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Articles 1 - 30 of 36
Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature
Final Master's Portfolio, Savannah Packman
Final Master's Portfolio, Savannah Packman
Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects
This portfolio uses Marxist and feminist film theory to analyze various forms of visual media. It analyzes Mark Mylod's film The Menu (2022), Julie Taymor's film Across the Universe (2007), the historic V-J Day Kiss photograph, and popular TikTok videos. This portfolio focuses on the impact of capitalism in the political and economic sphere. It also analyzes images of women throughout history and critiques how these images have been used to formulate the American body politic.
I Wrote This Instead Of Being Productive, Timothy Hill
I Wrote This Instead Of Being Productive, Timothy Hill
Honors Scholar Theses
"I Wrote This Instead of Being Productive" is a poetry chapbook focused on the mythos of productivity in our modern era, from the perspective of a college student. What does productivity mean at the end of an empire? In recent years, culture has become obsessed with new forms of productivity and time management. We optimize our schedules, compete against each other, and attempt to dissociate from the harsher realities of our lives. An omnipresent internet culture motivates us to generate more value from our time, even if it feels hollow. ‘Scientific’ explanations point towards dopamine deficits and cultural narratives emphasize …
Trapped In Time: Examining The Academy's Temporal Confines In The Works Of James Joyce And Sally Rooney, Alice Condry-Power
Trapped In Time: Examining The Academy's Temporal Confines In The Works Of James Joyce And Sally Rooney, Alice Condry-Power
English Honors Theses
In this paper, I propose that James Joyce reveals the ways in which artists registered the rising imposition of public time within schools which subsequently contributed to the mechanization of art and an emphasis on original production. Then, Sally Rooney helps us to see that these anxieties are still present in what Ian Kidd has labeled our “culture of speed” (339). Like the literary modernists, we are afraid that humans have been mechanized with the sole motivation of efficient production which leaves no time for creative thought and innovation. In response to these concerns, we have placed a great amount …
Final Master's Portfolio, Tooba Amin
Final Master's Portfolio, Tooba Amin
Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects
Tooba Amin covers the following topics in her Final Master's Portfolio: Capitalism, Medievalism, Women's Studies, and Indigenous Studies.
Princes, Princesses, And Socialites: Feminism And Class Transgression In Hollywood Romantic Comedies, Justina Marie Clayburn
Princes, Princesses, And Socialites: Feminism And Class Transgression In Hollywood Romantic Comedies, Justina Marie Clayburn
Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations
This dissertation explored how characters in romantic comedies negotiate and transgress class boundaries as the films conform to and challenge genre and social expectations, focusing primarily through a feminist lens. Specifically, it addresses the different ways the films negotiate ideas about American identity and economic systems, simultaneously trying to acknowledge problematic elements while upholding social and nationalistic ideals. Feminism has a complicated relationship with Hollywood romantic comedies. While the genre often focuses on issues of interest to women and forefronts female characters and their professional and personal experiences, the denouement generally reinforces heteronormative monogamous relationships above others and the traditional …
Triumph In The Suburbs: Richard Ford And The Spaces Of New Capitalism, John Gorton
Triumph In The Suburbs: Richard Ford And The Spaces Of New Capitalism, John Gorton
All Theses
In his 1986 book America, Baudrillard noted that “the most banal suburb…is more at the centre of the world than any of the cultural manifestations of old Europe.” My thesis argues that this monumental shift from the suburbs as enclaves at the outer edges of cultural urban centers to “the centre of the world” is at the heart of Richard Ford’s realist project in his Pulitzer Prize winning Bascombe series starting with The Sportswriter in 1986. Emergent twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature scholars have been interested in the schism between the fictionalized representation and the lived experience of suburbia — while …
A Lesson In Mourning: The Evolution Of The English Anti-Elegy, K. Matthew Bennett
A Lesson In Mourning: The Evolution Of The English Anti-Elegy, K. Matthew Bennett
