita Gupta

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This essay considers the significance of undirected childhood reading on an author’s mind and the reason some authors reference specific real books in their fiction. I argue that independent reading (as against schooling or formal education), and the direct and indirect references to certain books in Jane Eyre^[1] were deliberate, well-thought-out inclusions for specific purposes at different points in the story. When a title pointedly says Jane Eyre: An Autobiography, it is probable that a significant part of the author’s life has seeped into her creation which makes it essential to consider the relevant parts of her life to …

'Where History Meets The Future' : A Historiographic Exploration Of Mississippi : The View From Tougaloo., Khirsten L. Echols

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

“Where History Meets the Future”: A Historiographic Exploration of Mississippi: The View from Tougaloo explores the historical narratives of Historically Black Colleges and Universities, with a special emphasis on Tougaloo College in Tougaloo, Mississippi. In particular, this dissertation examines the ways in which Tougaloo’s official history omits the voices of its student populations. It offers, then, a revisionist reading of the school’s history, constructing a narrative from the perspective of students. Based on hours of archival research and examination of the school’s student newspaper, this dissertation constructs a method that incorporates student voices into the historical narrative. The collection of …

There Is Water In The World For Us : The Environmental Theories Of Alice Walker., Janae Lewis Hall

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The emergence of African-American Environmental thought responds to the ongoing erasure of Black experiences and their perspectives on nature. Mainstream environmentalism maintains a legacy of perceived innocence and incorruptibility towards the land, while Black Environmentalism demonstrates the limitations of that ideology. Limitations include the erasure of history in regards to stealing land from Indigenous people, the brutality of slavery, legalized lynching, forced removal from the land, exploitation in sharecropping, destruction of sacred lands, heavy pollution in urban centers, and harmful environmental policies. For Black and Indigenous peoples, it is impossible to view American soil as innocent. This project surveyed the …

Breaking With Tradition(?) : Female Representations Of Heroism In Old English Poetry., Kathryn A. Green

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

For the Anglo-Saxons, strength, bravery, and the willingness to put oneself in harm’s way for king and kingdom were not only part of contemporary society but recurring themes in Old English literature. Poems like Beowulf and The Battle of Maldon reinforce the important bond between lord and retainer and the heroic ethos key to that relationship. Women were not historically part of this relationship and, therefore, not subject to the heroic code in the same way; consequently, they are rarely seen as anything more than conventional mothers, queens, wives, sisters, daughters, and virgins, all identified by their relationships to men, …

Application Of Narrative Principles To Effectively Communicate Through Graphic Design, Joseph Wright

Masters Theses

From folk tradition to film, story has played a critical role in connecting one person to another. The principles that undergird the construction of exceptional stories may apply to other forms of communication, including visual mediums. Although studies show that storytelling communicates more effectively than simply stating information, the field visual arts has neglected to apply this tactic in its craft. What makes a great story, and why does it have the capability of emotionally moving a person? Why not use the same principles that connect a person to a narrative within the field of graphic design? Because of this …

Much Ado About Acting, Claire Louise Harlan

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

To be an actor, one must have an understanding not only of theatrical craft, but also of the world that surrounds and informs theatre. During my undergraduate training, I have pursued a variety of diverse academic skills and extracurricular talents, all of which I have been able to relate back to my primary field--the performing arts. I am particularly interested in the intersection between studies in Theatre Arts and studies in English, as those are my two majors. Literary analysis, research, and reflective writing can unlock an actor's interpretation of a role. The actor who combines these two fields is …

How Do We Teach All Students In Monolingual Classrooms? A Study Of Transfer And Translingualism, Norma Denae Dibrell

Theses and Dissertations

I take the work of Lorimer and Nowacek in “Transfer and Translingualism,” as a starting point to address these questions. In “Transfer and Translingualism” they argue that transfer and translingualism “both index movement among contexts, practices, or meaning” while “neither suggests a neutral carrying over of knowledge from one context or language to another” (260) and thus acknowledge prior knowledge and prior experience. Lorimer and Nowacek call for transfer researchers to look at language diversity “beyond recognition of difference to the matrices of power that regulate that difference” and to ask questions about how to measure transfer (261-262). Consequently, in …

Famed Communities: Trojan Origins, Nationalism, And The Question Of Europe In Early Modern England, Joseph Bowling

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Throughout medieval Europe, royal families traced their genealogies back to the ancient Trojans. Beginning in the Carolingian court, this practice persisted into the early modern period, when narratives of ancient Troy—from accounts of the war to rewritings of Virgil—saturated literary production. Constituting the translatio imperii tradition, in which civilization “translates” from east to west, these legends of Trojan descent allowed European monarchs to legitimize their authority, or imperium, as derived from the Roman Empire, which Virgil famously celebrated as descending from Trojan Aeneas. This tradition formed what I call feudal cosmopolitanism: an affiliation among nobility premised on shared descent …

