Senior Critical Essays, Spring 2010 |
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| Michael Crittell |
Wilde Beasts: Social Fitness of the Artist in The Picture of Dorian Gray Though much socio-historical research locates the Wilde trial as the epistemological site of the modern homosexual identity, few academics examine The Picture of Dorian Gray—the very novel that ultimately implicated Wilde as a criminal—as a literary case study of authorship and identity. Even Wilde fails to consider himself as an artist who undoubtedly bleeds into his ostensibly bibliographic opus. Although homosexuality certainly exists as one of Wilde’s identities, sexual orientation better serves as a sub-identity, which he superimposes atop his primary identity as artist. This essay will not only focus on the inseparability of Wilde and the male counterparts (Basil and Dorian) he creates in The Picture of Dorian Gray, but also on Wilde's contention that a multi-fractal identity, as opposed to a fixed identity, proves necessary for social survival during the Victorian era. |
| John Goerlich |
When Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was first staged in 1966, it immediately became one of the most uniquely structured plays of the twentieth century. In Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Stoppard takes the basic structure of Hamlet and uses it to explore ideas of causality, metatheatre, and free will by depicting onstage what happens offstage in Hamlet, and vice versa. This thesis argues that Stoppard uses the interplay between Shakespeare’s characters and his version of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to condemn passivity and posit that our lives are preordained not by some grand script but by our own deepest natures. |
| Charlotte Hsu |
Mirrors of Ourselves or “Other Nations”? Iconic Species in Modern Environmental Literature Among animals that have historically captivated our imaginations, perhaps none have been more compelling to human thought than the wolf and the whale. Both creatures have figured in the art, literature, religion and mythology of diverse cultures since human history began. Until recent times, people also hunted both animals to the brink—in a few cases, over the brink—of extinction. This history helped to make them a lightning rod for modern environmental campaigns and, concurrently, ideal subjects for environmental writers like Barry Lopez, Rick Bass and Farley Mowat. I compare how these authors represent the two animals, and argue that they reimagine them in ways both informed by and useful to modern environmentalism. In other words, they reshape the mythology of these iconic species to produce dual constructions of the animals as complex, independent, equal beings—“other nations”—and anthropomorphized, symbolic figures that provide a mirror to our own psyche. |
| Madison Kahn | We, as humans, have been destroying the earth for thousands of years. If we continue to treat the earth in this way, we will soon kill it (and in doing so, kill ourselves). Such disrespectful tendencies towards the environment spring from a particular attitude toward the earth. Looking at Jack Keruoac's Dharma Bums, Gary Snyder's Mountains and Rivers Without End and Peter Matthiessen's The Snow Leopard, I consider how the characters in these novels find nature as a source or a tool in their path to spiritual enlightenment. I will argue that by going back to nature, as these characters do, and ridding ourselves of the excesses of society, we can change this destructive attitude and our relationship to the Earth. I will also touch on certain aspects of Buddhist philosophy that convey similar ideas and can thus be an effective means for achieving a more sustainable existence. |
| Carly Lynch | The tales of Rapunzel and Sleeping Beauty have been familiar to most since childhood—in their Grimm Brothers versions. However, the earliest versions of these tales, recorded in Italian dialect by Giambattista Basile in the seventeenth century, were strikingly different from the stories standardized by the Grimm Brothers, both thematically and stylistically. This essay explores the cultural implications that are reflected in these differences and focuses on the witch figure as a means for interpreting the underlying messages of the two tales, especially in regard to gender roles and sexuality. The project will also include my own translations of Basile’s tales. (Joint with Italian Department) |
| Gregg Miller |
Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient depicts a mythical dreamscape of memory, loss, and the effort to move on after the devastation of World War II. In the following essay I seek to bring to light the complexities of a mythologized world were traditional defining features and barriers in time and space break down and create a unique spatial-temporal landscape for exploring issues of the self in the context of nationhood. |
| Mike Pappa |
Knights and Dragons: Competing Romance Motifs in Chaucer My esssay will focus on the ways in which Chaucer both relies upon and manipulates romance motifs in his Canterbury Tales. Throughout the tales are references to wandering knights, damsels in distress, and other common romance figures. These characters are inherently caught up in ethical, moral, and religious questions – they are most often used to reflect upon what it means to live righteously in the world. My reading will focus on the Wife of Bath’s Tale as an Arthurian legend and the Franklin’s Tale as an example of a Breton lai and the way in which these narrators subvert the forms upon which they are relying. Thus, questions of narrative strategy and influence will be my main points of focus. |
