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Title: "A Different Kind of Poverty": Folk Rock and Therapeutic Counterculture
Creator: Taylor, Lily Gibbs (Lily Gibbs Taylor) (Author), (Joel Pfister) (Thesis advisor)
Date: 2016-04-15
Description: Here I investigate the historical confluence of therapeutic culture, counterculture, and folk rock in late-1960s and 70s America. The Old Left communists of the 1930s popularized folk music as a political genre protesting systemic inequality. Then in the early-1960s, the New Left revived folksongs to protest racial inequality and the Vietnam War, among other causes. By the late 60s, though, some folk artists made interiority their hip “protest.” As many folksingers transitioned to folk rock, American culture was becoming more therapeutic, and folk rock artists like James Taylor, Joni Mitchell, and Jackson Browne, started writing lyrics preoccupied with interior pain—“inner poverty”—more than economic poverty. Treating the early albums of Taylor, Mitchell, and Browne as ideologically rich texts for cultural and literary studies, I examine the way that folk rock promoted—and sometimes self-reflexively critiqued—therapeutic perspectives that are associated with a political stance, but that also helped consumers evade external social, economic, and political issues. These singer-songwriters use images of the road and nature to evoke—and at times question—therapeutic individualism and ostensible anti-consumerism. In addition they romanticize love and music as therapeutic opportunities to express compensatory “depth,” but they also scrutinize the mass-commercialization of love and music. Their lyrics offer insights into the Woodstock to Watergate forms and operations of “soft capitalism.”, 2016, Old URL: https://wesscholar.wesleyan.edu/etd_hon_theses/1536, In Copyright – Non-Commercial Use Permitted (InC-NC)

Title: "A Self to Recover, A Queen": The Subjects of Poesis in Sylvia Plath's Ariel
Creator: Komlos-Hrobsky, Emma Anne (Emma Anne Komlos-Hrobsky) (Author), (Christina Crosby) (Thesis advisor)
Date: 2008-05-01
Description: 2010, Old URL: https://wesscholar.wesleyan.edu/etd_hon_theses/60, In Copyright – Non-Commercial Use Permitted (InC-NC)

Title: "Doing Time" across the Centuries: Early Influences on Prison Narratives
Creator: Keyes-Lebergott, StarRose Adudalesdi (StarRose Adudalesdi Keyes-Lebergott) (Author), (Henry Abelove) (Thesis advisor)
Date: 2010-04-15
Description: 2010, Old URL: https://wesscholar.wesleyan.edu/etd_hon_theses/569, In Copyright – Non-Commercial Use Permitted (InC-NC)

Title: "Empty Millenial Frenzy": American Fiction and Economic Prosperity of the 1990s
Creator: Alderman, Charles Elroy (Charles Elroy Alderman) (Author), (Sean McCann) (Thesis advisor)
Date: 2011-04-15
Description: 2011, Old URL: https://wesscholar.wesleyan.edu/etd_hon_theses/612, In Copyright – Non-Commercial Use Permitted (InC-NC)

Title: "Her old, old language of words that are not words": Haunting, Trauma, and History in the Works of Jean Rhys
Creator: Bartholomew, Isabel Anne (Isabel Anne Bartholomew) (Author), (Christina Crosby) (Thesis advisor)
Date: 2018-04-15
Description: This thesis proposes a reading of four of Jean Rhys? novels?After Leaving Mr Mackenzie; Voyage in the Dark; Good Morning, Midnight; and Wide Sargasso Sea?through Avery Gordon?s critical work on haunting, Ghostly Matters. Rhys? work is situated in its historical context, allowing for a reading that is specific to the conditions of the author?s time period and locations. Gordon?s book guides the framework of haunting and ghostliness that this project proposes for Rhys? women characters, suggesting that the Rhys women are themselves ghostly figures. They are both haunted and haunting. Ghostly Matters argues for a reading of ghosts and haunting that is socially and politically charged, reading haunting as the work of historical and social violences that will not be consigned to the past. In this framework, haunting is positioned as a call to action, a kind of political resistance, a and potent reminder of trauma?s recurrences. Ghosts are political actors doing important affective work. In Rhys? novels, these women ghosts communicate the violences of colonialism, whiteness, poverty, and misogyny. They are haunting figures that testify to social and historical injustices even as they are themselves implicated in them. This thesis will examine gender, race, and domesticity in Rhys? works as they play out in patterns haunting and representations of trauma, noting that these social structures inevitably intersect and complicate each other. The critical works of Cathleen Maslen, Judith Raiskin, and Elaine Savory will support these claims. Jean Rhys? ghosts, then, are not simply tragic women who?ve been wronged or the ?spirit? of loss or longing. They are created by?but also, as ghosts, must exceed?existing historical conditions of violence, power, and resistance., 2018, Old URL: https://wesscholar.wesleyan.edu/etd_hon_theses/2073, In Copyright – Non-Commercial Use Permitted (InC-NC)

