Student Abstracts 2016-2017

Holes and Dreams in the Pursuit of Diversity Within Diversity: Louis Sachar’s Holes and Jacqueline Woodson’s Brown Girl Dreaming

In today’s children’s book publishing marketplace, there is an acknowledged lack of diversity in a wide range of areas, including ethnicity, culture, sexual orientation, disability, and religion. Recent movements such as the We Need Diverse Books campaign (founded in April 2014) have inspired industry folks to take more definitive actions toward diversifying publishers’ book lists. However, as I argue in my preface, merely calling for diverse books is not sufficient. Publishers should be seeking books that offer diversity within diversity, or diversity within stories about marginalized characters, ensuring that portrayals of these characters are authentic rather than stereotypical or tokenistic.

To explore the insufficiency of “diverse” as the ideal for today’s children’s literature, I turn to two middle grade books written prior to the founding of We Need Diverse Books: Holes by Louis Sachar (1998) and Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson (2014). Both works accommodate yet exceed calls for “diverse” representation, offering subtle and complex meditations on race and history in 20th century America by imagining and exploring coming-to-racial-consciousness through their respective child protagonists.

Because of their starkly different genres and settings, the books explore separate aspects of race and history in the United States and thus offer different yet complementary reflections. Holes, a magical realism novel set in a fictional stretch of Texas desert, features a juvenile correctional institution, which we can read as an allegory for a modern form of slave labor. The book’s protagonist Stanley and his best friend Zero must reject the institution in order to restore justice to a space that has been governed by a cycle of varying forms of racism, speaking both to the cyclical nature of racism in the US and the necessity of resisting it. On the other hand, Brown Girl Dreaming, a memoir about growing up during the Civil Rights era in the South, frames Woodson’s coming-ofage journey in terms of both her nascent identity as a storyteller and her early experiences with segregation, racism, and inequality, demonstrating that despite facing oppression, Woodson has not only retained agency over her own story but also turned it into literary art.

Ultimately, I conclude that reading these two texts together highlights the fact that while racism in the US cannot be erased or ignored, neither does it have the final word on the experiences of marginalized people.

The Medieval Legalities of Raptus: An Exploration of Female Consent and Sexual Violence in The Canterbury Tales, and The Book of Margery Kempe

In medieval England, the term raptus could be used to refer to sexual violence, abduction, or women voluntarily leaving their husbands or guardians. Historicizing English rape code illuminates literary representations of sexual violence in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales and Kempe’s The Book of Margery Kempe.

In the body of my project, I will refer a secondary source to analyze o a correspondence between a father appealing the “abduction” of his daughter in court and the dignitary he reaches out to, Sir Thomas West and John of Gaunt, respectively. These letters immortalize the confusions and ambiguities of the law regarding raptus. This case study will productively add to my conversation of raptus and female consent by providing a legal framework to analyze the literature from.

Going further, in I will explore this topic of gender politics and unions in Chaucer’s “The Reeve’s Tale,” “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” and her “Prologue" (1478). “The Reeve’s Tale” engages with female consent as a currency and the female body as a transactionary object. To delve further into my exploration of female consent as portrayed in The Canterbury Tales, I turn to the Wife of Bath's “Prologue” and “Tale.” The Wife of Bath’s tale and prologue echo the structural violence that is embedded in English rape code, thereby transforming male desire into raptus.

Finally, I will conclude with "The Book of Margery Kempe" (1501), which tells of the life of medieval mystic, entrepreneur, mother, wife, and traveler, and offers a perspective on consent that is more nuanced than haunted by a fear of raptus.

"I Will Not Be the Girl": Gender and Dual Narrative Power Structures Across Medium in Gone Girl and The Last Five Years