| Emily Reed |
Memory and Nostalgia in A Lost Lady and My Ántonia Willa Cather’s A Lost Lady and My Ántonia are novels made of memories. Through memories of the past characters form themselves and construct other characters. In each novel, the past equates itself with youth and the characters are nostalgic. They yearn for the time before the disillusionment of adulthood. With age, characters learn that others do not live up to their ideals and they face the confusion this reality brings. In my essay I will explore how memories imaginatively return characters to the unity and purity of childhood. |
| Jaime Studwell |
Christianity Reimagined: God and the Devil in C.S. Lewis It was C.S. Lewis’ nonfiction that earned him recognition as the most famous Christian apologist of the twentieth century, but his most popular and memorable works are fiction and children’s novels. Lewis’ use of Christian imagery in his fiction can be seen as the convergence of these two strains of Lewis’ work: his imagination and his theology. In The Chronicles of Narnia, Lewis layers Christian images of God and the Devil from traditional sources, such as the Bible and John Milton’s Paradise Lost, to create multidimensional and original characters. This essay will investigate the orthodoxy of Lewis’ theology as expressed through his imagery and the ramifications of his modern and sometimes radical reinterpretations of the natures of God and the Devil. |
| Charlie Taft |
Telling Hard Truths and Telling Them Hard: The Short Stories of Thom Jones This senior essay will be a study of the little known, but critically acclaimed short story author Thom Jones. A former Force Reconnaissance Marine and boxer, his work is often autobiographical, dealing frequently with the themes and issues of pain, mortality, pessimism and their effect on his tough, hard-pressed characters. Two stories will be given special attention: “The Pugilist at Rest,” the award-winning title story of his first collection; and “I Want To Live!” which John Updike included in his anthology The Best American Short Stories of the Century. |
Senior Critical Essays, Fall 2010 |
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| Brittany Coleman | Why Stories? An Inquiry into the Forms and Functions of Narrative This senior work, a joint project combing the studies of Spanish and American Literatures, is a multi-disciplinary inquiry into the question, "Why do we tell stories?" The project incorporates reflective as well as critical responses to research in the fields of literature, philosophy, anthropology, psychology, and religion. Its aim is not to form consensus on the answer to one of humanity's fundamental questions, but rather to initiate and document the process of its exploration. |
| Emily Culp | Good Mother/Bad Mother: Cultural Motherhood from "Hansel and Gretel" to Coraline This essay will examine how the figure of the split mother in folk tales has changed over three historical eras. First, it will focus on two oral tales originating in the Early Modern period: "Hansel and Gretel" and "The Juniper Tree." It will also look at Lucy Lane Clifford's "The New Mother" (1882) and Neil Gaiman's novel, Coraline (2002). The essay will examine the cultural and historical anxieties involved in this Good Mother/Bad Mother split. Finally, it will question whether today's notion of the unattainable ideal mother continues to reflect the prejudices of the Early Moderns and Victorians. |
| Cleopatra Cutler | Fox Lore: Revealing the Bestial Man in European and Japanese Culture Throughout Occidental and Oriental cultures, human deviance has been investigated through the lens of the fox. Fox lore filtered through European mythology and bestiaries, landing in England as The History of Reynard the Fox and giving voice to the medieval moral code. Konjaku Monogatari Anthology, a 12th-century Japanese collection of tales from India, China, and Japan, features fox lore of magic, religion, pride, and love. Accompanied by my translation of a Konjaku tale, this essay explores the way Japanese and European foxes reveal the deviances of each culture, as well as the understanding of "good and evil," sexuality, and religion. (Joint with Japanese Department) |
| Andrew Fuller | Sense in Senselessness: Liberating Rebellion in Philip Roth's Eli, the Fanatic and The Conversion of the Jews Individuals, continuously buffeted by external forces both from the past and present, stand on unstable ground in the fiction of Philip Roth. In Eli, the Fanatic and The Conversion of the Jews, the instability of man himself is a result of social pressures designed to enact passive conformity. Throughout these narratives, oppression permeates the protagonists' relationships with others; it serves to keep individualism checked and public behaviors well under control. When Eli dons the dress worn by members of an Orthodox Yeshiva and Ozzie threatens to jump off the roof of a synagogue, each respectively demonstrates how, for Roth, outlandish behavior is an empowering reaction to repressive social institutions. |
