When Charles Guiteau killed U.S. President James Garfield, he claimed that God had ordered him to do so. During his trial, Guiteau’s lawyers plead not guilty by reason of insanity, and the question of Guiteau’s innocence or guilt quickly became a question about the very nature of insanity itself. In...
The sudden and unexpected death of a seemingly healthy infant sets in motion a number of linked processes with potentially complex and far-reaching ramifications. While individuals, families and communities grapple with the shock and heartbreak associated with the loss of a young life, a chain of multidisciplinary investigative responsibilities is...
Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is one of the most widely read novels written by an Oregonian. A mute Native American, a boisterous Irish white man, and numerous African Americans working behind the scenes of the narrative all converge in this struggle for autonomy. Little to no...
This thesis examines the characterization of the femme fatale and the implications of this trope for late-Victorian gender and sexuality in the ghost stories of female aesthete Vernon Lee. In her treatment of the femme fatale figure, Lee both reinforces and complicates the image of the sexualized, often bestialized woman...
Despite Portland’s progressive reputation, the response of city officials, police officers, and the community as a whole to the killing of the black man, Lloyd Stevenson, in 1985 at the hands of Portland police, demonstrates that the long racially discriminatory history of Oregon shaped public policy and popular thought about...
This thesis examines the representation of consumer culture in Fight Club within the context of Frederic Jameson's theory of postmodernism. I propose that the film represents consumer culture as a totalizing system. This representation is evident in the setting of the film and in the Narrator's attempt to escape from...
The Lizzie Bennet Diaries is a multimodal adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, released from 2012-2013. As a media event, the show proved how effective transmedia storytelling can be, eventually winning an Emmy for Original Interactive Program. In creating an intensely immediate narrative world, the series adapted more than Jane Austen’s...
Recent conflicts in America concerning the environment (the harvesting of old growth timber in the Pacific Northwest, or the proposed opening of public lands in southern Utah to mining interests, for instance) have precipitated a personal examination of "historical others" (Jensen 64), individuals that possess very different sensibilities from a...
This thesis focuses on performances of masculinity by British Royal Flying Corps (RFC) airmen in the charged landscape of the First World War prisoner of war (POW) camp. I examine how captive airmen coped with imprisonment by reasserting the familiar homosocial communities of pre-capture squadron life, particularly through practices associated...
Recent changes in the historiography of American Transcendentalism
have inspired a reappraisal of the relationship between the Transcendentalist
movement in New England and the pietistic wing of the Unitarian church. This
thesis explores this reappraisal through a close reading of selected writings by
Henry Ware Jr. in juxtaposition to the...