What happens when a text has two narrators, each bringing their own, sometimes conflicting perspectives and biases to the narrative? What is the impact of chronological sequence on a narrative in which each narrator is situated in a different point in time? What are the differences in narrative form between a novel, a film adapted from it, and a musical performance rooted in equally conflicting perspectives? My thesis explores such inter-narratorial conflict through two dual-narrative works, Gillian Flynn’s novel Gone Girl (2012) and Jason Robert Brown’s musical The Last Five Years (2001), as well as their respective film adaptations. Drawing on Mieke Bal’s theory of narratology, and Susan Lanser’s work in feminist narratology, I explore how these works each employ two narrators to tell their stories: two heterosexual couples, each coloring the story with their particular biases and techniques of narrative. Inevitably, the clashes in bias lead to a struggle for narrative control as both narrators struggle to twist the narrative to favor their perspective. Given the heterosexual nature of both couples, this power struggle becomes gendered. Turning to Helene Cixous’ characterization of narrative power through an active/passive gendered binary to contextualize and analyze that power, my thesis considers how breaking the binary Cixous discusses (in both cases through male infidelity) violates the power structure, allowing the female narrators to analyze and resist the gender roles of female victimization and male power. Moving from the narrators to their readers and listeners, the thesis considers the role of the audience in not only watching, but moderating and judging this power struggle. These works, though they have similar power struggles when considered through the lens of gender, play out to vastly different audiences, allowing for comparison of the audience’s impact on narrative power. Gone Girl has equally important intra- and extradiegetic audiences, as the role of the internal audience comments directly on the experience of the external reader. The Last Five Years has no intradiegetic audience, relying on the live, external audience, engaged in watching a musical performance. The thesis considers the role of medium in shaping audience impact, both through the difference in medium between Gone Girl, and The Last Five Years, through their respective adaptations on page, screen and stage. Through these narratological techniques and reader and audience response elements, the thesis aims to uncover the role that gender plays in the distribution and development of narrative power, as perceived by both the narrators and the audience. 

Ishmael's Narrative Perspectivism in Moby Dick

In Moby-Dick, Ishmael the first-person narrator routinely fades out, giving way to a thirdperson omniscient voice. Such transitions often occur in chapters that are dramatically styled, and ones that feature detailed expository writing. Through examining Ishmael’s intermittent appearance as narrator, I expand on what many scholars have identified as the dual-Ishmael model to explore the plurality of Ishmael’s component selves. Truly, Ishmael cannot be pinned down as “one,” because he contains “many.” Drawing on Ishmael’s narrative perspectivism, I investigate the bounds of his creative liberty in transforming his reading of events into the writing of this text, noting how “facts” are defined, and how “meaning” is derived in Ishmael’s highly personal and often sympathetic method of interpretation. My remarks center on the act of reading, specifically Ishmael’s reading of his surroundings, his borrowing from imagination when reading becomes insufficient, as well as a reader’s reading of Moby-Dick, touching on the topic of readerly empathy. In particular, I examine how legibility and illegibility of meaning affect the process of reading; more precisely, I explore “the thought of whiteness” through a juxtaposition of non-meaning and an overabundance of meaning in chapter “The Whiteness of the Whale.” Ultimately, how does one read an indeterminacy of meaning? How does one keep on living, in a world at once deprived of meaning, and bursting with meaning? Would you, the reader, skirt around the abyss and embrace not knowing, or dive in for the truth and die trying? The answer to these questions provides tremendous insight into Ishmael and Ahab as characters, and it summarizes their contrasting views on selfhood and meaning

The Refusal and Response: Understanding Shamelism Today 

Samuel Richardson’s novel Pamela (1740-1741) remains one of the most significant in the realm of literary history. It tells the story of an innocent maid guarding her virtue in such a charming way that she eventually marries her master, the same one who had been in pursuit of her “honesty” to the point of attempted rape. Given the hundreds of scholarly articles that have been written, it is not an undervalued text. However, the phenomenon that it sparked, Shamelism, in which those critical of Richardson’s female narrator actively spoke out against her in satirical or other forms of backlash, has not been brought into a contemporary context. This thesis attempts to better understand the phenomenon, tracking its definition at its inception before bringing it into today’s context. While the beginning definition of Shamelism seems to be a satirical response to an unbelievable female narrator, I will explore how in fact it is a violent response to a female narrator as she depicts both herself and her sexual encounters. My introduction will briefly parse the phenomenon and the end-goal of the thesis; in addition, it will provide contextual information surrounding a hermeneutic of suspicion key to the philosophical core of Shamelism. Finally, it will introduce my key texts: Richardson’s Pamela (1740-1741) & Clarissa (1747), Henry Fielding’s Shamela (1741), and Eliza Haywood’s Anti-Pamela (1741). Following this introduction I explore the specific textual elements and metaaspects that comprised Shamelism at its inception and continue to contribute to our current understanding of the phenomenon. I begin more broadly with an overview of Richardson’s use of epistolarity and how unreliability becomes embedded in that narrative form. I then narrow the scope, and briefly focus on the formal depiction of temporality, specifically how a temporal rift within Pamela causes backlash. Shamelists take issue with the rift not for its ontological impossibility but because the narrator must therefore be faking the mental states she writes about. The third section discusses the complicated epistemology of desire that arises within the Shamelist phenomenon, briefly, that a female can never know her desire. Whether she claims to or against desire, she is never correct because she can never be conscious of those feelings. It is in this section that I bring in Clarissa and how her rape contributed to Shamelist responses. Finally, the fourth and last major component is the active reader that is necessarily a part of the phenomenon. Though Shamelists begin with the intent of reparative, activist readings — bringing truth to the public via their responses — this proves impossible and transforms into violent responses. Finally, my conclusion brings Shamelism into the current literary sphere. I discuss Lena Dunham’s book of essays, Not That Kind of Girl (2014) and the extreme criticism she received surrounding her essay on her rape. Shamelism, though not explicitly called as such, still exists and rears its ugly head with Dunham as the target. In its current context, Shamelism has evolved — but the definition this thesis works to understand still remains. 