| Jaime Fuller | Two Moveable Feasts: Finding the Real Hemingway in his Posthumously Published Memoir Ernest Hemingway's memoir, A Moveable Feast, was unfinished at the time of the author's death in 1961. His wife and editor made significant changes to the ordering of the chapters and removed parts they believed were not in line with the painstakingly groomed Hemingway myth. For fifty years, scholars have found fault with the original edition, and have lobbied for a new edition. In 2009, Hemingway's grandson published the "restored edition" of A Moveable Feast, reversing some of the original editorial changes. However, scholars and lovers of the book were still displeased. Despite criticism that the restored edition was tampering with a classic, the book offers an unvarnished portrait of Hemingway that is not found in the original edition, including more details concerning his divorce from Hadley Richardson, an event that unsettled Hemingway until his death. By including more text from the original manuscript, the restored edition peels away at the Hemingway myth and begins to offer more insight into the man, instead of the almost fictional protagonist of the first edition of A Moveable Feast. |
| Sasha Hirsch | Last Call: Alcohol, Its Effect on Prince Hal and his Final Rejection of It The sheer amount that people in Early Modern Europe drank boggles the mind. Whether it was sack or sherry or whether it was being consumed as an alternative to dirty drinking water or in a religious celebration, alcohol was an inescapable presence in Shakespeare's day. My essay focuses on Henry IV parts 1 and 2, and examines where and when alcohol arises, how it affects the characters' relationships and, even when it is not overtly present, how it still manages to pervade the scene at hand. I also aim to define, in modern psychological terms, Prince Hal's relationship with his father, Henry IV, as a classic relationship between an alcoholic father and his son. |
| Sonia Hsieh |
"A nightingale between two worlds of dust": Mrs Moore and Friendship in E.M. Forster's A Passage to India |
| Corinne Hundt | Understanding the Purpose of Modern Adaptations of Classic Works of Dramatic Literature: A Case Study of Anton Chekov As arguably the most famous playwright that Russia has ever produced, Anton Chekov has written works that have been read and performed on an international level since their first publication in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His literary genius has helped to further the genre of realistic theatre with a tragicomedy of simultaneous humor and melancholy unique to his plays. I will compare three contemporary dramatic literature adaptations of Chekhov's seminal play Uncle Vanya (Sam Holcraft's Vanya, Howard Barker's Uncle Vanya and David Mamet's Uncle Vanya) in order to prove that Chekov's particular use of tragicomedy creates a human universality that dramatists try to emulate to this day."
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| Alison McAnaney | Faith and Narrative: Illuminating Religion and Story in Yann Martel's Life of Pi With the evolution of society, stories dependent on faith and belief have become few and far between. Yann Martel challenges the reliance on fact and truth, writing fiction that encourages his readers to look beyond the facts and use imagination to realize a story's value. The two separate tales presented in Life of Pi examine the dichotomy between religion and science, asking readers to choose which interpretation presents "the better story." This essay will analyze Martel's confrontation of faith and reason as well as the function of narrative in religious traditions.
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| Leah Nagel | Companion Species: Victorian Literature and Science in Dialogue Victorian popular fiction ascribing human-like intelligence and emotions to animals predates scientific inquiry into animal thought. I argue that the popularity of this fiction influenced Charles Darwin to study animal intelligence and to develop the hypothesis that animals' emotions and intellect differ only in degree from their human counterparts. Examining animal autobiography, I delineate its generic conventions and point to descriptions of animal emotions, particularly joy and fear, textually parallel to the observations Darwin later uses as evidence for animal emotions in Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. I further examine the growth and maturation of the genre of animal literature after the publication of Expression of the Emotions to demonstrate that Darwin's book allowed for the application of animal literature to a broader audience and variety of social issues. |
| Lindsay Selin | The Fountainhead is for More than Tea Party Radicals: Diving through Ayn Rand's Politics to the Root of her Heroic Appeal Ayn Rand's protagonists are heroes in the truest sense-they are fearless champions of integrity and value, stand undaunted against every obstacle, and possess the power to conquer the world. The purity of their passion, purpose, and confidence is so enigmatically appealing that readers of every generation have fallen helplessly in love with them, worshiping the ideals of life and self that they so stoically stand for. Yet in recent years Rand's characters have been subject to harsh literary and political criticism, particularly since radical conservatives have claimed them as emblems of Tea Party politics. With this kind of stigma many of Rand's readers feel uncomfortable defending her novels. Rand's comprehensive philosophy underwriting her work-which so thoroughly integrates matters of politics and matters of character-can be deconstructed and broken into tenets we can accept and reject on a personal basis. Yet this task can only be accomplished if we understand the flawed and mortal mind that constructed the universe of John Galt and Howard Roark, and learn to recognize that many of Rand's views on life and self were formed from biases of her own personal experience. Ultimately we may find that what modern readers sense (and crave) in her work is not so contentiously conservative as we may expect-it is the same soulful essence of individuality and integrity that has been championed by American thinkers since the Transcendentalists.
