My thesis is comprised of two articles, titled "Journeying Through (An)Other World: Examining the Role of Magic and Transformational Otherness in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" and "Magic, Muggles, and Mudbloods: Examining Magical Otherness in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter Series." The introduction frames the thematic, theoretical, and critical connections...
Novelist Toni Morrison is well-known for using the concept she calls rememory, or the process of actively revisiting and reconstructing a cultural past. Many critics agree that Morrison uses rememory in a strategic way, so that it provides
sturdy framework for a larger discussion of issues of race, class, and...
In their respective novels, The House Behind the Cedars (1900) and
Passing (1929), both Charles Chesnutt and Nella Larsen utilize racial
passing, the process of a mixed-race individual living as "white," to
explore the relations between black and white people during early-twentieth century America. This thesis specifically argues that
Chesnutt...
The popularity and pervasiveness of eugenic discourse during the modernist period in England and Ireland raised many questions about race, class, and gender. While Hitler's Nazi "experiment" ultimately demonstrated the consequences of implementing eugenic ideas, forcing eugenicists to abandon, or at least mask, their theories, the eugenics movement before World...
Asynthesis & Act is a significant intervention into the discourse of the sublime. Through a deep investigation of the critical metaphysics of Immanuel Kant, the first chapter of this thesis puts forth the claim that the sublime is a radical experience that occasions a possibility for the individual to commit...
Ms. Miles is Missing—the beginning of a novel—is the story of a woman who, in her early thirties comes to realize that the life she is living is not the life she wants. She yearns for her lost childhood, and tries to come to terms with her mother’s death. Martha...
The purpose of the study was to attempt to develop a methodological
approach which would tap the contribution of the literary
artist to the understanding of human behavior. It was assumed that
a content analysis of the social attitudes expressed in fiction would
yield data which was complimentary, if not...
This essay is an exploration of identity formation and expression. Humanity's identity formations create the orientations and languages with which we use to create our knowledge and understanding of the surrounding external environment (both social and physical) and our internal environment (psychological). This essay traces the sources of identity formation...
Violence and voice seem to be related. In this thesis I detail personal experiences with violence, and then put them into the context of research done about the ways in which violence affects the writing voice, as well as the speaking voice. Helene Cixous' writings about the writing voice and...
This thesis is a study of Herman Melville’s symbolism. I have chosen to investigate the elemental images of water, fire, and stone in Moby-Dick (1851), Pierre; Or, The Ambiguities (1852), and Clarel; A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876). This work is a semiotic study, insofar as the...