The cultural and historical construction of African American identity in the United States has been closely tied to the dialectical relationship formed between sound and silence. This thesis examines the modernist and postmodernist representation of sound and silence in the African American novels Passing (1929), by Nella Larsen, and Jazz...
This thesis takes an auteurist approach to the films of director Terrence Malick by reading them through the spiritual philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson. I establish Malick's thematic concern with the human struggle to achieve better existences in a broken material world, a concern buoyed by his signature aesthetic that...
This thesis examines the postmodern confrontation of representation throughout the oeuvre of Martin McDonagh. I particularly look to his later body of work, which directly and self-reflexively confronts issues of artistic representation & masculinity, in order to gain a more nuanced understanding of his earliest and most controversial plays. In...
In 1965 Malcolm X said that we are living in a time of extremism. People in power have misused it now there has to be a change, and a better world has to be built, and the only way it's going to be built is with extreme methods. And I,...