Learn more about current English Department Honors Theses!
Description: With its roots in the Gothic tradition, horror literature tends to conflate and purposefully confuse fear and desire, combining uncertainty and anxiety with excess and ornament. While such a breakdown of categorical boundaries might elicit fear in a Western modern society predicated on efficiency and discrete categories, it is appealing to queer audiences interested in the ways boundaries can “leak” or overlap. Drawing from scholarship in Gothic/horror studies and queer theory (including monstrosity and abjection), this thesis examines the relationship between horror media and queer and transgender audiences, arguing that horror can offer representation, catharsis, and weapons against societal marginalization. I examine four pivotal novels in horror literature which were published between 1950-1990, a period representing major sociopolitical shifts in British and American societies which had direct implications on normative understandings of gender and sexuality. This project engages with both close reading analysis and social context for each text: The Haunting of Hill House (1959), Rosemary’s Baby (1967), The Exorcist (1971), and The Hellbound Heart (1986). Through my analysis of each literary text, I will explore two major themes related to queer experiences: the horror of family and the body. These themes guide my reading of each novel, and thereby lead to uncovering the inherent queerness of horror.
Committee: Professors Andrew Uzendoski (English, advisor), Walter Wadiak (English), and J Selke (Religious Studies)
Description: This thesis will discuss the works Come And Join the Dance, Minor Characters, and Memoirs of a Beatnik by Joyce Johnson and Diane di Prima respectively, discussing how Johnson and di Prima formulate feminist critiques of their treatment by male Beats as well as their erasure from the movement in response to the texts On the Road, Howl, and Naked Lunch by Kerouac, Ginsburg, and Burroughs. These works demonstrate how the three male authors wrote about women in an overly sexualized manner, ignored them entirely, and portrayed them as caricatures. This fosters the misconception that the Beat Generation was made up solely of these three white male authors when in reality it boasted a high amount of diversity, sexuality, and forward thinking for the time period. In looking at the movement with these blinders, it creates a sense of erasure for those who are also responsible for shaping a literary legacy and building what we know about the Beats today in our studies. This is an issue within the Beat scholarship that is available to peruse now, in the sense that there is a significant amount of writing on Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs and less on other pivotal figures, such as Diane di Prima and Joyce Johnson, who were responsible for notable contributions and literary feats. In bringing in the works of di Prima and Johnson, I am planning to address the importance of looking at the male Beats from a feminist point of view and explore how di Prima and Johnson’s works were a response to the exclusion of women from the Beat movement, as well as a response to how these men were expressing their opinions in writing about women. Di Prima and Johnson were essentially talking back to the male Beat authors and calling out the oppression and exclusion of women as they saw it being written down.
Committee: Professors Steven Belletto (English, advisor), Gabrielle Kelenyi (English), and Michael Feola (Government & Law)
Description: Whether we like it or not, or choose to accept it, the notions of geography and origin comprise and define a huge part of our identity: how people know us, see us, and, inevitably, how we know ourselves. This thesis, by supplementing a collection of poetry with research and analyses of various source texts, aims to explore such themes and questions in an attempt to better understand these broadly-applied concepts: place as material, memory as obfuscation, home as intangible, ancestry as both familiar and unknown, and belonging as foundational to identity formation. My collection of poetry is organized into three sections: Poetic Autoethnography, Erasures of Theory, and Ekphrastic Poetic Responses to Diasporic Films. In this thesis, through knowing, unknowing, and most certainly re-knowing, I aim to craft and present a more whole, vulnerable, and honest understanding of my place within the world and within the diaspora that I find myself in.
Committee: Professors Megan Fernandes (English, advisor), Nandini Sikand (FAMS), and Mikael Awake (English)
Description: Both poets and lawyers rely on language to shape perception, evoke emotion, and argue for truth, whether in the courtroom or on the page. Through a comparative rhetorical analysis, this research seeks to uncover how these disciplines converge through argumentation, performance, and audience engagement. This interdisciplinary approach shows how each practice uses language to evoke ethos, pathos, and logos. I aim to demonstrate that rhetorical awareness links poetry and law through persuasion, enhancing one’s understanding of language as a tool for justice, art, and human connection. Drawing on primary texts such as Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas, Amanda Gorman’s “The Hill We Climb,” Johnnie Cochran’s closing argument in the O.J. Simpson trial, and Theologis v. Weiler, the study will analyze rhetorical devices including repetition, syntax, humor, rhyme, and metaphor. The theoretical foundation will incorporate scholarly works by Owen Barfield, Kenneth Burke, S.W. DeLong, Louise Rosenblatt, and James Boyd White.
Committee: Professors Christopher Phillips (English, advisor), Gabrielle Kelenyi (English), Megan Fernandes (English), and Bruce Murphy (Government & Law)