Title: "How am I pursu'd": Beyond Consent in Richardson's Clarissa
Creator: Ruby, Natalie Handler (Natalie Handler Ruby) (Author), (Matthew Garrett) (Thesis advisor)
Date: 2019-04-15
Description: In my close reading of the novel, I attempt to demonstrate a form of reading with rather than for Clarissa’s desire. To read with Clarissa is not to interpret as she interprets, but rather to read next to her as she interprets. “Reading with,” means to read the novel as Clarissa moves through it and to take this occasion to read social relations as they appear allegorical and specifically within the text. To read with means to read the novel allegorically, as rape and not seduction, because solidarity with Clarissa as a rape survivor is politically important. Furthermore, it means to recognize the characters as psychologically complex characters who, in their specificity, support, break down, and have no relation to an allegorical reading of the text at different moments across the narrative. Clarissa is an allegorical character and she is specific. However, her specificity does not mean the end to the allegory; these terms are not mutually exclusive. To read with Clarissa also means to read against rape as the structuring event of the novel. In my second chapter, the “act” of rape is not an isolatable event it is a “state of being” that creates a new relationship between the victim of rape and her body. By destabilizing rape as a concrete “event,” I destabilize the strict movement of corruption between moral and immoral standards of behavior. Clarissa is an angel who falls and maintains her angelic virtue. Furthermore, as a state of being, the catastrophic embodied consequences of rape become clear. In this sense, to read with Clarissa is to focus on the consequences of rape as the main subject of the novel. While the seduction plot considers consent or resistant to be unambiguous, the state of being generated by rape throws consent into ambiguity. In the “state of being” produced by rape, a space is opened in which the victim of rape can have desire, no desire, and complicit desire simultaneously. The problem with the structure of the feminine “response” to rape is that it reads across time, and rejects contradiction. To “read with” Clarissa is to read against a strict binary of consent or resistance, desire or never desire. Reading with lets one moment signify in that moment only, not across the time of the narrative., 2019, Old URL: https://wesscholar.wesleyan.edu/etd_hon_theses/2175, In Copyright – Non-Commercial Use Permitted (InC-NC)

Title: "One Tale, One Telling": Communal Legacy and Liminality in William Faulkner's South
Creator: Wilkinson, Alex Cohen (Alex Cohen Wilkinson) (Author), (Sarah Mahurin) (Thesis advisor)
Date: 2013-05-23
Description: Starting with an analysis of Benjy's narrative, this paper will examine how the pain of a lost antebellum past infects the narrative presents of William Faulkner's protagonists, in particular Quentin Compson, Reverend Hightower, and Isaac McCaslin. I define the transitional state of Faulkner's postbellum South as "liminality," an anthropological term for the intermediary stage of ritual passages. I use liminality as a metaphor to describe the lack of rootedness of Faulkner's characters and Southern society itself. Chapter 1 examines Quentin's attempts to dissociate himself from his own life due to the shame he feels concerning the Compson family's decline. Chapter 2 details Hightower's adoption of his grandfather's Civil War history as postmemory, a term coined by Marianne Hirsch to signify inherited ancestral memories that evacuate the lives of descendants. Finally, Chapter 3 describes Isaac's attempts to root himself within the wilderness to create a redemptive Southern legacy., 2013, Old URL: https://wesscholar.wesleyan.edu/etd_hon_theses/1040, In Copyright – Non-Commercial Use Permitted (InC-NC)