Syntax and Slant Communication: The Grammar of Austen's Characters

Jane Austen is known for her unique prose style and much criticism centers around analyzing how it works. In this vein, my thesis will carefully examine different syntactic elements through the use of Noam Chomsky’s X-Bar Theory. This theory, a cornerstone of how linguists understand grammar, allows me to isolate different grammatical relationships between specific words, phrases, and clauses and the sentence as a whole. In my analysis, I have come across three specific traits that enable Austen to create precise dynamics between speakers. First, embedding allows pertinent pieces of information to be hidden in plain sight, diverting the attention of the speaker. Next is subordination which displaces the significance of a sentence, allowing the speaker to mislead the listener as to the true meaning of the sentence. Finally, her choice of verbal argument creates either ambiguity or incredible precision, leading the listener to either understand or misunderstand the speaker’s meaning. To tease out the specifics of how these traits function, I am using x-bar theory to create syntactic trees of sentences from exchanges of varying nature. Specifically, I consider scenes of interaction between female peers, potential lovers, and family members in Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice.

The Does She Really Love Dick? Authorial Self-Insertion as a Performative Feminist Strategy in How Should a Person Be? and I Love Dick

The use of authorial self-insertion, a literary technique in which the author materializes as a character within the text’s fictional world, has been dominated and defined by big-name male writers: Philip Roth, Paul Auster, Ben Lerner, Karl Ove Knausgaard, to name a few. As demonstrated by this admittedly cursory list, works featuring authorial self-insertion have, at least in an American context, traditionally been written by men. In this study, I turn to investigate two contemporary works by female authors who utilize the practice: Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be? (2010) and Chris Kraus’ I Love Dick (1997). Placing these texts in conversation with some of the aforementioned examples by male writers, I argue that an author’s expression of gender dictates the narrative effects produced by authorial self-insertion, and that Heti and Kraus employ the practice to a particular feminist end. In Part I, I use Ralph Cohen’s critical framework to investigate how the practice of authorial selfinsertion confuses standard expectations of genre and complicates the task of classifying the texts. Unpacking concepts from authorship studies by Michel Foucault and Susan S. Lanser, I observe that the blurred line between the historical author and the fictional narrator allows Heti and Kraus to construct layered authorial personas that all appear under the same proper name. By confusing the reader’s sense of both genre and authorship, authorial self-insertion ultimately obscures a clear vision of authorial intent. The unsettling technique opens Heti and Kraus’ narratives to interpretation and allows the reader to project conclusions about the authors’ motivations and their alignment with their fictional personas. Beginning with Hélène Cixous’ classic feminist discourse, Part II analyzes how the problematic fictional personas Heti and Kraus construct subject them to criticism that is pointedly hostile towards women writing themselves as subversive or perverse. I draw on Leslie Jamison’s essay “Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain,” which poetically illuminates how readers tend to condemn, rather than celebrate, women who write about female suffering and calls for an examination of the gender bias that affects reception of Heti and Kraus’ works. Analyzing particular scenes of shame in both texts, I demonstrate how shame operates as a performative tool of empowerment for the female protagonists rather than a crippling or overwhelming affective response to their oppressive male romantic partners. Despite some unfavorable and perplexed critical responses generated by the protagonists’ expressions of sexuality and shame, How Should a Person Be? and I Love Dick successfully execute a feminist agenda. In the process of exposing themselves, their fictional personas actually expose the oppressive figures who seem to control them. Heti and Kraus, therefore, are not simply women employing a narrative technique historically used by men; their texts exemplify a performative practice of authorial self-insertion that provocatively uses shame and radical self-exposure to represent liberated female subjectivities. 