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This thesis analyzes the evolution of the anti-elegy originating with Thomas Hardy’s elegiac sequence in memory of his wife Emma; Poems of 1912-1913. Using French post-structuralist Georges Bataille’s The Accursed Share as a theoretical lens, Hardy’s anti-elegies are analyzed and rhetorically connected to English war poet Siegfried Sassoon’s anti-elegies. Hardy’s anti-sentimentality, fatalistic outlook on death, and rejection of the Christian afterlife seeps into the language of Sassoon’s war poems which serve as a protest to the dehumanizing effects of late capitalism witnessed during the First World War. Hardy and Sassoon’s anti-elegies, with their hyper-focus on the elegized body, are …
Existential Orwell: Capitalism, Religion, And Philosophy, Eliza A. Morgan
Existential Orwell: Capitalism, Religion, And Philosophy, Eliza A. Morgan
Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism
Orwell wrote in the same 1930s Europe as existentialist philosophers: most notably, Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. We know, through his critique of Sartre’s “Portrait of an Antisemite” (Coombes 12), that Orwell was active in these circles, well enough to critically evaluate absurdist theories. As such, it’s long overdue to discuss how the concept of existentialism may have shaped Orwell’s beliefs, specifically in two of his contemporary novels, The Clergyman’s Daughter and Keep the Aspidistra Flying. The purpose of this paper is to argue that existentialism, specifically the ideas of bad faith and absurdism, played a pivotal role for Orwell …
The Imperial Gothic: Contact Tracing Narratives Of Disease, Disorder, And Race In Global American Literature, Emma Brownstein
The Imperial Gothic: Contact Tracing Narratives Of Disease, Disorder, And Race In Global American Literature, Emma Brownstein
Honors Papers
This thesis examines the intersections among gothic literature, empire, and contagion, and traces the emergence and evolution of a yet unexplored subgenre: the Imperial Gothic. Where early American Gothic narratives express anxieties about national stability and the republican subject, the Imperial Gothic explores anxieties that emerge when imperialism brings white Americans into contact with foreign commodities, environments, and bodies, ranging from foreign nationals, immigrants, and enslaved peoples, to Martians. It demonstrates how viral threats to the body correspond to the nationalist conception of foreign threats against the imagined white body politic. What emerges from this body of global and interplanetary …
Capital Distress: Productive Citizenship And Mental Health In Adolescent Literature, Jeremy Tl Johnston
Capital Distress: Productive Citizenship And Mental Health In Adolescent Literature, Jeremy Tl Johnston
Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository
This dissertation explores the complexities of adolescent mental health under neoliberal capitalism in twentieth- and twenty-first-century U.S. fiction about and for adolescents. Drawn on research that defines youth citizenship as responsibilities-based in nature, this project outlines the ways contemporary young adult (YA) novels of mental distress reveal an inextricable link between adolescent mental health and the conditions of what I term productive citizenship. Constituting my theorization of productive citizenship are three distinct tenets adolescents must adhere to: (1) displaying the motivation to achieve specific goals; (2) showing a propensity for self-reliance and individuality; and (3) accepting the translation of …
“The End Of One Shall Be The End Of All”: Solidarity In 19th Century African American Texts, David Puthoff
“The End Of One Shall Be The End Of All”: Solidarity In 19th Century African American Texts, David Puthoff
English Language and Literature ETDs
This project examines how African American authors imagined solidarity through documents before, during, and after the Civil War. While solidarity as a framework has yet to be elucidated for literary studies, I draw on political theory and especially the works of the authors themselves to examine how solidarity as a strategy operates to facilitate cooperation between people of different or similar races or occupations in the periods of abolitionism, war, Reconstruction, and Redemption. I argue that these authors remember, imagine, and articulate small scale acts such as listening, organizing, making material aid, promoting literacy, and fundraising in the pursuit of …
Hunger, Capitalism, And Modern Gothic Literature, Becky Tynan
Hunger, Capitalism, And Modern Gothic Literature, Becky Tynan
Honors Program Theses and Projects