Title: "Ordained To Suffering:" Three Moments of American Devotional Poetics
Creator: Santopietro, Michael Steven (Michael Steven Santopietro) (Author), (Matthew Garrett) (Thesis advisor)
Date: 2011-04-15
Description: 2011, Old URL: https://wesscholar.wesleyan.edu/etd_hon_theses/693, In Copyright – Non-Commercial Use Permitted (InC-NC)

Title: "She Is Not All There": Performative Language, Gender, and Psychology in the Fiction of Jean Rhys
Creator: Dade, Anne Elizabeth (Anne Elizabeth Dade) (Author), (Stephanie Weiner) (Thesis advisor), (Sally Bachner) (Thesis advisor)
Date: 2016-04-15
Description: This thesis analyzes representations of women and madness in Jean Rhys’s fiction. I explore the interplay between psychology, in particular the clinical understanding of abnormal psychological types, gender, and language. I address how language constitutes self-knowledge and self-expression for the heroines in Rhys’s novels who find it difficult to survive in modern (early and mid-twentieth century) European society. I establish a historical framework for this literary analysis by offering a critical overview of European-American Psychiatric development from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. In this overview, I interrogate the role of language in diagnosing and expressing medicalized psychological states, in particular in the case of female-identified patients. In her fiction, Rhys portrays the violent enactment of erotic and imperial power through language. Stylistically, Rhys reworks conventional language, playing with ellipses and repetition and destabilizing the point of view of the narrative. I explore the ways in which Rhys represents the psychological experience- the “madness”- which imperial or patriarchal power structures produce. Her fiction provides a literary site for a feminist, post-colonial interrogation of western historical psychiatric practices., 2016, Old URL: https://wesscholar.wesleyan.edu/etd_hon_theses/1684, In Copyright – Non-Commercial Use Permitted (InC-NC)

Title: "The Edge of Writing and Speech": Measuring Silence and Voice in the Works of Jean Rhys, Jamaica Kincaid, and Erna Brodber
Creator: Raddatz, Emma Jean (Emma Jean Raddatz) (Author), (Christina Crosby) (Thesis advisor)
Date: 2018-04-15
Description: The project of this thesis is to understand the ways that three Caribbean women writers—Jean Rhys, Jamaica Kincaid, and Erna Brodber—recover voice and orality from the powers of colonial recitation and mimicry and the printed word. Each author is positioned between Gayatri Spivak's work on measured silence and Edouard Glissant's "explosive scream." The native woman is continually refracted and driven out into silence, while the Caribbean body can't inhabit this silence and remains restless—a body following a voice. This thesis considers first measuring silence—how to write out of silence and the way in which the Caribbean woman's silence is always inflected with levels of voice and orality. Next, it turns to the possibility of subaltern speech in Jamaica Kincaid's work. It will also consider how Caribbean oral forms transform through a turn to the written—how Rhys couldn't capture or express Christophine's orality through a rewriting of the European novel, but how other Caribbean texts, like Kincaid's and Brodber's, "take shape at the edge of writing and speech" (Glissant, Caribbean Discourse 147). After establishing the intimate connection between voice and body in Caribbean women's writing, the thesis will turn towards place and location—tracking a turn in Caribbean literary criticism from an emphasis on migratory subjectivities in the 90s to a more recent emphasis on those who have remained in the Caribbean. Lastly, I'll consider the ways that voice, body, and place converge in Brodber's Myal., 2018, Old URL: https://wesscholar.wesleyan.edu/etd_hon_theses/2065, In Copyright – Non-Commercial Use Permitted (InC-NC)

