Undergraduate Honors Theses
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Includes Baccalaureate theses from the Vanderbilt English Department Honors Program.
For more information on the English Department Honors Program go to their webpage.
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Item The Fury and the Mire: Readers, Reading, and Our Digital World(Vanderbilt University, 2013-04-17) Combs, Chris; Wollaeger, Mark; Clayton, JayItem Rancière’s Political "Perceptible" and Perversions of Marxist Ideology: An Analysis of Narrative Politics in Brecht, Bulgakov, and Ishiguro(Vanderbilt University, 2013-04-17) Lindell, Katherine; Wollaeger, Mark; Tran, BenItem Binary Domination and Bondage: Blake's Representations of Race, Nationalism, and Gender(Vanderbilt University, 2013-04-17) Calvin, Katherine; Wollaeger, Mark; Garcia, HumbertoItem "The French Book Saith": Malory’s Adaptation of His Sources(Vanderbilt University, 2012-04-17) Stanley, Jennifer; Wollaeger, Mark; Plummer, JohnItem Roadblocks to Publishing Obscenity and Blasphemy in Ulysses and The Satanic Verses(Vanderbilt University, 2012-04-24) DeBell, Liz; Gottfried, Roy; Wollaeger, MarkThe publishing industry is in such turmoil—thanks to digital publishing platforms which offer higher royalties and instant gratification to authors—that nearly every day a new story comes to light of a bookstore closing, or a digital publishing success, giving doomsayers foretelling the death of the industry and the downfall of publishing houses endless material. While their claims are, in part, correct—the industry cannot go back to the way it was before the introduction of e-readers and Amazon—a glance backward to self-publishing in the past suggests that the industry is constantly in flux, and changes, whether in the realm of obscenity, blasphemy, or technology, inevitably impact the industry. Of course, even using the words “self-publishing” brings to mind a very specific definition, yet this definition has changed over time. Once, it brought to mind images of vanity presses, but now most of the buzz surrounding self-publishing is in the digital world. These developments have given rise to a number of anxieties in the publishing community: how will publishing houses make themselves relevant in the digital publishing world? What is the future of the publishing industry? Does a text carry the same weight as “literature” when published online as when published in print? Do we value literature less when it’s sold at discount prices? While I don’t presume to have the answers to these questions, my hope is that examining cases of self-publishing in the past will shed light on the new developments in the industry. With these issues in mind, in the following pages I will turn to Ulysses, examining three different written texts that appear: Martha’s letter, Deasy’s published letter, and Stephen’s unpublished verse. Turning next to The Satanic Verses, we see that blasphemy, not obscenity, forced Salman Rushdie to evade the traditional publishing system, even though his novel was initially much heralded in literary circles. Then, in a brief final discussion, I will reflect on how these issues of obscenity, blasphemy, and self-publishing play out today in the digital realm.Item Resounding Footnotes Understanding the Pre-Romantics Through the Footer(Vanderbilt University, 2012-04-13) Snyder, Travis; Juengel, Scott; Wollaeger, MarkLabels can be highly problematic metaphysical entities when they suggest and lead to the creation of unity where little exists. When exactly did the Romantic Period start and stop? Some individual works are certainly seminal to a period, but who were its progenitors and at what point does a collection of eccentricities constitute a new era? It seems to me to be the case that the only answer to these origin issues is to accept that there is an inexhaustible multiplicity of histories, aesthetic regimes, and critical lenses. By highlighting the tensions within the “Romantic” label, I do not wish to declare it impotent, but rather take a sympathetic look at the nomenclature and think about the philosophical problems I will encounter as I offer a revision for how we think of pre-romanticism. I will argue that while sentiment did in fact play a crucial role in the development of Romanticism, it did so as an adversary and not just as an aid. Through the adoption of the term “post-Augustan” as the new era nomenclature, we will free ourselves as 18th century scholars from the critical mindset of “overlooking” that “pre-Romantic” construal provides us.Item Speaking with the Subaltern: An Exploration of the Voices of South Asian Women in Literature and Film(Vanderbilt University, 2012-04-17) Young, Laura; Tran, Ben; Wollaeger, MarkIf the subaltern could speak, what would she say? Would the women of India and South Asia talk about arranged marriages, sati (the sacrificial burning of widows), bride burnings, clitoridectomy, purdah, pativratadharma (husband worship), or female infanticide? Would they talk about the expectation of a woman’s community or the roles ascribed to them as mothers, caretakers, and the bearers of tradition? Would they talk about the denial of education, property rights, domestic violence, or denial of female sexuality? Or are these the topics on which a white Western feminist would have them speak and, if unsatisfied with what they have to say, speak for them? The key to my inquiry