Vanderbilt English Department Honors Theses

Permanent URI for this collection

https://ir.vanderbilt.edu/handle/1803/1628

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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Now showing 1 - 20 of 46

Beyond Postmodernism: David Foster Wallace and the Creation of New Sincerity
(Vanderbilt University, 2025-05) Pagan, Charles; Fay, Jennifer
The common interpretation of David Foster Wallace’s novel Infinite Jest sees the text as a work of postmodernism, falling in line with the literary tradition of postwar American authors who emphasized the use of irreverence, irony and cynicism in their novels. While Infinite Jest is indeed in conversation with the postmodern movement, I believe that this reading of the novel is incomplete because it fails to account for the rest of David Foster Wallace’s canon. When understanding Infinite Jest as one part in Wallace’s larger body of works, it becomes clear that the novel is not postmodern, and is instead a deconstruction of postmodern tropes that begins to establish the formal and thematic framework for a new movement called new sincerity. New sincerity is an ongoing movement that began to develop in the early 2000’s. Its aim is to answer the question of whether or not sincere art – art that demonstrates honesty from the creator to the consumer about intention and motivation – can exist in a commodified media landscape. In my project, I examine the use of metafictional characters and texts in Infinite Jest and David Foster Wallace’s unfinished novel, The Pale King, to illustrate the ways in which his novels mark the beginning of the new sincere movement instead of the end of the postmodern movement.
e-real
(Vanderbilt University, 2025-05) Stephan Bellamy
This thesis is a science fiction trilogy about relationship building and shattering between a human, robot, and supercomputer. The chief setting of the desert was an intentional choice to juxtapose the living with the lifeless, as well as provide a motif with the cosmos on a greater beauty. Similarly, the all-metal city (the destination) marks a precipice for machine ingenuity at the cost of everything else. I incorporated current anxieties around AI into the conception of the two non-human characters. Their existence and stories in this thesis are a response to hushed fears about AI's hold on things, it's lightning-quick expansion in knowledge and understanding and (well, not quite as fast) mimicry. I stamped a portal into a possible future where a supercomputer has a misleading, broken capacity to know “everything.” It’s in the city, waiting for greater and greater achievements in consciousness. My thesis hinges upon the very conversation it has with the story’s only human being, a woman who met its inferior counterpart, a robot, first.
Thinking with and Responding to Gone with the WInd as a Circulator of White Supremacy
(Vanderbilt University, 2023-04-25) Maresca, Lauren
This project aims to investigate the power of Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novel Gone with the Wind, its impact on readers, and their responses to the text and the ideologies Mitchell conveys in it, a particularly timely interrogation as the United States grapples with the consequences of white supremacist hate speech. An analysis of Mitchell’s narrative techniques, specifically we-voice and third-person omniscient narration, reveals the novel’s ability to circulate emotions and ideologies including white supremacy and anti-Blackness via Sara Ahmed’s theory of affective economies. The terminology of unresistant and resistant reader are used to differentiate between types of readers and draws on reader response theorist Kathleen McCormick’s writing on the negotiation between the reader and the text. The unresistant reader is one who either already has a nearer ideological proximity to Mitchell’s worldview or one who, unlike the resistant reader, has no knowledge or lived experience that would lead them to problematize it. Using a reader reception lens, contemporary book reviews and other media relating to GWTW are examined and collated for themes. After tracking GWTW’s transition from a book to a cultural idea through various mediums, Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone is presented as an appropriate response novel to address the harms GWTW enacts. This project illustrates that, despite the seemingly obviousness of its erroneousness, GWTW still benefits from, as well as requires, critical readers’ nuanced engagement with it as both an idea and as a text.
Unmasking History: Superhero Tropes and Historical Reimagination in the Watchmen Franchise
(Vanderbilt University, 2021-04-27) Bressler, Sarah
(Re)Encountering Africa: Repatriation and the African Imaginary in Black Travel Literature
(Vanderbilt University, 2021-05-12) Norford, Jasmin
Gendering the Techno-Orient: The Asian Woman in Speculative Fiction
(Vanderbilt University, 2021-04-27) Lu, Melanie
This thesis explores the complicated relations between the ontology of race and its gendered aesthetic representations within the phenomenon of techno-Orientalism, the prevailing tendency in textual and visual culture to imagine Asia and Asians in hyper-technologized and/or futurized terms. Although Saidian Orientalism has pointed out the constructed nature of the dichotomies between the modern, technological west and the ancient, mystical East, techno-Orientalism takes such discourse into the context of global information capitalism, producing nuanced yet troubling narratives of race and technology that reflect changing perceptions of modern personhood and identity. I focus specifically on the figure of the Asian woman in various works of speculative fiction, including the film Ex Machina and the Japanese animation Ghost in the Shell to interrogate the ways in which her embodied racial identity can be represented, reimagined, and renegotiated in both western and Asian narrative spaces. Ultimately, I critique the notion that postmodernist and/or utopian portrayals typical of SF legitimize the erasure of contemporary discourses of race and gender, since emphasis on either pure aesthetic signs or posthuman ontology loses sight of the fact that race is heavily intertwined with technology and can itself constitute a form of technology.
See No Evil: The (In)Carceral Imagination
(Vanderbilt University, 2020-04-30) Hayes, Solomon