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| Jessica Spar | When Silence Speaks More Loudly than Words: Shakespeare's Silent Women and the Social Commentary of his Comedies I am exploring how Shakespeare takes strong female characters, especially in his comedies, and silences these women, even in the context of his plays' "happy endings." This suggests a critique of the patriarchy by drawing attention to the indifference of the male characters to the desires and agency of these female characters in the resolution of each play. Because these submissive silences stray from the theatrical Shakespearean tradition where the text is explicit, an exploration of these silences is important. Looking at performance interpretations of the plays as well as the way these comedies are structured helps us acknowledge and understand the importance of these striking silences. |
| Nick Stevens | "If there was a world more disturbing than this, you don't remember it": An Explanation of the Vietnam War through the Poetry of Bruce Weigl and W.D. Ehrhart The Vietnam War was the longest and arguably the most horrific battle that the Untied States has ever endured. The war affected everyone who lived through it, and changed the lives of the men who fought in it forever. The poetry that was written during and after the war by soldiers gives us a lens through which to examine the brutal and sickening events that took place in Vietnam. Bruce Weigel and W.D. Ehrhart are two soldier poets who claim that the war ruined their lives but made them great poets. Using their poetry, I will explore the Vietnam War, the poetry that was produced by the war, and the loves of these two men who portray themselves as both victims and victimizers in a senseless and immoral war. |
| Sasha Swerdloff | Cannibalism in Hansel and Gretel from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Centuries: Form and Function In this essay I intend to examine representations of cannibalism in variations of Hansel and Gretel from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. I will analyze the cannibal figure, the mode of cannibalization, and the setting in which cannibalism occurs in order to delineate both the historical context as well as the metaphorical meaning of cannibalism as a literary motif. Throughout, I will shed light on the controversy concerning the literary criticism of fairy tales based on their tenuous and constantly evolving form. Finally, I will discuss the role of the author, reader, and critic as cannibal. |
| Laura Williams | From Entitlement to Stewardship: Children's and Young Adult Literature of the Chesapeake Bay Though early literature of the Chesapeake Bay reflected the first settlers' unbridled consumption of resources, as the environmental health of the Bay declined over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries due to habitat loss, overfishing, and pollution, literature, specifically an emergent genre of children's and young adult literature, increasingly encouraged youth, either didactically or through metaphor, to value the Bay's resources, protect the health of the Bay, and encourage others to become stewards of a healthy Chesapeake for future generations. This essay will examine the transformation of the Chesapeake Bay literature, and explore how these children's and young adult works color the growing environmental education movement in the Bay region. |
| Kristen Wilson | Contemporary Carter and the Feminine Fairytale In translating the works of Charles Perrault, Angela Carter developed a sophisticated, contemporary perspective towards fairytale motifs. In her works, The Magic Toyshop and The Bloody Chamber, Carter expounds her own interpretation of the feminine world of fairytales. Her books emphasize the oral traditions of old wives' tales and the ultimate female quest for a happily-ever-after through marriage. This essay examines how Carter empowers her female protagonists, skewing the norms of misogynistic relationships, patriarchal marriage plots, and incarnate, bestial masculinity found in early fairytale literature. In her writing, Carter offers a modern female oration of fairytales by reintegrating elements of sexuality and physicality that have been previously omitted through the tales' early written forms. |
Senior Critical Theses, Fall 2010 -- Spring 2011 |
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| Catarina Campbell | "Between Primitivized and Exoticized: Black Women's Struggle to Navigate Conceptions of Beauty, Marriage, and Sexuality" How does one find a safe, affirming space for the sexuality of women of color? The black woman's body and beauty are read alongside a range of socio-cultural texts and experiences from the fixation with and freakishness assigned to the body of the Hottentot Venus to the role of black women as "breeders" under slavery. Two formative women from the black literary canon, Helga Crane from Nella Larsen's Quicksand and Janie Crawford from Zora Neale Hurtson's Their Eyes Were Watching God, reveal solidarity among black women in the struggle for a selfhood in which one is neither saint nor savage, black stereotype or white imitator.