here is the fundamental problematic: can the subaltern represent herself and be heard in Western discourse? The subaltern is best characterized by the economically dispossessed individual whose identity is his/her difference from the elite group. For my thesis, I explore the works of three artists (literary and visual): Kamala Das, Meena Alexander, and Deepa Mehta. The women of my thesis, though born in India, hardly constitute what Spivak defines as the “true subaltern” (27). All of the women I study were born into privileged or middle-class families and all but one obtained higher levels of education.Item Burning Castles in Sherwood Forest: The Construction and Destruction of Political Ideology in Scott, Peacock, and Conan Doyle(Vanderbilt University, 2012-04-18) Herbon, Margaret; Teukolsky, Rachel; Wollaeger, MarkFor this study, I have chosen to concentrate on three historical novels from the nineteenth-century that are set in the medieval period: Ivanhoe, by Walter Scott; Maid Marian, a reworking of the Robin Hood legend by Thomas Love Peacock; and The White Company, by Arthur Conan Doyle, the story of a young Englishman who goes to seek military adventure in France with the famous (and fictitious) White Company during the Hundred Years War. As realistic novels, all three seek to transport the reader into a medieval world that is true to historical “life.” In an exploration of imagery in medievalist historical fictions, I will focus my analysis around two popular, imagistic settings which, together, encompass both angles of the political debates about this form of fiction: the forest and the castle. The following pages provide a general summary of the range and reach of British medievalism: how and why it originated, the many different forms it took, and, crucially, the different ideologies bound up in portrayals and “mobilizations” of the medieval past. I will also, however, question these established ways of thinking about medievalism, providing examples from the three main primary texts of this project.Item Campbell, Frye, and Girard: Myths, Heroes & Ritual Violence in Literature(Vanderbilt University, 2012-04-18) Jones, Jesse; Clayton, Jay; Wollaeger, MarkIn my thesis, I analyze the literary theories of Joseph Campbell, Northrop Frye, and Rene Girard for their ability to address political concerns in literature. In the movement from Campbell -- who treated politics with an active disregard -- to Girard -- who has given interviews directly linking his theory of literature with political events such as 9/11 -- I hope to reveal that a theory like Girard's successfully incorporating political concerns is not an invitation to subjectivity, but instead a crucial method of ensuring the theory's adaptability to the ever-changing world in which we live.Item Trauma in Lyric: A National Reading of 20th Century Postwar Lyric(Vanderbilt University, 2012-04-17) Muenchrath, Anna; Garcia, Humberto; Wollaeger, MarkGrounded in postwar German and British poetry, this thesis explores the dynamic tension between the historicity located in poetic language and the trans-temporality of the identification mechanism facilitated by the lyrical “I” in order to theorize lyric as a medium for communicating national trauma.Item The “Universal Cannibalism” of Things: A Historical, Psychoanalytic Treatment of Melville’s Bartleby, Benito Cereno, The Encantadas, and Billy Budd(Vanderbilt University, 2012-04-16) Webb, David Potter Townsend; Dayan, Colin; Wollaeger, MarkThis study will evaluate Herman Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener, Benito Cereno, The Encantadas, and Billy Budd as evidence of Melville’s embrace of an historical view of the U.S. and will further analyze these novellas using a methodological framework that attempts to synthesize a historical lens and psychoanalytic perspectives. While the historical and psychoanalytical approaches may sometimes appear to resist reconciliation, they will generally complement each other. It is only through analysis that takes into account both the psychoanalytic and the historical that we can comprehend how intensive is Melville’s sense of a social degeneration that affected both the internal subjective demands on citizenship and the external evidence of history.Item "I always wanted to be historical" : The Crack-Up of the Self from the Outside(Vanderbilt University, 2010-04-29) George, Sarah; Levy, Ellen; Schoenfield, MarkItem The Perils of Patriarchy(Vanderbilt University, 2010-04-29) O'Neal, Ellen; Schoenfield, Mark; Young, PaulTracking patriarchal control through three Hitchcock films: North By Northwest, Notorious, and Rear Window.Item No Game for Knights: The Arthurian Legend in Hardboiled Detective Fiction(Vanderbilt University, 2009-04-29) Preston, Andrew J.; Schoenfield, Mark L.; Bell, VereenItem Writing the Vampire: Constitutions of Gender in Carmilla, Dracula, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer(Vanderbilt University, 2009-04-22) Mai, Emily; Dever, Carolyn; Schoenfield, Mark L.Examination of the constitutions of gender and sexuality in three texts centered on vampires.Item Fictions of Escape and the Economy of Gender in Victorian Children's Literature(Vanderbilt University, 2009-04-28) Berube, RachelItem "All thinking things" and "Objects of all thought": Materiality and Thought in Wordsworth, Coleridge and Keats(Vanderbilt University, 2009-04-20) Williams, Martha; Porter, Dahlia