2019-2020 Senior Honors Theses
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10657/6786
This collection contains theses produced by Class of 2020 Honors students
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Browsing 2019-2020 Senior Honors Theses by Department "English, Department of"
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Item Against the Machine(2020-05) Cadenhead, Erin P.With its preoccupation with misogyny and violence towards women, the Romance genre instructs its female readers how to react to what has become unavoidable in a patriarchal world. Unfortunately, the abuse perpetrated by the Hero towards the Heroine counters the educational intentions of the genre and sends the wrong message. The readers of the Romance who see themselves in the Heroine– particularly the modern day, independent Heroine of the Time Travel Romance– are taught that in order to achieve their desired ‘happy ending,’ they must forgive their abusive significant others. Through satire and feminist edits to Janice A. Radway’s Narrative Logic of the Romance, Against the Machine addresses the presence of domestic violence and misogyny in the Time Travel Romance, and offers an alternative way to write in the genre.Item Home Address(2020-05) Mayden, MelindaThis manuscript aims to do exactly what it claims to in the title—to address home. Home is a word that gets used without thought and often multiple times per day. “Let’s go home” and “I’m on my way home” are thrown out over dinner parties or phone calls. Advertisements that plaster the side of apartment complexes tell the passerby, “If you lived here, you would be home by now.” Home Address contains five short stories, each of which strive to contextually define and redefine “home.” This collection explores aspects of the stories’ characters’ homes, or lack thereof, and the effect that can have in warping, creating, or breaking down personal identities. Home is not a place, or a relationship, or a blood relation, or a material thing. It is none of those things. It is also all those things. I hope that those who read Home Address and who feel as if they have no real home can be encouraged by these stories which show the ways home is a concept, not a concrete reality, and that it can continue to be shaped throughout any individual life.Item Misleading and Misrepresenting the American Youth: “Little Orphan Annie” and the Orphan Myth in the Twentieth Century(2020-05) Beck, Amanda G.This interdisciplinary thesis examines the myth of the orphan in twentieth-century America as exemplified through the recurring story of “Little Orphan Annie,” an iconic American figure of independence, resilience, and optimism. By providing historical context and literary analysis for each of Annie’s crucial moments in the twentieth century, this thesis shows how the character has advanced a misguided perception of orphan and youth agency. While evolving to represent different decades of American society in the twentieth century through different mediums, Annie has further misled Americans in their perception of orphan and youth agency. America’s failure to separate the fictional aspects of Annie’s life from the darker realities surrounding children, along with the country’s fascination with her triumphant narrative, has contributed to the misunderstanding of American youth.Item Representations of Influences in the Identities of Young Migrant Girls of the Borderlands and their Relationship to Gender, Childhood, and Motherhood(2020-05) Caceres Ferreira, FlorenciaThis thesis seeks to analyze the representations of border-related trauma in contemporary written works. The introductory chapter seeks to set the foundation for this thesis using Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1985) as a means of thinking about the border in terms of womanhood and identity. In Chapter I, I draw from Chicana feminist theory and criticism to read closely Reyna Grande’s 2012 The Distance Between Us, a Memoir. In Chapter II, I turn to Valeria Luiselli’s 2019 fictional piece, Lost Children Archive, as well as her 2017 essay, Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions. By reading across diverse genres, this thesis argues that Chicana writers construct works in which representations of the border’s detrimental effects are shown through narrative and pivot centrally around motherhood. Each writer points to the ways the border specifically complicates the relationship between Chicana identity and traditional notions of motherhood and childhood development.Item Sakimirai(2020-04) Faour, WilliamThis thesis, a fiction novella, examines themes of nostalgia, perception against reality, redemption and forgiveness, and the inner human. Drawing from a mix of literary classics by greats such as Shakespeare, Morrison, Asimov, Orwell, and Steinbeck as well as real-world experiences, it places an adult in her childhood home and examines her attempts to recreate the past, asking us to what length one will go to satisfy our goals. The human mind holds an all-encompassing power that may change the significance of events large and small, so this work intends to answer the following questions: how valuable a tool is nostalgia; what can one do in the face of crushing perceptions that may warp reality; what constitutes as redemption, and how can one act when forgiveness isn't granted; and what truly defines the inner human, a being under the mind's gripping control?Item Serialized Comic Book Storytelling As Modern Myth-Making(2020-04) Bui, JustinThis work sets out to investigate serialized comic book storytelling as a medium through its low-culture historical roots and the unique qualities it possesses. In doing so, it identifies the characteristics integral to the medium like decentralized narrative authority, long-running continuity, and multiformity: all of which help differentiate the serialized comic book from more conventional forms like literature or film. This work also closely analyzes one of the most popular examples of successful serialized comic book storytelling. By using The Amazing Spider-Man, and the body of work surrounding the Spider-Man character as a case study, those same integral characteristics of the format can be verifiably evaluated in a real-world context. Finally, this work compares the serialized comic book to Ancient Greek storytelling through myth and theater. The same multiformity and fluidity that defines comics is key to understanding mythic storytelling. By drawing that comparison, it becomes clear that serialized comic book storytelling, with all of its unique formal characteristics, bears the closest modern resemblance to a new form of mythmaking.Item