The ongoing “method war” in literary criticism that has manifested as the impasse between Critique and Postcritique, which are identified respectively with paranoid and reparative modes of reading, raises existential questions about criticism in the face of its declining social value under neoliberalism. This thesis enters that impasse to suggest...
In Nella Larsen’s novel Passing, the character of Irene notes how “no one is every completely happy, or free, or safe,” which highlights how social limitations in American society restrict access to freedom and safety from those who do not conform to standards as defined by American society– something especially...
My thesis examines perceptions of power in relation to white and black masculinity in the United States. The introduction invokes the work of Mireille Miller-Young, Hortense Spillers, Vincent Woodard and Hiram Pérez as a foundation to ground my discussion of agency, consumption, desire, homoeroticism and the characteristics of the Mandingo,...
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ElizabethSheehan
My thesis examines perceptions of power in relation to white and black
In this two-article thesis, I argue that an opposition to Eurocentrism may be articulated without ethnic or identarian determinisms but through a critical engagement with the categories of ethics and truth in a global frame. I build upon the work of Frantz Fanon and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak to accomplish a...
The Walt Disney Company is one of the most recognizable and pervasive sources of children’s entertainment worldwide and has carefully crafted an image of childhood innocence. This wholesome image is contradicted by Disney’s consistent use of racist and sexist tropes, as well as its record of covertly using political themes...
Recent work in moral philosophy has displayed a renewed interest in ethics and ontology that consider the social constitution of the subject. However, these approaches to ethics, exemplified in Judith Butler’s work in Giving an Account of Oneself, often neglect the problem of antiblackness, which Afro-pessimist scholars argue operates at...
This thesis invokes Black Jesus as an abstract figure in two seemingly disparate early twentieth century American novels and, in doing so, intervenes in ongoing debates about the ethical capacities of literature as means of grappling with difference. The Christ figure is a literary trope of waning importance in contemporary...
This thesis examines alternative modes and forms of production in texts by Willa Cather and Virginia Woolf. Applying queer methodologies drawn from the work of Michel Foucault, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Lee Edelman, and Elizabeth Freeman, I show how Cather’s The Professor’s House and Woolf’s To the Lighthouse demonstrate and interrogate...
In her novel, Nightwood (1936), Djuna Barnes examines the relationships and identities of diverse characters during the early 20th century. My paper investigates the depiction of inversion and how it challenges heteronormative structures. However, I argue that the depiction of queer relations is only available between feminized queer subjects. The...
This thesis examines two cultural productions of the Harlem Renaissance: Aaron Douglas's mural series, Aspects of Negro Life, and Nella Larsen's novel Passing. I read these works together because, more than their shared time period, they showcase an attention to the visual. Both Larsen and Douglas's works are concerned with...
The 1920’s was a period of immense growth of consumer and celebrity culture, that brought changes in film, art and the creation and presentation of identity. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night reflects these changes, particularly with respect to how cultural shifts challenge prevailing views about individual autonomy and...
Over the past decade, the explosion of social media has secured the Internet as a venue for political discussions of all sorts; as well as a realm of consumption and commodification. One population of women that has utilized social media in this way is the plus-sized fashion ("fatshion") community on...
Presentation at Undergraduate Humanities Conference: Bodies and Technology.
I presented my paper “The Other Mother: Assessing Edwidge Danticat’s “New York Day Women” in the Light of Hortense J. Spillers’ “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” at the 2020 Undergraduate Humanities Conference on May 8th, 2020. This paper assesses...
This thesis explores the roles of scripts in shaping minoritarian subjectivity through Kim Jee-woon’s film The Good, The Bad, The Weird (2008), Kim Fu’s novel For Today I Am a Boy (2014), and R. Zamora Linmark’s novel Rolling the R’s (1995). In all three works, diasporic characters of Asian descent...
Author Nella Larsen and photographer James VanDerZee are two of the most canonical figures of Harlem Renaissance studies, whose respective novels and portraits have been explored extensively, if separately, by scholars. Both Larsen's 1929 novel Passing and VanDerZee's studio portraiture of the 1920s and 1930s have been read in terms...
Online fanfiction communities have received attention for providing spaces of creativity and individual empowerment. Yet as critics have sought to establish fanfiction as a worthy object of study, many have not grappled with the ways that fanfictions not only trouble, but also reinforce various discourses and ideas of gender and...
This project investigates the ways in which conceptions of women and gender in Islam are articulated within discourses of modernity, freedom, and justice. Considering the ways in which third-world literature and scholarship interacts with, and creates, multiculturalist discourse, this paper examines representation, spokesmanship, and the role of the cosmopolitan humanities...