Title: "The Frightful Degradation of Manhood": Masculinity in Victorian Popular Fiction
Creator: Shanis, Bodie Stone (Bodie Stone Shanis) (Author), (Stephanie Weiner) (Thesis advisor)
Date: 2018-04-15
Description: This thesis explores the relationship between Victorian discourses on masculinity and three works of popular fiction written in England in the 1880s and 90s. I discuss Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. While Doyle celebrates the fact that Holmes and Watson both possess a mixture of masculine and feminine traits, Stevenson and Wilde heavily condemn their male characters that do not conform (most notably Jekyll and Dorian). Informed by historical research, I divide Victorian debates on masculinity into three broad categories and consider their implications on these fictional narratives. First, I address the notion of the home as a feminine space and the external workplace as a masculine one. Secondly, I explore Victorian ideals of masculine athleticism, outdoorsmanship, and courage. Finally, I speak to Max Nordeau's conception of a degenerate. I conclude by analyzing early illustrations of these stories, as well as their adaptations for screen and stage in the modern era., 2018, Old URL: https://wesscholar.wesleyan.edu/etd_hon_theses/2015, In Copyright – Non-Commercial Use Permitted (InC-NC)

Title: (Mad)Women in the West Indies: History and Identity in the Caribbean Gothic
Creator: Franchi, Sophia Amanda (Sophia Amanda Franchi) (Author), (Lily Saint) (Thesis advisor)
Date: 2015-04-01
Description: This thesis examines the works of three Caribbean writers, Jean Rhys, Jamaica Kincaid, and Shani Mootoo, all of whom engage with the Gothic, a literary tradition that, at first glance, seems a surprising mode of expression for twentieth- and twenty-first-century authors grappling with the legacy of colonialism. I argue that these writers draw from the "Female" Gothic, a subgenre grounded in the works of Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, and the Bronte sisters. In doing so, they adapt gothic conventions in order to explore issues at the forefront of postcolonial studies in the Caribbean, especially concerning the role of a troubled colonial past plays as the impetus for forms of identity that challenge the essentialist, unified self of the white Western male produced by mainstream accounts of colonial history. In their postcolonial gothic novels, all three writers explore and critique the ideas of relation and creolization posited by Edouard Glissant in Caribbean Discourse and Poetics of Relation. Chapter 1 analyses the "gothic conditions" of Rhys' white creole protagonists using Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's spatial model of the Gothic. Chapter 2 uses Julia Kristeva's notion of the abject as a lens through which to understand how horror in Kincaid's novels is tied to the disintegration of the protagonists' identities under the intertwined influences of their mothers and the colonial past. In the final chapter, I discuss how Mootoo combines the queer with the Gothic in order to stake a claim for the continued relevance and value of a postcolonial Gothic that does more than condemn the horrors of the past., 2015, Old URL: https://wesscholar.wesleyan.edu/etd_hon_theses/1527, In Copyright – Non-Commercial Use Permitted (InC-NC)

Title: 1,372 for Love
Creator: Greenwood, Claire Siciliano (Claire Siciliano Greenwood) (Author), (Bellen, Martine) (Thesis advisor)
Date: 2009-04-15
Description: In Theravada Buddhism, "romantic love" and sex are seen as antithetical to spiritual development because they are motivated by desire. This collection of poems examines the psychological and spiritual overlap between compassion and "romantic love," with special attention paid to ego and selfhood. Who is the "I" and the "you" in "I love you?" Are they categorically different? What does compassion have to do with "romantic love?" This manuscript interrogates language's ability to communicate about the abstraction "love," taking cliché, convention, and historical memory as starting points and then exploding them. Despite her skepticism of language, the speaker allows "love" to shape her words and experience. "Eros is fallacy," the speaker states, "and a wild/ garden where I see God/ in your face." ., 2009, Old URL: https://wesscholar.wesleyan.edu/etd_hon_theses/227, In Copyright – Non-Commercial Use Permitted (InC-NC)