In Ireland, the Great Famine of the 1840s caused not only hunger and starvation, but also diseases, emigration, and a rupture in the social framework. Many social critics of the time argued that a lack of food came from an imbalance in society between those who could afford to eat and those who could not. Hunger was described as a disease because British colonial society depended on feeding citizens from its economic and political menu. Irish people under British landlords lacked the ability to own land outright and this supported an inequality in land ownership that in turn affected government …
“Everything Will Be As It Is Now, Just A Little Different”: Affectively Imagining Alternative Worlds In Ben Lerner’S 10:04, Grace Riley
Theses and Dissertations
One of the most crucial concerns of cultural criticism today is the question of how to grapple with what Mark Fisher refers to as the “malaise” of the present; the pervasive belief that capitalism is the only viable option, that there is no alternative ‘other.’ However, there remains a vibrant scholarship committed to resisting such pessimism that theorizes the possibility of alternative, utopian futures that lie athwart the apocalyptic present. This thesis explores the question of how one begins to imagine such alternative futures from within a capitalist order that constantly works to pre-emptively subsume any possibilities of resistance. Art …
Dickens’S Changing Perspective Towards Capitalism And The Bourgeoisie, Christina Oliveira
Dickens’S Changing Perspective Towards Capitalism And The Bourgeoisie, Christina Oliveira
Honors Program Theses
Most scholars agree that author and social activist Charles Dickens (1812-1870) made keen observations on human behavior and societal problems through his works. However, scholars are divided over whether to categorize Dickens and his work as radically reformist or pro-bourgeoisie. Through an analysis of three of Dickens’s texts, A Christmas Carol (1843), Bleak House (1852), and Great Expectations (1861), this thesis demonstrates that Dickens’s works carry contradictory ideologies. As time passes, Dickens becomes disillusioned with capitalism but continues to promote capitalist and bourgeois values and ideologies. The trajectory of Dickens’s views shows the difficulties in imagining different realities outside of …
Roberto Bolaño’S 2666, The Funneling Effect Of Capitalism, And The Production, Consumption, And Proliferation Of Violence For Profit, John Timlin
Dissertations and Theses
Roberto Bolaño's novel 2666 is a realist text, one that reflects the simple fact that in contemporary capitalism, the physical destruction of female bodies is a profitable enterprise; one that forces its readers to confront their complicity or outright participation in violence against women; and one that relates directly to violence against women as consumable entertainment in American mass culture.
A Letter To The United States Government On Wealth And Income Inequality, Matthieu Maier
A Letter To The United States Government On Wealth And Income Inequality, Matthieu Maier
English Department: Research for Change - Wicked Problems in Our World
The United States of America is the world’s hotspot when it comes to income and wealth inequality. The wealthiest Americans are accumulating more and more wealth everyday while most Americans, who fall somewhere around middle-class, remain struggling and stagnant. The United States’ unchecked and deregulated system of capitalism is the root cause of our country’s inequities along with our government’s refusal to set aside self-interests and biases in order to combat these issues. From the inequality caused by rouged American systems larger issues are created that lead to complications in health, wages, standard of living, and race relations within our …
A Sense Of Unending: Apocalypse And Post-Apocalypse In Novels Of Late Capitalism, Brent Linsley
A Sense Of Unending: Apocalypse And Post-Apocalypse In Novels Of Late Capitalism, Brent Linsley
Graduate Theses and Dissertations
From Frank Kermode to Norman Cohn to John Hall, scholars agree that apocalypse historically has represented times of radical change to social and political systems as older orders are wiped away and replaced by a realignment of respective norms. This paradigm is predicated upon an understanding of apocalypse that emphasizes the rebuilding of communities after catastrophe has occurred. However, in the last half-century, narratives that emphasize the destruction of human civilization without this restorative component have begun to overshadow the more historically popular post-apocalyptic models that were particularly abundant during the early days of the Cold War. In light of …
Does Money Indeed Buy Happiness? “The Forms Of Capital” In Fitzgerald’S Gatsby And Watts’ No One Is Coming To Save Us, Allie Harrison Vernon
Does Money Indeed Buy Happiness? “The Forms Of Capital” In Fitzgerald’S Gatsby And Watts’ No One Is Coming To Save Us, Allie Harrison Vernon
English (MA) Theses
