English Language and Literature Commons^™

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.

The Unicorn Trade: Towards A Cultural History Of The Mass-Market Unicorn, Timothy S. Miller

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

As genre fantasy congealed around a Tolkienian core in the middle decades of the 20th century, two fantastical creatures emerged as the dominant emblems of the form: the dragon and the unicorn. Either one might serve to adorn genre labels on the spines of library books, or act as the colophon for a publisher’s fantasy line. Dipping in and out of touchstone texts in the fantasy tradition such as Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn and Michael Bishop’s Unicorn Mountain, this essay will commence a preliminary exploration of the wider mass cultural adoption of one of these two creatures, …

From Jane Austen To Meghan Markle: The Persistence Of British Imperialism In White Popular Feminism, Kathryn M. Kohls

Theses and Dissertations--English

This dissertation traces the persistent threads and values of white womanhood from the nineteenth-century British Empire to modern American popular culture. The figure of the white woman was significant to upholding colonialism and empire in the literary mass media and culture of the nineteenth century, and I argue that this figure continues to be used in popular media and online content today to surreptitiously uphold white supremacy and obscure race and gender inequalities. This dissertation will explore the overlaps between nostalgia, historical revisionism, white womanhood, white supremacy, and white feminism in modern American popular culture. The connections between, and the …

You, Me, And The Rise Of The American Serial Killer, Keyana Marie Mccain

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

Throughout this project, I focus on the lives of two prolific serial killers, Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer, with the intention of tracing the rise of the American serial killer in pop-culture, as being rooted deeply in our own complex fears, instinctual empathy, and darkest desires. America’s fascination with the serial killer is not simply what some may call morbid curiosity, but rather an attempt at vicariously exploring our most uncomfortable emotions - fear, empathy, and desire, without exposing ourselves to real physical danger along the way. David Schmid argues that the serial killer is now “as quintessentially an American …

"A Mind Of Metal And Wheels": Agrarian Ruralism In Joss Whedon's Firefly And J.R.R Tolkien's The Lord Of The Rings, Christopher Hines

English (MA) Theses

Both Joss Whedon's Firefly and J.R.R Tolkien's The Lord of The Rings present settings that are just as much influenced by the environments in which they occur as they are by the characters who act within those environments. For J.R.R. Tolkien, it was his lived experience of having grown up in a changing England that influenced his depiction of the world, while Joss Whedon's Firefly revisits and readapts the American mythos of the Western and the cowboy and re-appropriates it to science fiction, placing the action in the far future and in space where humanity is once again exploring and …

Fanfiction As: Searching For Significance In The Academic Realm, Megan Friess

English (MA) Theses

What is literature? What is art? And, just as importantly, what isn’t? What criteria are you using to make this judgment call? As natural as we feel our views to be, they are not; they are culturally and socioeconomically based. How and when we live affects what we see as literature or art and what we deem not to be. While there was originally a large chasm in Western cultures between what was considered to be “proper” art and literature and what was considered lowbrow and for the uncultured masses, this divide has diminished over time. Instead of everyday people …

"The Most Insistent Subject Of Popular Music": An Exploration Of Romeo And Juliet Music Adaptations And Their Expressions Of Modern Cultural Issues, Gabrielle Sheets

Honors Projects

Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (1597) has been persistently popular throughout history, especially in the modern production of popular music releases. People are often widely familiar with Romeo and Juliet’s usage throughout music. However, the reasoning behind the adaptation of Romeo and Juliet is relatively undiscussed. Romeo and Juliet is a leading symbol of tragic romance, an ever-present topic in popular music. Romeo and Juliet’s canonical qualities lead music artists to adapt the original play since it permits access to an audience that is familiar with the contexts of Shakespeare’s tragedy. This essay also provides a clear definition of “adaptation,” requiring …

Noir Affect [Table Of Contents], Christopher Breu, Elizabeth A. Hatmaker

Literature

Noir Affect proposes a new understanding of noir as defined by negative affect. This new understanding emphasizes that noir is, first and foremost, an affective disposition rather than a specific cycle of films or novels associated with a given time period (the mid-twentieth century) or national tradition (the U.S.). Instead the essays in Noir Affect trace noir’s negativity as it manifests in different national contexts (from the U.S. to Mexico, France and Japan) manifests in a range of different media (films, novels, video games, and manga). The forms of affect associated with noir are resolutely negative: these are narratives centered …

The Gen Z Zombie: Ya Takes On The Undead, Jason Mccormick

Theses and Dissertations

After the terror attacks of 9/11, zombie stories experienced an unprecedented boom, or for some critics, a renaissance. Fears of mass death, infiltration by the Other, and life before and after the apocalyptic moment were played out through zombie stories. The longevity of the boom also saw the zombie myth move into strange new places including Young Adult novels, resulting in what I refer to as the “Gen Z zombie.”