The A Tale of Two Fitzgeralds: Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald's Save Me the Waltz and F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night

F. Scott Fitzgerald is one of the most celebrated writers in the American literary canon: numerous books analyze his novels, scholarly articles dissect particular works, critics continue to discuss his works, and recent movies remakes of his books, such as 2013’s The Great Gatsby, feature modern-day popular rap artists like Jay-Z on the soundtrack. And where there is discussion of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s semi-autobiographical work, there is always discussion of his life. This discussion often turns to his muse, the inspiration for most of the female protagonists in his novels: his wife, the original flapper-girl, Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald. However, while there is much scholarship on Fitzgerald’s work, and the Fitzgeralds’ life together, there is little scholarly discussion or common knowlegde of Zelda’s first and only novel, Save Me The Waltz (1932). In this thesis, I will discuss Zelda’s little-known debut alongside her husband’s last novel, Tender Is The Night (1934). His last work focuses on much of the same subject material as Save Me The Waltz, since both authors were writing semi-autobiographically about their relationship and life experiences. Through a careful side-by-side analysis of the similarities as well as the differences of the two texts, I will show how the novels provide different perspectives on the end of a relationship, and let these dual perspectives exist in equal value alongside one another, allowing both voices to be heard amongst the myths. By putting Zelda’s novel alongside her husband’s, I honor her work as a writer as well as demonstrate both authors use of storytelling to immortalize oneself. I will also show how the both of the Fitzgeralds create characters as a way to recreate a youth years out of reach. My comparison allows Zelda and Scott speak to one another, one last time.

Lovely in Eyes (Not) His: Re-reading as a Form of Seeing in Gerard Manley Hopkins' Poetry

Gerard Manley Hopkins was both a poet and priest, and precisely this duality and the conflict it generated makes his poetry so intriguing and insightful to read. His was not merely an inner conflict between humanity and desired divinity, but a question of perception as it manifested onto the physical and visible world. Focused on God and the reincarnation of Christ in man and the world, yet simultaneously and inevitably weighed down by his intrinsic and flawed human perception, Hopkins’ unconventional poetry straddles a liminal void, both transcending boundaries of physical time and space, yet needing precisely these boundaries to fully come into its own. I claim that this is achieved through a forced rereading, which allows for a contemplation of the work reaching beyond time and space, where the physical object of the poem, acts as lens, as well as boundary to the visible unseen. Firstly, I analyze the means of temporal transcendence Hopkins achieved in “As Kingfishers Catch Fire” by drawing most importantly on Mikhail Bakhtin’s work on the chronotope, as well as Hopkins’ own scholarly work on inscape and instress. This analysis demonstrates how Hopkins’ uncommon syntax and neologisms allow for grammatical tenses to be undermined in favor of timelessness. Secondly, in my analysis of “Pied Beauty” I define the close relationship Hopkins’ poetry shares with prayer, as well as mark the deciding difference between the two, by drawing on research analyzing modernism in relation to prayer, most importantly Jay Parini’s and Jahan Ramazani’s work. This demonstration further illustrates the torn nature within Hopkins’ and his work as it reflects a split within the person of the reader. The poetry becomes not only a lens, but van Tol 3 also a mirror, thereby illustrating the many ways the physical object of a poem lends itself to seeing, as well as highlighting its marginal threshold position. Lastly, I discuss the importance of this liminal space in “Hurrahing in Harvest” and further define it through an attempt at classifying Hopkins’ work under the Impressionists, by drawing on Walter Pater’s work due to his connection to Hopkins as mentor. The impossibility of doing so illuminates the importance of the movement upward for Hopkins’ work, as well as the over-arching belief of unity within the one as opposed to individuality. Seeing beyond is only possible through the act of repetition and acknowledgement of a boundary blocking this vision and thus, perception become an act of the mind, as opposed to a physical response. I conclude that the boundaries, such as time and space, Hopkins’ poetry straddles and yet, can never overcome are precisely what allow for his poetry to transcend. His work is given shape and form by these boundaries even as they strive beyond it. By attempting to reach divinity, Hopkins taps into something truly human, which is able to touch his readers decades later. This paradox is what defines Hopkins’ seemingly strange poetry and explains the mix of modernist structure and conservative content, which I call religious Impressionism.