A quick delineation of the United States reveals deep historical roots in racism, that which endures and manifests through the twenty-first century. Especially in the present, the era of mass incarceration exists as an evolution of slavery and extractive labor in its proliferation of black inmates. Through narrative (novel and memoir), this thesis observes the capacity of certain spaces in shaping the realities of minority groups, with specific attention to black boys and men. Through Richard Wright's Native Son (1940), Jesmyn Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017), and John Edgar Wideman's Brothers and Keepers (1984), this project explores the ways in which society imagines carcerailty and criminality in young black boys, an ongoing process of dehumanization.
Literary Alchemy and the Transformation of the Transformation
(Vanderbilt University, 2020-04-17) Fesmire, William
Alchemy is a pseudoscience that has persisted throughout millennia as a result of its own ability to change while retaining its primary purpose: transformation. What began as a means of wielding and evolving metals developed into both a scientific and spiritual quest. Eventually, alchemy was no longer considered a viable science; however, it became a philosophical and psychological framework for analyzing internal transformation. This transformation of alchemy can be seen in literature throughout time. Authors have incorporated elements of the alchemical process into their own works, creating a "literary alchemy" with the same purpose of transformation. After an introduction to alchemy and literary alchemy, this thesis will present four permutations of literary alchemy in Western Literature—William Shakespeare's The Tempest, Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter—in three separate time periods to demonstrate how literary alchemy both reflects the attitudes towards alchemy in the respective time period and remains consistent in its message of transformation.
Orientalism at Home: The Mirror Through Latinx and Jewish American Literature
(Vanderbilt University, 2020-04-29) Hu, Samantha
Aristotle Meets Apple: Rhetoric in the Podcast
(Vanderbilt University, 2018-04-24) Butrico, Anna; Clayton, John
Podcasts such as Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History and Manoush Zomorodi’s Note to Self, engage with, and extend, the deliberative rhetorical form. Aristotle defined deliberative rhetoric as a persuasive genre that identified problems (typically within the Greek polis) to then recommended policies for change. While the content of these podcasts adhere to this classical deliberative form – detecting issues and proposing solutions within their episodes – the podcast’s form allows for a modern update and extension of this process. Through sound edits, colloquial narration, and music, the podcast encourages new and extended listener participation, where audience members are prompted to solve presented problems themselves. My analysis of Revisionist History and Note to Self will begin with the classical courtroom setting of deliberative rhetoric and then extend into more nonconformist spaces like the Internet, illustrating the new shapes and settings deliberative rhetoric takes on in the podcast, as well as the reach this medium extends to listeners to solve problems on their own.
Social Horror and Social Media: The Threat of Emergent Technology in "Unfriended" and "Sickhouse"
(Vanderbilt University, 2017-04-24) Hamrick, Jessica; Goddu, Teresa; Fay, Jennifer; Hock, Jessie
Portrait of a Grandmother
(Vanderbilt University, 2017-04-24) Wise, Laura; Goddu, Teresa; Schoenfield, Mark; Park, Sohee
Absent Characters: Stage Space and Social Change in Modern Drama
(Vanderbilt University, 2017-04-24) Carlson, Stephanie; Goddu, Teresa; Orr, Bridget; Essin, Christin
"Compton's Human Sacrifice": Kendrick Lamar and the Identity of Exile
(Vanderbilt University, 2017-04-24) Thompson, Matthew; Goddu, Teresa; Schwarz, Kathryn; Tran, Ben
We'll Always Have Allusions: The Cultural Function of Allusions
(Vanderbilt University, 2017-04-24) Sanchez, Veronica; Goddu, Teresa; Clayton, Jay; Marcus, Leah
Twitter Fiction: A Shift in Author Function
(Vanderbilt University, 2016-04-25) Hyman, Hilary Anne; Kutzinski, Vera
Twitter fiction, an example of twenty-first century digital narrative, allows authors to experiment with literary form, production, and dissemination as they engage readers through a communal network. Twitter offers creative space for both professionals and amateurs to publish fiction digitally, enabling greater collaboration among authors and readers. Examining Jennifer Egan's "Black Box" and selected Twitter stories from Junot Diaz, Teju Cole, and Elliott Holt, this thesis establishes two distinct types of Twitter fiction - one produced for the medium and one produced through it - to consider how Twitter's present feed and character limit fosters a uniquely interactive reading experience. As the conversational medium calls for present engagement with the text and with the author, Twitter promotes newly elastic relationships between author and reader that renegotiate the former boundaries between professionals and amateurs. This thesis thus considers how works of Twitter fiction transform the traditional author function and pose new questions regarding digital narrative's modes of existence, circulation, and appropriation. As digital narrative makes its way onto democratic forums, a shifted author function leaves us wondering what it means to be an author in the digital age.
Writing the Temple
(Vanderbilt University, 2015-04-15) Post, Kollen; Garcia, Humberto
This thesis approaches Infinite Jest's revision of Postmodernism and various features of millennial America, including drugs and rehabilitation, as a scriptural undertaking, best understood through the lens of the Qur'an. The proposition suggests the novel as the literary creation of a community based on shared rituals and referents, both within the AA of the text and the experience of readers without.
Locating the Russian Hero: Genre, Gender, and National Identity in Mikhail Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time
(Vanderbilt University, 2015-10-26) Rose, Kristin; Garcia, Humberto; Wollaeger, Mark
A Study in Empathy: Cognitive Disorders Exposed in First Person Narrators
(Vanderbilt University, 2015-04-15) Viroslav, Hannah
Indo-Persian Performative Identities and the Harlequin: Agency and Subversion in The Wonders of Vilayet and The Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb Khan
(Vanderbilt University, 2015-04-15) Friesth, Stevie

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