Looking primarily at two critically acclaimed texts that concern themselves with American citizenship—F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Stephanie Powell Watts’ No One is Coming to Save Us—I analyze the claims made about citizenship identities, rights, and consequential access to said rights. I ask, how do these narratives about citizenship sustain, create, or re-envision American myth? Similarly, how do the narratives interact with the dominant culture at large? Do any of these texts achieve oppositional value, and/or modify the complex hegemonic structure? I use Pierre Bourdieu’s “The Forms of Capital” to investigate the ways in which economic, cultural, …
Dissonances Of Dispossession: Narrating Colonialism And Slavery In The Expansion Of Capitalism, W. Oliver Baker
Dissonances Of Dispossession: Narrating Colonialism And Slavery In The Expansion Of Capitalism, W. Oliver Baker
English Language and Literature ETDs
This project studies how ethnic American literature of the long nineteenth century represents the relationship between the dispossession of lands and lives—the histories of settler colonialism and slavery—and the making of democracy and capitalism in the United States. We often think of this relationship in terms of temporally distinct stages in which the formal equality of democracy and the marketplace overcome and thus leave behind the direct domination of colonization and enslavement. However, I focus on how the early novels of Indigenous, African, and Mexican American writers from the period of manifest destiny to the New Deal era represent the …
The City As A Trap: 20th And 21st Century American Literature And The American Myth Of Mobility, Andrew Joseph Hoffmann
The City As A Trap: 20th And 21st Century American Literature And The American Myth Of Mobility, Andrew Joseph Hoffmann
Dissertations (1934 -)
This dissertation reads twentieth and twenty-first century U.S. multicultural literatures, women’s literature, and science-fiction film and literature to identify a tradition of literary representation of long-standing patterns of economic entrapment in American cities.” I argue that the capitalist ideologies of opportunity and spatial, economic, and social mobility associated with American cities have been largely false promises, and that literature provides an avenue to investigate the ideological matrices and cultural narratives that American capitalism uses to situate bodies where it needs them, primarily in urban centers. I claim that this entrapment remains more or less a constant in American cities despite …
“I’Ve Known Rivers:” Representations Of The Mississippi River In African American Literature And Culture, Catherine Gooch
“I’Ve Known Rivers:” Representations Of The Mississippi River In African American Literature And Culture, Catherine Gooch
Theses and Dissertations--English
My dissertation, titled “I’ve Known Rivers”: Representations of the Mississippi River in African American Literature and Culture, uncovers the impact of the Mississippi River as a powerful, recurring geographical feature in twentieth-century African American literature that conveys the consequences of capitalist expansion on the individual and communal lives of Black Americans. Recent scholarship on the Mississippi River theorizes the relationship between capitalism, geography, and slavery. Walter Johnson’s River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom, Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton: A Global History, and Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the …
"The Great Pleasures Don't Come So Cheap:" Material Objects, Pragmatic Behavior And Aesthetic Commitments In Willa Cather's Fiction, Bari Taylor Bossis
"The Great Pleasures Don't Come So Cheap:" Material Objects, Pragmatic Behavior And Aesthetic Commitments In Willa Cather's Fiction, Bari Taylor Bossis
Senior Projects Spring 2019
Senior Project submitted to The Division of Multidisciplinary Studies of Bard College.
How To Be The Perfect Asian Wife!, Sophia Hill
How To Be The Perfect Asian Wife!, Sophia Hill
Art and Art History Honors Projects
“How to be the Perfect Asian Wife” critiques exploitative power systems that assault female bodies of color in intersectional ways. This work explores strategies of healing and resistance through inserting one’s own narrative of flourishing rather than surviving, while reflecting violent realities. Three large drawings mimic pervasive advertisement language and presentation reflecting the oppressive strategies used to contain women of color. Created with charcoal, watercolor, and ink, these 'advertisements' contrast with an interactive rice bag filled with comics of my everyday experiences. These documentations compel viewers to reflect on their own participation in systems of power.
Undercurrent By Rita Wong, Kelly Shepherd
Undercurrent By Rita Wong, Kelly Shepherd
The Goose
Review of Rita Wong's undercurrent.