The Figures of Ophelia in Japanese Narratives: Re-signification Through Immateriality

Ever since the beginning of the Meiji era, Japan has had a long history with Shakespeare. During this era, imperial rule was restored through a consolidation of political powers under the Emperor of Japan thus ending the era of the Tokugawa Shogunate, a feudalistic ruling state that was known for enforcing a 200-year isolationist foreign policy on the country. As a result, an influx of Western influence entered Japan in the guise of language, weaponry, industrialization, and most importantly literature. Shakespeare, already a national figure of British literature, was quickly assimilated into Japanese culture and was considered a prime source for academic study among Japanese scholars and educators. This thesis seeks to provide a narrowed focus on the figure of Ophelia and provide a more concrete context by which readers may view Shakespeare’s Ophelia through the addressal of the following questions: How do the new works in question re-frame Shakespeare’s Ophelia? In what ways does Ophelia manage to regain significance and become a dynamic, nuanced character? What does this re-framing reveal about the nature of the Ophelian figure as it is repeatedly reused and reformed in various media/narratives? I will make use of three different narrative modes in three drastically different genres to pursue these questions. The works will be Ophelia’s Testament, a short story by Kobayashi Hideo; The Bad Sleep Well, a film by Kurosawa Akira; and Blast of Tempest, a manga series written by Shirodaira Kyou and illustrated by Sano Arihide and Saizaki Ren. I will begin by discussing Ophelia’s Testament, discussing the ways in which Kobayashi’s Ophelia is initially presented in the original framework of a jilted lover in waiting, only for that stereotype to be subverted through a humanized presentation of her depression/anxiety, her role as an unreliable narrator, and her claim to the act of suicide (taking responsibility for the act). In the second chapter I will turn to the works The Bad Sleep Well and Blast of Tempest. With The Bad Sleep Well, I will focus on the focus on Yoshiko’s crippling physical disability in place of a dissolution into insanity. I will work through how the representation of physical crippling being equated to mental insanity may be problematic. In addition I will discuss as to how the lack of screen time/exposition of Yoshiko allows her to be the film’s enabler behind the scenes of the movie. Then turning to Blast of Tempest, I will discuss the immediate fridging/killing off of Aika—and how despite that her ghostly presence continues to pervade the entirety of the manga. What these two works have in common is the fact that both female characters are used as primary catalysts/excuses for the actions of the men around them. I will question if they truly have power/agency over their disability/death or whether they merely become tools to be used in the grand scheme of the men’s character developments.

The Joyce, Shakesepare, and Benjamin: Portrait of the Artist as Flaneur

As its title implies, James Joyce’s Ulysses abounds with literary allusions. This thesis examines the young protagonist Stephen Dedalus’s struggle to determine his own literary identity in light of his Shakespeare theory and its “proof by algebra” in the National Library scene of “Scylla and Charybdis,” utilizing specifically the concept of the flâneur from Walter Benjamin’s essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” as a means to analyze the centrality of the shock experience to the production of art. I will contend that the development of Stephen’s theory points to authorship as a means of crafting one’s identity, while also serving a second purpose in its critique of Shakespeare’s example by exemplifying the Bard’s lack of control over the interpretation of his life’s work, and consequently his life. For this reason a focus on Stephen’s shifting identity throughout the first three chapters of the book and in particular his meditations on Hamlet and vision in “Proteus” must be applied in order to trace the formation of his theory throughout the day. In depicting the physical Shakespeare hustling to perform Hamlet at the Globe, the exposition of Stephen’s theory in “Scylla and Charybdis” serves a purpose similar to The Murder of Gonzago as a play-within-a-play by staging the Bard within his historical setting of Elizabethan London. This moment presents the further maturation of Stephen’s theory of artistic creation by his emphasis on the author’s grounding in material circumstance, which relates back to Stephen’s meditations on the dead dog he encounters along Sandymount Strand. The corpse of dogsbody figures significantly in the formulation of Stephen’s identity and his Hamlet theory, as this scene itself parallels the gravediggers in act 5, scene 1 of Shakespeare’s play. Furthermore, this epiphany motivates Stephen in the formation of both his identity and the Shakespeare theory, as he resolves to counteract history through the power of artistic creation, figuring himself as the new Irish national poet. In this way, Stephen attempts to redefine authorship and determine its value according to his own perspective by investigating the mechanism of Shakespeare’s transfiguration from cuckold, as he contends, into the formless father of English literature which status he retains today. The individuality which Stephen so craves proves to be his downfall, however, as no others confirm his greatness for him. Instead, by the time of Leopold Bloom’s own walk on the beach in “Nausicaa,” Stephen no longer presents an image of the artist, the claim to his previous identity lost to the sands of Sandymount Strand and the nightmare of history.