Insurgent Knowledge: The Poetics And Pedagogy Of Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, And Adrienne Rich In The Era Of Open Admissions, Danica B. Savonick

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Insurgent Knowledge analyzes the reciprocal relations between teaching and literature in the work of Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Toni Cade Bambara, and Adrienne Rich, all of whom taught in the Search for Education, Elevation, and Knowledge (SEEK) educational opportunity program at the City University of New York in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Drawing on archival research and analysis of their published work, I show how feminist aesthetics have shaped U.S. education (especially student-centered pedagogical practices) and how classroom encounters with students had a lasting impact on our postwar literary landscape and theories of difference. My project demonstrates how, …

Sickly Sentimentalism: Sympathy And Pathology In American Women's Literature, 1866-1900, Nicole Zeftel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Sickly Sentimentalism: Pathology and Sympathy in American Women’s Literature, 1866-1900 examines the work of four American women novelists writing between 1866 and 1900 as responses to a dominant medical discourse that pathologized women’s emotions. The popular fiction of Metta Fuller Victor, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Sarah Orne Jewett, and E.D.E.N. Southworth mobilized sentimental style and sympathetic affect to challenge the medical trend of treating female sentiment as a sickness. At the level of narrative, this challenge took the form of deviating from the domestic and marriage plots prevalent in women’s popular fiction of their period. Through forms of sentimental writing my …

Darwin's Failures: Childless Women In The Nineteenth-Century British Novel, Rose P. O'Malley

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation uses feminist neo-materialist and evolutionary theory to examine non-maternal relations among childless female characters in nineteenth-century British novels. In both the nineteenth century and the present day there is a tendency to use the authority of evolutionary biology to define women as essentially reproductive beings; their entire physical and intellectual organization is seen as geared toward childbearing and childrearing. Reading childless female characters with this tradition in mind, as well as the more open-minded counter-narrative of feminist engagements with evolution, opens up new questions about their meaning: Are they truly biological failures, or not? What avenues of physical …

“The Childish, The Transformative, And The Queer”: Queer Interventions As Praxis In Children’S Cartoons, Heather Wright

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, Scott McCloud considers “the simplified reality of the cartoon,” establishing a definition and theory for the medium (30). McCloud believes that cartoons possess “a special power” that is tied to their unique ability to “focus our attention on an idea” (31). Put simply, there is something about cartoons that allows for an easy exchange of concepts. Cartoons can teach. Using cartoons, a general term, to refer to both comics and animation, this thesis examines the transformative power of queer world building and intervention in recent children’s cartoons and how it functions, and can …

The Social Life Of Black Thought In The Long Eighteenth Century, Kristina Huang

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Social Life of Black Thought in the Long Eighteenth Century moves from the framework of social death to the foundations of social life in the study of early black Anglophone writings. By exploring the diverse textual and visual forms through which black life appeared in the Anglo-Atlantic world of the long eighteenth century, my project argues for situating early black writings within the social spheres of the city, the plantation, slaves’ provision grounds and independent markets, and churches. In this regard, I depart from the popular model of social death in literary criticism as a mode of reading early …

Tangible Things: The Matter Of Susan Howe, Thomas Lewek

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Tangible Things: The Matter of Susan Howe” examines materiality in two books, That This (2010) and Debths (2017), by the contemporary American experimental poet Susan Howe. More specifically, this examination finds a double movement in both collections between foregrounding the materiality of writing and of the text and meditating on the vibrant nature of matter itself. To frame the first part of this double movement, the thesis draws on recent digital humanities scholarship from Matthew Kirschenbaum and Johanna Drucker that highlights the technologically and materially mediated nature of writing processes and the texts they produce. Then, to frame the second …

“Community In Solitude”: The Solitary Self, Social Critique, And Utopian Longing, Colin S. Macdonald

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation argues that the discourse of solitude in early modern English literature was used to construct a fantasy of resistance to political and social corruption and internecine conflict. Furthermore, the rhetoric of solitude and the positioning of oneself as an outsider, as “uniquely separate from society,” in Andrew Bennett’s terms, led to the development of an early modern authorial identity in opposition to the world, opening a space that allowed social critique and utopian desire to flourish. The notion of disengaged resistance, or what we might call disengaged engagement, is the key component of the rhetoric and practice of …

Dolls Who Speak: Sex Robots, Cyborgs And The Image Of Woman, Victoria E. Pihl Sorensen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis examines the emerging phenomenon of sex robots from a feminist materialist perspective. I explore the current scholarly and popular debates on sex robots, and suggest a reading of sex robots in their machinic, literary and cinematic expressions to move beyond the moral-ethical impasse that seems to dominate sex robot discussions. Employing Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Myth” on a methodological and theoretical level, I argue for an interdisciplinary approach to studying sex robots, which proceeds carefully so as to avoid contributing to sex panic, and which thinks critically about what it might mean to assess sex robots from a feminist …