The Anti-Civilizational Queer: Reconceiving the Subject-Subject Consciousness of the Radical Faeries(2020-04) Foreman, JacobThe first section of this thesis is a consideration of Harry Hay’s writings about “subject-SUBJECT” consciousness and Sanford’s critiques thereof. A refutation of Hay’s writings on the topic, which is not a central component of Sanford’s dissertation, is where Sanford’s work ends. I find it important to present the conversation between these two Faeries, Hay and Sanford, as a backdrop for my own exploration of the topic. My consideration of subject-subject consciousness is noticeably different in form than either of theirs, however. Hay’s writing on the term is epigraphic and bombastic; Sanford’s writing, while mixed with affect and narrative in other areas, is purely theoretical on this point. My writing on subject-subject consciousness dispenses with Hay’s melodrama and moves nearer to Sanford’s narrative academic style while prioritizing my own experience and operating within a crudely phenomenological framework. Because of the nature of this academic work, my thesis here is inseparable from my involvement with myself and the Faeries. The work of myself that I am doing here thus begins as I reconceive subject-subject consciousness by interweaving my experience of Faerie community and texts that have helped me comprehend and embody Faerie relationality. The second section is an analysis of the term which I have, along with Sanford, come to most closely identify with the ethics of Faerie community: attention. I primarily define attention using the writings of Simone Weil, principally through an examination of attention’s counterpart, force. The clarity with which Weil explicates what she terms force allows me to discuss force’s antidote, attention. I more fully form my conception of attention by examining the closely Faerie-aligned novel The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions, in which I locate a series of scenes of communal healing and mutual aid. [note on scenes] These scenes lead my discussion to the embodied nature of attention, which I again primarily conceive of through the negative. Attention at this point in my writing will be seen as the antidote of trauma, here understood in one facet as the corporealization of force. I rely here on the work of Marian Dunlea, which incisively explores how we can identify and counteract the embodiment of our trauma. Section three is then an approach toward Faerie ethics from the starting point of the subject’s relationship to themself. I draw primarily from Judith Butler’s writing about the subject’s partial self-opacity. I, however, move beyond the subject via the anti-civilizational critique of Baedan, a queer anarchist journal out of Seattle. I explore what Baedan terms domestication and the struggle against it within Faerie community, which can be seen as attempts to bring the subject in communion with themself. The alienation of the subject from the human – a reformulation of Butler’s subject’s partial self-opacity via a discussion of Agamben’s consideration of apparatuses, itself a building upon Foucault’s thought of the same term – is combatted as a means of realizing an ideal of ethical relationality that I view as aligned with the mandates of attention. I thus position Faerie ethics as aligned with the embrace of civilization’s decomposition elucidated by Baedan. Finally, I explore Faerie gender practices as a site of the refusal of civilization. I challenge Butler’s drive toward intelligibility in her conception of gender performativity by linking intelligibility to subjecthood and therefore civilization. I consider how Faerie gender practices instead emphasize our inherent unintelligibility, which exposes a drive within Faerie community toward what Butler terms precarity. I then link precarity to chaos and explore ways that an embrace of precarity and chaos has been exhibited to me in Faerie community. I further conceive of precarity and chaos, as conditions of our existence, to be necessary sites of embrace in the pursuit of ourselves. This leads me to what I perceive to be the call of Faerie ethical relationality.Item The Porter, Lady Macbeth, and the Theme of Spoiled Hospitality(2020-05) Tan, Emma E.This thesis analyzes how scholarship has treated Act 2, scene 3 in William Shakespeare’s Macbeth and posits that the scene has significance with respect to the theme of hospitality. To prove this thesis, we first review the relevant scholarship about the scene. Next we explore the theme of hospitality in the play with a focus on the historical context. Finally we show how Lady Macbeth and the porter are connected as faces of hospitality. We find that throughout the play not only does Lady Macbeth remain interested in preserving the semblance of hospitality, but also by convincing her husband to break the laws of hospitality, she has severed them from the peace that good hospitality was meant to foster. This finding shows that Act 2, scene 3 is more than the comic relief scene in an otherwise solemn play.Item Viaticum(2020-05) Wheat, KeaganMy poetry works to increase representation of FTM men in poetry, a minimally represented identity, and make meaningful contributions to the way this identity is discussed or analyzed. My poetry focuses on critically thinking about the experience of a transgender man’s identity and his family’s interactions with that identity. The manuscript will challenge Jay Prosser’s idea that the initial self ceases to exist or dies when a transgender person transitions. If transition metaphorically kills the previous self, every transitioning transgender person innately comes with tragedy. Prosser’s idea also leads to a strain in parent-child relationships when a child comes out as transgender, insofar as the parent begins to mourn the child in the presence of the child. To retain the initial self through transition, the poetry will recreate aspects of childhood with which the transman still identifies. My poetry does not always adhere to the chronological order of transition to disrupt the idea of moving from wrong body to right body as sole transition/transgender narrative. I create small narratives of experiences within the transman’s identity that refuse to disidentify with the pre-transition self, instead of strict narrativization. The poetry creates the trans experience for the reader through common interactions relating to FTM identity. The subject shifts, not due to changing self, but due to the changing outward interactions. By critiquing the importance of the narrativization, the manuscript opens the trans identity to people who identify with their past self.