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| Carla Cevasco | From "It-girl" to Forgotten Poet: A Cultural Reading of Edna St. Vincent Millay's Reputation Early twentieth-century lyric poet Edna St. Vincent Millay was, at the height of her career, a literary celebrity, and the stage seemed to be set for her to become a major poet. Today, she is largely unknown outside of literature classrooms. This thesis, a literary history, explores the forces at work during her fall from canonical grace in the 1930s and 1940s - the propaganda poetry she wrote before and during World War II, Elizabeth Atkins' laudatory biography of Millay, and New Critic John Crowe Ransom's attack on Millay's poetry and intellectual capabilities - and analyzes the phenomenon of literary celebrity, particularly for women writers. |
| Andrew Cohen | Are All Heroes The Same? How does one define a hero? I will find a new way to do so by looking at the vehicle that transforms him into a hero. That is to say that I will locate the root cause of the hero's transformation, and use this to define what it actually means to be a hero. To do so, I will look at several books spanning two centuries, from Homer to Tolkien, in order to show that heroes might have different plots or causes, but at heart, they are all the same. |
| Wren Huston | A.A. Milne: The Silliness of War In 1934, A. A. Milne, author of Winnie-the-Pooh, a veteran of the First World War, published what he considered his most important work: Peace with Honour. Unfortunately, this passionate support of pacifism, which attacked the idea of war with such words as "silly," "absurd," and "childish," would prove to be a frustratingly ineffective exposition. In the end, could Milne, who scorned to participate in the modernist movement, preferring instead more traditional forms, who preferred light, humorous, even mundane subjects, to heavy, tragic, and extraordinary ones, find a voice to express his outrage at the age of modern war? |
| Julia Ireland | Rushdie's Magical Realism: A Lens in the History of Post-Colonial India This joint History and English Thesis will use Salman Rushdie's semi-real novels, primarily Midnight's Children, as lenses for the study of post-colonial Indian history, looking to reveal how Rushdie present events preceding and following India's independence and what significance his narration contributes to India's history. This thesis aims to address issues of historical narrative and the role of literature in the construction of a national identity, specifically in Rushdie's novel and more broadly as issues of narration and storytelling. (Joint with History Department) |
| Ariel Ritchlin | The End of Books We are living through arguably the most radical "literary revolution" since Gutenberg. If Marshall McLuhan's famous words prove to be correct, and the medium truly is the message, literature will never be the same. But how do the changing modes of reading truly influence good literature, in particular what we would classify as "good fiction"? What is literature now? And how is it being transformed, both by the author and by the reader, in a more collaborative virtual environment? To what extents do new technologies trivialize it? Advance it? Literature obviously isn't static. The introduction of the book changed both reading and writing, by establishing a novel process of silence, exclusion, and self-reflection-Does the digital environment similarly transform reading and writing, or are there major differences? Is the E-Book, for example, another form of the conventional book, or is it a major deviation from paper-and-ink? How/can/will/should writers respond to these new forms, and to the evolving digital reader?
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| Phoebe Shang | From Purgatives to Purgatory: Social Eradication in Literature Around the World Wars Written in the aftermath of one or both of the World Wars, a time when there are no "good, brave causes left," The Age of Innocence, Look Back in Anger and Death and the King's Horseman offer spiritual solace through the aesthetics of loss. Caught on the cusp of transition from hereditary descent to personal consent, the characters of these works are tempted by, but deny themselves, self-fulfillment. Forced to see the past as an irretrievable myth, and their faith in the future destroyed by war, they resort to the limbic joissance of loss. |
| Sydney Ward | Canonical Children's Literature: the Literary Quality of Little Women, Anne of Green Gables, and The Secret Garden Published in 1868-69, 1908, and 1911, respectively, Little Women, Anne of Green Gables, and the Secret Garden form an enduring trinity of classic girls' fiction dating from the emergence of the burgeoning children's literature industry in the United States. Louise May Alcott, L.M. Montgomery, and Frances Hodgson Burnett achieved financial and literary success in their lifetime, and created among them three very different versions of girlhood that still have resonance. The parallels and differences between their lives and their fictions form the basis for a comparative study of the their three most celebrated works, This thesis will attempt to assess the value of these works by addressing their formal qualities as well as the contexts in which the books were produced and received. |