Title: A Bastard Form: The Problem of Celebrity and the Rise of the New Journalism
Creator: Cohen, Danielle (Danielle Cohen) (Author), (Sean McCann) (Thesis advisor)
Date: 2018-04-15
Description: The modern celebrity occupies a nebulous role in the public eye. "The fame of others," wrote Leo Braudy, is "a common coin of human exchange - more forceful than mutual political or religious beliefs for establishing intimacy." While we understand celebrities as distant figures, we also perceive them as sources of social connection, constantly hoping to relate to them and to glimpse moments of humanity beneath the sheen of renown. Accordingly, celebrity journalism consistently strives for authenticity: how to make the celebrity feel like a genuine human being. In the 1960s, a brazen group of young writers happened upon a strange paradox: that they could evoke authenticity through techniques pulled from fiction. Later dubbed the New Journalists, this cohort responded to a pervasive suspicion that the world seemed manufactured by applying the conceits of realist novels to non-fiction coverage of politics, crime, war, pop culture, and social life. They transformed and exported the genre of the celebrity profile, applying techniques like metaphor, scene-by-scene construction, dialogue, and free indirect discourse to coverage of non-fictional subjects. Their highly stylized prose flagrantly defied the confines of conventional news coverage, and they used rigorous, time-consuming research methods to craft pieces that wholly immersed their readers in the world created on the page. This thesis elucidates how, by turning celebrities into characters, the New Journalists were able to evoke a sense of authenticity by imparting to readers the interior life of their subjects. In six highlighted works, I investigate the methods through which the New Journalists turned flat, distant figures into multi-faceted and accessible heroes, creating authenticity by treating their renowned subjects as fictional characters., 2018, Old URL: https://wesscholar.wesleyan.edu/etd_hon_theses/1989, In Copyright – Non-Commercial Use Permitted (InC-NC)

Title: A Life Archived
Creator: Backlund, Anya Morgan (Anya Morgan Backlund) (Author), (Lisa Cohen, Sean McCann) (Thesis advisor)
Date: 2011-04-15
Description: 2011, Old URL: https://wesscholar.wesleyan.edu/etd_hon_theses/747, In Copyright – Non-Commercial Use Permitted (InC-NC)

Title: A Partial Life
Creator: Goodstein, Liza Morrow (Liza Morrow Goodstein) (Author), (Douglas Martin) (Thesis advisor)
Date: 2013-05-23
Description: 2013, Old URL: https://wesscholar.wesleyan.edu/etd_hon_theses/1098, In Copyright – Non-Commercial Use Permitted (InC-NC)

Title: A Quartet of Myths: Four Connected Stories
Creator: Gentry, Sage Alana (Sage Alana Gentry) (Author), (Anne Greene) (Thesis advisor)
Date: 2019-04-15
Description: A Quartet of Myths is a collection of short stories set in the fantastical world of Anteros. Our four main characters approach their external problems all the while dealing with internal issues of anxiety. Fantasy as a genre is used here to discuss the struggle with anxiety and anxiety induced thoughts. As we are introduced to each character and their story, the world of Anteros begins to build even further. As the characters are in their very late teens, this would be considered Young Adult Fantasy, especially considering the themes of finding oneself and where one’s family lies., 2019, Old URL: https://wesscholar.wesleyan.edu/etd_hon_theses/2177, In Copyright – Non-Commercial Use Permitted (InC-NC)

Title: A Reconciliation of Philosophy: The Frame Narrative Tradition
Creator: Austin B. Fainsod (author), (Ruth Nisse) (Thesis advisor)
Date: 2019-04-15
Description: It has commonly been reasoned that Boethius, and his Consolation of Philosophy, is at the stem of the conceptualization of the Western Medieval frame narrative. Through the guise of fickle Fortuna, the material world presents itself as an alluring machnation that rewards individuals instantly in our present reality; however, those luxuries afforded by Fortuna are merely a Wheel of Fortune: material reward may be restricted as easily as it is afforded. Through The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio, the audience is presented a notion of fortune contextualized by the tragedy of the Black Plague. The aristocrats of the Brigata recognize their fleeting world while they are stricken by the corruptness of society that may have motivated the growth of this pestilence; however, although the Brigata appears to acknowledge the fickleness of their fortune, their true fated mortality, they are seemingly unable to reconcile a certain determinism latent within their Boethian ideals. The true Wheel of Fate is not one guided by Fortuna, but is one predestined by God and is marked by moral virtue; the Brigata are incapable of detaching their moralistic ideals from their societal position, preordained and granted by birth. It is this potential for corruption within the Boethian ideal that distorts an interpretation of the boundaries of the frame, creating a game rooted within human anxiety where control is seeded to those who claim to understand that boundary of the frame, mortality and the intentions of the divine. Geoffrey Chaucer attempts to reconcile this corruption through the contextualization of Arabic philosophy. Through the influence of Petrus Alfonsi and his Discplina Clericalis, and through Alfonsi’s studies, The Arabian Nights, Chaucer attempts to establish a philosophy guided by Boethian ideals, however, seemingly focused upon what human perception can know, this present material reality. Through establishing a persistent game of class antagonism, Chaucer exposes the anxieties of individuals when faced with challenges and consequences over which one has no control. By utilizing Arabic philosophy, Chaucer refocalizes the frame tradition away from ideals of truth, and towards a consolation of the frame — to accept the lack of autonomy and to observe it for its naturalness, and in that way, its beauty. I analyze this lineage of the frame, the recontextualization and reinterpretation of human knowledge and mortality, through the reconstruction of the Griselda tale in several iterations. It is through her translation that the philosophical foundations of the frame narrative become exposed and distinguishes the frame’s incapacity for true interpretation for intention can never be known. Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler, exposes these medieval traditions within a contemporary context, thoroughly expanding upon the reader’s experience and relationship to the frame. Thus, it would appear that the frame narrative is marked by a lack, as a signified with no conclusive signifier; although it may seem oppressive for Fortuna to act so fickle, it is for us as mortals to recognize that that is simply the way of nature. To fight that natural process is to be stricken with anxiety with no hope of reconciliation., 2019, old WesScholar URL: https://wesscholar.wesleyan.edu/etd_hon_theses/2245/

