Vanderbilt English Department Honors Theses

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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

Absent Characters: Stage Space and Social Change in Modern Drama
(Vanderbilt University, 2017-04-24) Carlson, Stephanie; Goddu, Teresa; Orr, Bridget; Essin, Christin
"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
The Anorexic Aesthetic: An Analysis of the Poetics of Glück, Dickinson, and Bidart
(Vanderbilt University, 2014-04-11) Rigl, Alexandra Haley; Hilles, Rick; Wollaeger, Mark
My argument acknowledges the complex liminal space within which the artist creates—one in which art may constitute an act of self-assertion or a deliberate pattern of self-sabotage, among other non-symptomologic, aesthetic purposes. Anorexia is a disease of contradiction. Through attentive discipline and deprivation, it provides a kind of indulgence through perceived power. This conjuring of self-control leaves the anorexic feeling overcome by impotence. Anorexia is a disease of the mind that attempts to divide the body from the self, to acquire an identity through the act of renunciation. The anorexic ironically thrives and creates through the very act of self-annihilation. Paradoxically, the compulsion undergirding anorexia is to become visible by disappearing—contradictorily emaciating one’s self in an effort to recreate the body into a form so confronting that it cannot be ignored. I suggest that the integrated fields of literature and medicine provide the theoretical and analytical means to posit a kind of anorexic aesthetic: neurosis (metaphorically and stylistically) embodied in writing and, more specifically, anorexia nervosa embodied in poetry. While I choose to explore the rendering of anorexia in poetry, I by no means celebrate eating disorder as a gateway to creative genius or suggest that the anorexic style necessitates a disordered poet at its core. Quite to the contrary, I analyze this stylistic trend in the work of three “anorexic poets,” a term which I operationally use in a stylistic rather than a diagnosing sense. The experiential histories of the poets I choose to analyze vary: first, Louise Glück, officially diagnosed with anorexia nervosa; second, Emily Dickinson, a known ascetic whose apparent anxieties parallel those associated with anorexia nervosa; and, lastly, Frank Bidart, occupying the narrative persona of a woman officially diagnosed with anorexia nervosa. Each of these poets’ works embodies in its own way the vast contradictions built into the contrarian impulses of anorexia and the complex processes by which the margins of often harshly self-disciplined expression are continually redefined. I analyze the poetic aesthetics of these representative authors’ works, allowing each chosen reading to interact with the symptomology, therapy, and neutralization of disorder. In doing so, I deconstruct instances of both “anorexic” poiesis and mimesis throughout the respective collections.
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.
Becoming Jane: Subject and Narrative Formation through the Language of Suicide and Marriage in Charlotte Brontë’s *Jane Eyre*
(Vanderbilt University, 2014-04-11) DeAngelo, Elizabeth; Dever, Carolyn; Wollaeger, Mark
Scholars have understood Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, a quintessential female Bildungsroman or coming-of-age novel, as ultimately a conservative work, since the marriage at the end of the novel appears to subsume and domesticate the rebellious, feminist actions of the eponymous protagonist. As both a Bildungsroman and a fictional autobiography, the novel, published in 1847, tracks the psychological development and maturation of Jane that allows her to become a productive citizen and the author of her own story. From the beginning of the novel, Jane is aware that she must actively cultivate herself as a subject to establish her place in society. This awareness complicates the conservative understandings of the novel, because it compels Jane to develop her narrative abilities so that she can determine her own fate and suggests that Victorian women can do the same. Both as the narrator and the protagonist, Jane uses language to differentiate herself from the “other” and to redefine what constitutes success and failure in her life. More specifically, she uses the language of suicide and marriage to describe failed and successful processes of development for herself and other characters throughout the novel, demonstrating her awareness of these developmental processes. Jane’s self-conscious development as both a subject and a narrator parallels Brontë’s blending of the Bildungsroman and autobiography. By tracking Jane’s development as both a subject and a narrator and demonstrating Jane’s awareness of this process through the narration of her own story, Brontë provides a model for Victorian women to assert themselves by becoming the authors of their own lives.