In his discussion of the sympathetic zombie, Kyle William Bishop mentions YA zombie texts including Carrie Ryan’s The Forest of Hands and Teeth and Isaac Marion’s Warm Bodies but groups …

Snc Theatre Studies Presents Brontë

St. Norbert Times

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Mumbai Macbeth: Gender And Identity In Bollywood Adaptations, Rashmila Maiti

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This project analyzes adaptation in the Hindi film industry and how the concepts of gender and identity have changed from the original text to the contemporary adaptation. The original texts include religious epics, Shakespeare’s plays, Bengali novels which were written pre-independence, and Hollywood films. This venture uses adaptation theory as well as postmodernist and postcolonial theories to examine how women and men are represented in the adaptations as well as how contemporary audience expectations help to create the identity of the characters in the films. Ultimately, this project hopes to fulfil the gap in scholarship on adaptations in Bollywood.

Reclaiming The Black Personhood: The Power Of The Hip-Hop Narrative In Mainstream Rap, Morgan Klatskin

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

Hip hop, as a cultural phenomenon, leverages rap as a narrative form in periods of acutely visible political unrest in the Black American community to combat pejorative narratives of Black America as revealed in the American criminal justice system’s treatment of Black Americans. Hip-hop themes were prevalent in golden-age rap of the 1980s in response Regan-era war-on-drugs policy, which severely disadvantaged the Black community and devalued the Black personhood. Hip hop used narrative to reclaim the Black personhood while it served to encourage political involvement in the Black community, urging Blacks to participate in rewriting the narrative of Black America. …

“The Blackness Of Blackness”: Meta-Black Identity In 20th/21st Century African American Culture, Casey Hayman

Doctoral Dissertations

The central claim in this dissertation is that much contemporary African American cultural expression would be better conceptualized not as “post-black,” as some would have it, but as what I call “meta-black.” I use the preface “meta-” because while this contemporary black identity also resists sometimes constrictive conceptions of “authentic” black identity from within the African American community, I diverge from theorists of “post-blackness” in observing the ways that, as Nicole Fleetwood observes, blackness necessarily “circulates” within a technologically-driven mediascape, and these postmodern black subjects work within and against the constraints of this aural-visual regime of blackness in order to …

Strangers With Cameras: The Consequences Of Appalachian Representation In Pop Culture, Chelsea L. Brislin

Theses and Dissertations--English

Representations of the Appalachia region in literature, art and pop culture have historically shifted between hyperbolic, colorful caricatures to grotesque, sensationalized, black and white photography. This wide spectrum of depictions continually resonates within the North American psyche due to its shared commonality of Appalachia as the cultural “other.” This othering frequently leaves audiences with a kind of relief that this warped representation of backwards, rural poverty is not their own progressive, present-day reality. Countless artists have exploited the region in order to show the impoverished side of rural Appalachia and spin a failed capitalistic way of life into a romanticized, …

The Somewhere We Wish Were Nowhere: Dystopian Realities And (Un)Democratic Imaginaries, Benjamin B. Taylor

Senior Independent Study Theses

How do political practices influence mass culture? Conversely, how does mass culture influence political practice? This project addresses these questions by turning to the concepts of utopia and dystopia. Imagined utopic and dystopic visions express both the hopes and anxieties of the societies producing them. Dystopias also highlight the mechanisms of power that function within particular social orders. Through readings of Lois Lowry’s The Giver and Phillip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, I demonstrate how utopia and dystopia function and how we can respond to dystopic realities by theorizing solutions that are more conducive to the …

Myriad Mirrors: Doppelgangers And Doubling In The Vampire Diaries, Kimberley Mcmahon-Coleman

Kimberley McMahon-Coleman

Mirroring is of fundamental importance in Gothic literature and filmic texts generally, and is a prevalent trope in the CW network teen drama, The Vampire Diaries. The television series is itself a “doubling” in that it is an adaptation of a series of novels by L.J. Smith, creating a situation wherein the same central characters inhabit the parallel townships of the novels’ Fells Church and television’s Mystic Falls, and thus have histories which are, at times, contradictory. The television version also explicitly explores the concept of the doppelganger, and thus the idea of reflection, even as it manipulates the historical …