Title: A Tumultuous Sea of Human Heads: Detective Fiction and the Mystery of the Crowd
Creator: Michelson, Rebecca Ahn (Rebecca Ahn Michelson) (Author), (Matthew Garrett) (Thesis advisor)
Date: 2015-04-15
Description: This thesis explores the representation of crowds and masses in detective fiction from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. Taking as primary sources the classic detective stories of Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Agatha Christie, this thesis considers the models of the crowd presented by the texts, the methods of crowd control that the texts provide, and the status of the individual (and particularly the detective) in the context of the crowd. The thesis considers how early concerns about the crowd’s size and instability are supplanted by later concerns about individual identity within the crowd. Drawing on secondary sources on subjects including physiognomy, the history of the literary market, and the history of reading, this thesis tracks the displacement of anxieties about changing demographics and altered social life into detective fiction. The thesis considers how, in its nineteenth-century form, detective fiction develops methods of crowd control that alleviate anxieties about urbanization and every-growing city populations. In Christie’s work, the thesis focuses on concerns about individual identity in a mid-twentieth century milieu., 2015, Old URL: https://wesscholar.wesleyan.edu/etd_hon_theses/1481, In Copyright – Non-Commercial Use Permitted (InC-NC)

Title: Afterlives
Creator: Radigan, Kathleen Allison (Kathleen Allison Radigan) (Author), (Amy Bloom) (Thesis advisor)
Date: 2017-04-15
Description: When I was a little girl my mother and I pored over library books about near death experiences—moments when the dead breathed again in lakes and on operating tables. In the interim between death and wakefulness, warm tunnels glowed. The afterlife appeared like a salient dream, a half world where the frontal cortex shut off and thalamus took over. Colors poured from bright columns and dead loved ones beckoned, young and laughing. Last spring, my mother was diagnosed with Stage 1 Breast Cancer. Her prognosis was good, but while she was sick I felt painfully adult. The prospect of an afterlife comforted me: a warm realm like a womb. I arranged life and death in my mind as twins—mountains and sky reflected in a river. In June, shortly after her final radiation treatment, I traveled to Western Ireland to research Celtic spirits of the dead. I visited Rathcroghan, or “The Cave of Cats” –a muddy tunnel in a field buzzing with gnats. An ancient pagan site (known in the medieval period as Ireland’s gate to Hell), the cave provides a porous border between our world and the spirit realm. If a human crawled in, they could dwell with the dead for hours, then climb back into ordinary life. As I lowered myself into its jaw I swatted bugs off my legs, struggling to squeeze into the muddy crevice. These poems kneel in the cave between worlds; they are a childhood flashing before my eyes., 2017, Old URL: https://wesscholar.wesleyan.edu/etd_hon_theses/1790, In Copyright – Non-Commercial Use Permitted (InC-NC)

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