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.
Binary Domination and Bondage: Blake's Representations of Race, Nationalism, and Gender
(Vanderbilt University, 2013-04-17) Calvin, Katherine; Wollaeger, Mark; Garcia, Humberto
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, Mark
For 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.
Campbell, Frye, and Girard: Myths, Heroes & Ritual Violence in Literature
(Vanderbilt University, 2012-04-18) Jones, Jesse; Clayton, Jay; Wollaeger, Mark
In 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.
"Compton's Human Sacrifice": Kendrick Lamar and the Identity of Exile
(Vanderbilt University, 2017-04-24) Thompson, Matthew; Goddu, Teresa; Schwarz, Kathryn; Tran, Ben
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.
Fictions of Escape and the Economy of Gender in Victorian Children's Literature
(Vanderbilt University, 2009-04-28) Berube, Rachel
"The French Book Saith": Malory’s Adaptation of His Sources
(Vanderbilt University, 2012-04-17) Stanley, Jennifer; Wollaeger, Mark; Plummer, John
The Fury and the Mire: Readers, Reading, and Our Digital World
(Vanderbilt University, 2013-04-17) Combs, Chris; Wollaeger, Mark; Clayton, Jay
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.
"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, Mark
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
Jorie Graham’s Overlord: Poetics, Ethics, and Différance
(Vanderbilt University, 2014-04-15) Stevens, Jeremy; Clayton, Jay; Wollaeger, Mark
*Overlord* by Jorie Graham requires a theoretical paradigm which can account for the Overlord within it; this paradigm, I will argue, is Jacques Derrida’s différance. Just as différance produces an endless chain of violent repetition, so too does the Overlord. The latter is merely an addressable version of différance, one which Graham can refer to by name—though that fact does little in the way of containing its violence. I will also explore the power of différance to interpret the entire volume, revealing ways in which Graham’s theoretical commitments shape her ethical and stylistic choices into a unified whole. This does not mean that I will deconstruct Overlord—in fact, my primary deconstructive move will be targeted at deconstructive ethics. From the outset, it is important to keep in mind that although différance is central to an understanding of Graham’s poetic, it cannot explain the force of her ethical commitments. The burden of making that claim believable, of course, is mine. Much of this work will be concerned with the possibility of ethics after différance, a possibility that will ultimately open true resistance to the Overlord. Although it is not my intention to produce an apology for Overlord as good poetry, any careful reading must begin by expecting to find something of worth in the text under consideration. Yet this defense, though true, will not satisfy pessimistic readers—and rightly so. I have already indicated where my allegiance lies by my selection of Overlord as a candidate for analysis. To borrow a phrase from J. Hillis Miller, “The choice of examples…and their ordering, is never innocent” (The Ethics of Reading 10). The authors in my introduction appear in the order that they do—Graham, Derrida, Hillis Miller—precisely because that is the order in which I will discuss them. From a close reading of Graham, I will pass into a close reading of Derrida and Graham together. Finally, I will place the ethical commitments of Hillis Miller in concert with those readings.
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.
Literary Treatments of Blindness from Sophocles to Saramago
(Vanderbilt University, 2014-04-11) Camp, David; Gottfried, Roy; Wollaeger, Mark
Blindness plays a prominent role in literature and is frequently turned into a metaphor associated with wisdom or divinity. There are certainly other ways to interpret blindness, but literature consistently links blindness and insight in one way or another. In this project I hope to trace blindness through several important works of literature spanning various time periods and genres, observing how the literary understanding of blindness has developed. Early works establish the connection between blindness and wisdom primarily through the blind prophet figure. The short stories of the twentieth century never completely abandon the metaphor of blindness as wisdom, but the symbolism becomes more sophisticated, and the depictions of blindness become more realistic. Each of the short stories expands the theme of blindness by complicating the blind prophet figure and posing questions that anticipate the work of the of disability studies. Finally, José Saramago’s novel Blindness deconstructs the glorification of blindness and explores the blind identity and its interaction with competing identities.

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