Do You Fit The Alloy Mold? The Homogenization Of Structure And Audience In The Television Adaptations Of 'Gossip Girl,' 'Pretty Little Liars,' And 'The Vampire Diaries', Caitlin Murray

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the ways in which the television adaptations of Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Liars, and The Vampire Diaries become more homogenized during the adaptation process, thus contributing to an implied exclusivity from which Alloy, Inc.—the media and marketing company that owns these products—might benefit. This paper points out the ways in which the three products become structurally similar to one another during the adaptation process through the implementation of soap opera conventions. An exploration of consumption and class in each of the three works reveals an emphasis on class-based exclusivity in the adaptation process. Finally, a focus on …

Engaging "Apolitical" Adolescents: Analyzing The Popularity And Educational Potential Of Dystopian Literature Post-9/11, Melissa R. Ames

Melissa A. Ames

Although dystopian novels have been prevalent under the young adult banner for decades, their abundance and popularity post-9/11 is noteworthy. The 21st century has found academics and laypersons alike discussing the supposed political apathy of young adults and teenagers of the Millennial Generation. However, despite this common complaint—and contrary to ample research that indicates that this age group has traditionally been uninterested in global politics—the reading preferences of this generation indicate that this label of "apolitical" may not be as fitting as some believe. In fact, the popularity of young adult dystopian literature, which is ripe with these political themes, …

Who's Your Daddy?: Representations Of Masculinity And Coming Of Age In Television’S The Vampire Diaries, Kimberley Mcmahon-Coleman

Kimberley McMahon-Coleman

Fantasy narratives often use the metaphor of the werewolf for the adolescent identity-forming process. The Vampire Diaries goes one step further in the character of Tyler Lockwood, a teen wolf/vampire hybrid. An aggressive and abused teen, Tyler loses his father in Season 1 and his replacement father figure, a paternal uncle, in Season 2. In Season 3, he is “sired” by the Original hybrid, Klaus. In the face of these competing influences, Tyler struggles to come to terms with his own identity. The program uses the fictional township of Mystic Falls, populated by witches, werewolves, vampires and ghosts, to examine …

"The Ties That Bind: Family And Blood In Television’S The Vampire Diaries.”, Kimberley Mcmahon-Coleman

Kimberley McMahon-Coleman

No abstract provided.

Southern Civility, Sexuality And Secularity: Minority Politics In "True Blood.", Kimberley Mcmahon-Coleman

Kimberley McMahon-Coleman

Southern Civility, Sexuality and Secularity: Minority Politics in True Blood. Paper Topic area: Science Fiction and Fantasy - True Blood (Burnett) In the popular HBO series True Blood and the novels by Charlaine Harris on which they are based, Sookie Stackhouse is a thoroughly postmodern Southern Belle. Sookie’s decisions are based on her notions of what it is to be a ‘lady’ and on her Christian beliefs. She is directly contrasted with members of the Fellowship of the Sun in that she refuses to believe that Jesus would hate vampires. The viewer is thus implicitly invited to become a resistant …

Vamping Up Sex: Audience, Age, & Portrayals Of Sexuality In Vampire Narratives, Melissa R. Ames

Melissa A. Ames

No abstract provided.

A Clutch Of Vampires: Or, An Examination Of The Contemporary Dracula Texts, James Craig Holte

Journal of Dracula Studies

No abstract provided.

The Mini-Casebook--Easy As Pie, Charlie Sweet, Hal Blythe

English Faculty and Staff Research

Presents a casebook on the song "American Pie" that considers how to define the parameters of short narrative. Describes the creation of an end-of-term cumulative writing project that the authors have successfully employed for the last decade. Discusses how they put together a casebook that teaches the necessary research skills.

The Mini-Casebook--Easy As Pie, Charlie Sweet, Hal Blythe

Hal Blythe

Presents a casebook on the song "American Pie" that considers how to define the parameters of short narrative. Describes the creation of an end-of-term cumulative writing project that the authors have successfully employed for the last decade. Discusses how they put together a casebook that teaches the necessary research skills.

The Mini-Casebook--Easy As Pie, Charlie Sweet, Hal Blythe

Charlie Sweet

Presents a casebook on the song "American Pie" that considers how to define the parameters of short narrative. Describes the creation of an end-of-term cumulative writing project that the authors have successfully employed for the last decade. Discusses how they put together a casebook that teaches the necessary research skills.