Moral Margins: Ethics And Economics In American Northern Literature, 1837-1900, John Adam Stromski
Moral Margins: Ethics And Economics In American Northern Literature, 1837-1900, John Adam Stromski
Doctoral Dissertations
“Moral Margins: Slavery and Capitalism in American Northern Literature, 1837-1900,” focuses on the intersections of slavery, capitalism, and literature, building on recent historical scholarship on the myriad ways slavery impacted the growth of American capitalism. Nowhere is this relationship more prominent than in the nineteenth century, when slavery experienced its highest levels of economic and political influence. Scholars of capitalism and American slavery have tended to focus on the South, the obvious locus of slavery, but little attention is paid to the North, where this relationship is more veiled. I argue that Northern literature shows the ethical complexities of slavery-based …
Reading Ruth Ozeki's All Over Creation Under The Logic Of Capitalism, Sun Ju Kim Kim
Reading Ruth Ozeki's All Over Creation Under The Logic Of Capitalism, Sun Ju Kim Kim
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
This thesis understands Ruth Ozeki’s novel, All Over Creation in the context of the capitalist system of production pulling non-commodified goods into it in search for profit. This thesis offers the naturalization of nature given as “gift” by God that we can see through the character of Lloyd Fuller, and the political/ethical orientation of ecological movement evident in the Seeds of Resistance. I consider these to be problematic approaches to food and agricultural industries since this roundabout rhetoric impedes readers from seeing through the fundamental problem structuring food production. Focusing the author’s ecological and political imagination, I argue that Ozeki …
Love Vs. Capitalism, Blake R. Coury
Love Vs. Capitalism, Blake R. Coury
Line by Line: A Journal of Beginning Student Writing
My purpose in writing this Summary and Response paper was to take a deep look at Norris’ essay, The Secret Ingredient, and focus on a main aspect that I found to be important to me. I am trying to show, using Norris’ essay as evidence, that I agree with Norris’ assertion that people are too materialistic today and that people should be focuses on love instead. The hardest challenge for me when I was working on this paper was trying to balance between using textual evidence and using my own words. I wanted to make sure that I provided …
Capitalism And "Blithedale": Exploring Hawthorne's Response To 19th Century American Capitalism, Kyle G. Phillips
Capitalism And "Blithedale": Exploring Hawthorne's Response To 19th Century American Capitalism, Kyle G. Phillips
disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory
With the intensive migration of the American public from rural to urban settings in the mid-nineteenth century came many logistical problems. Chief among them was the contention that the city was a place fundamentally void of, or else lax with morals. The examination into these issues explores why Americans felt the city was a catalyst for immorality, specifically examining prostitution and the exploitation of the working poor. It seeks to answer these questions within the framework of the anchor text, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Blithedale Romance”.
The Grimm Brothers: An Interpretation Of Capitalistic Demands And Desires, Rebecca Cicalese
The Grimm Brothers: An Interpretation Of Capitalistic Demands And Desires, Rebecca Cicalese
Senior Capstone Theses
This paper explores how Marxism, particularly the teachings of Karl Marx, are echoed in lesser-known Grimm Brothers Fairy Tales. I will focus on “The Maiden without Hands,” “The Juniper Tree,” and “The Boy Who Went Forth to Learn Fear.” My overall argument is that within the mystical world the Grimm Brothers create in their legendary fairy tales, components of Marxism exist and are purposefully written into the stories. As seen through the eyes of both Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm, the society existing within the fairy tales are commodity based. The “monsters” are seen as the laborers who must comply with …
"What, To A Prisoner, Is The Fourth Of July?": Mumia Abu-Jamal And Contemporary Narratives Of Slavery, Luis Omar Ceniceros
"What, To A Prisoner, Is The Fourth Of July?": Mumia Abu-Jamal And Contemporary Narratives Of Slavery, Luis Omar Ceniceros
Open Access Theses & Dissertations
Writing from a specifically Black postmodern perspective, former death row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal composes his multimedia slave narrative as a postmodern Neo-slave narrative. From the Atlantic slave-trade to the United States prison-industrial complex, from Quobna Ottobah Cugoano to Mumia Abu-Jamal, the slave narrative exists as a critique against oppressive State powers and a collective affirmation of interiority and embodied significance. For Abu-Jamal, his incarceration is indicative of an ever-pervasive capitalist power-structure that in the past has, in the present is, and in the future will control designated groups of made marginalized masses in order that preeminent capitalist beneficiaries preserve elite …