Showing 1 - 4 of 4 Items

Date: 2023-01-01

Creator: Jack McDermott Wellschlager

Access: Open access

My project concerns the pedagogical nature of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Across the various styles and forms of Ulysses’ chapters, or “episodes,” I theorize the pedagogy of James Joyce’s prose by tracking the ways that the text demands readers participate in a Freirean dialogue. I will also discuss how Ulysses understands language as a practice of resistance: the novel’s characters have personal linguistic practices that help them open up the worlds that occupy them. I will appreciate the control these characters take of their world as I argue, through Paulo Freire’s work, that no true change occurs without the presence of a cooperative worldbuilding effort.

Date: 2022-01-01

Creator: Miranda Viederman

Access: Open access

The aim of this Honors project is to investigate representations of female virginity in Renaissance English dramatic works. I view the period as one in which the womb became the site of a unique renewal of cultural anxieties surrounding the stability of the patriarchy and the inaccessibility of female sexual desire. I am most interested in virginity as a “bodily narrative” dependent on the construction and maintenance of performance. I analyze representations of virginity in female characters from four works of drama originating in the Jacobean period of the English Renaissance, during and after the end of the reign of Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen. Across four chapters, I examine the characters of Isabella from Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure (1604), Beatrice-Joanna from Thomas Middleton’s The Changeling (1622), the Jailer’s Daughter from Shakespeare and Fletcher’s The Two Noble Kinsmen (1634), and Helen from Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well (c. 1602-1605). To establish a framework for my readings, I situate each work in its contemporary cultural context, drawing upon Catholic and Protestant religious doctrines, period medical texts, and popular culture. I intend to explore the complex, often contradictory nature of the forms of virginity the plays depict. Still, I hope by uncovering the opportunities these four characters are provided by their virginity, that I can widen the confines of the category.

Date: 2022-01-01

Creator: Grace Monaghan

Access: Open access

This project examines Victorian England through the analysis of three Victorian gothic novels: Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903/1912), and Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897). The end of the nineteenth century and the final years of the Victorian era brought with them fears and uncertainties about England’s role in the world and its future, fears that the Victorian gothic sought to grapple with, but inevitably failed to contain. In examining this genre, I draw on “Undisciplining Victorian Studies” (Chatterjee et al, 2020), which calls for the field of Victorian studies to center racial theory. As such, I foreground race and whiteness in these novels, in conjunction with animality, empire, and sexuality, all of which were crucial tools in the imperial gothic’s project of constructing the monstrous Other. The British empire relied on the establishment of a physical and moral boundary between itself and the colonized Other, in order to justify its imperialism and maintain its own perceived superiority. Yet, ultimately, this project demonstrates that the boundaries between the self and the Other, between morality and monstrosity, and between mainland England and its empire, were dangerously porous.

Date: 2018-05-01

Creator: Sarah Claudia Bonanno

Access: Open access