Honors Program

Jackie Booth

“Vision and Artistic Creation in Woolf’s To The Lighthouse and Nabokov’s Despair”

One of the primary features of Modernism which so distinguishes it from its predecessors is the era’s fascination with vision and visual modes. In my paper, I compare two Modernist texts, Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse and Vladimir Nabokov’s Despair, to explore how these writers question the reliability of vision as the basis of knowledge and artistic expression. In comparing the respective artistic processes of the texts’ central characters (one a visual artist; one a verbal artist), I argue that their “ways of seeing” are what dictate how they create art, regardless of whether they are working in a visual or verbal medium.

Faculty: Thomas Seifrid, David Treuer

Dox Raskin

“Trading for Whiteness in The Merchant of Venice”

In conversation with Ian Smith’s Black Shakespeare: Reading and Misreading Race, this thesis explores the relationship between identity, race, and economics in The Merchant of Venice. Jessica and Shylock, the play’s two central Jews, both attempt assimilation through racially-coded transactions. However, they are unsuccessful in “purchasing whiteness” and fail to re-style themselves within Shakespeare’s Venice. Their failures can be attributed to a larger English canon of the utilization of Jewish visibility and racialization as a tool for constructing and protecting whiteness.

Faculty: Ian Smith, Meg Russett

Camryn Brewer

“Atlanta as Borderland: Race, Consciousness, and the Psychic Architecture of Atlanta Highways”

The term “borderland” is often used to describe a city that rests on the cusp of two nations. This term has served the field of border studies well in triangulating the unique experiences of people who experience a certain splitness between “here” and “there,” “us” and “them,” and who have cultivated a powerful and generative culture out of that experience. However, what this essay aims to do is reconfigure our understanding of borderlands by training the term on an inland city—Atlanta, Georgia. This is a city known for its stark contradictions, and I argue that one of its most stark contradictions is how its highways enable a sense of spaciousness for white communities by providing a sense of protection and expansiveness that empowers them to cut through and repel those who are “other.” By exploring Atlanta highways as physical manifestations of psychological and spiritual anxieties about who has access to power in this country, I illuminate how fantasies of whiteness have built Atlanta into a borderland. On the other side of this fantasy are Black people who strive to transcend these borders through forms of creative expression that the city is so known for, like its rap music. Ultimately, this essay grapples with the potentiality of these creative expressions to truly liberate a bordered people.

Faculty: Jonathan Leal, Beatrice Sanford Russell

Jordan Ferdman

“‘Better Dead Than Coed’: Reading the Post-Coeducation Campus Novel as Gothic Narrative ”

This thesis traces the evolution of the campus novel as a genre defined by cross-pollination of tropes, narrative structures, and competing portrayals of educational insularity. When elite American universities begrudgingly accepted undergraduate coeducation in the second half of the twentieth century, the campus novel’s tone and motifs shifted so harshly that to analyze it requires a reorienting of genre paradigms. When charting the campus’s rendering as a sanctum to a site of epistemological violence, the Gothic genre emerges as a uniquely congruous foundation upon which to build. To rhetorically reconfigure the campus novel as a haunting requires engaging with historical, feminist, and trauma-informed theory; by engaging with narrative portrayals of institutional isolation, this thesis seeks to critically address the tenuous links between education and nostalgia with specific attention paid to gendered experiences of precarity within the academy.

Faculty: Erika Wright, Maggie Nelson

Jonathan Hayden

“Insert a Caesura: Writing Blankness and Reading Desire in Qiu Miaojin’s Last Words from Montmartre”

In their review of Qiu Miaojin’s Last Words from Montmartre, Eileen Myles questions if this collection of twenty letters that “can be read in any order” can even be considered a book. It is exactly because of this “radical untranslatability”—its confounding in the moment of meaning-making through its refusal of genre, narrative conventions, and formal elements—that the book has developed a cult audience and even entered the mainstream in Taiwan. Similar to the book’s eclectic and expansive set of references (from Frank Sinatra to Osamu Dazai to Rodin), this thesis draws variously on cultural theory, post/anti/de colonial studies, queer theory, psychoanalysis, and critical theory to explore how the book consciously constructs a mode of writing that refuses genre, and through it, gender. But ultimately, the book is not concerned with gender, genre, or even writing, but desire itself. Last Words from Montmartre directly references Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization, and through writing, embodies his utopian project of unrepressed Eros and offers new tactics to resist structures of oppression, even if for just the length of a caesura.

Faculty: Jane Hu, Maggie Nelson

Joelle Chien

“From Eden to Babylon: Los Angeles Literature during the Hollywood Golden Age and Decadence”

Since its founding, Los Angeles has been mythologized and sold as a type of Eden or, in classical terms, a new Arcadia–a paradise of easy financial success, physical regeneration, and perfect weather. Very soon after its birth, however, critical voices pointed out that the city had become closer to a new Babylon, a decadent Rome. Through a close reading of Nathanael West’s 1939 novel The Day of the Locust and William Faulkner’s 1935 short story “Golden Land,” this thesis reads Los Angeles literature during Hollywood’s Golden Age as participating in the Decadent tradition as it explores this social, cultural, and moral decay. In this period, Los Angeles literature develops its own particular brand of Decadence. It adapts the 19th century literary movement (primarily associated with upper-class, fin-de-siecle Paris and London) to a literature that instead focuses on the common person and a relatively young city of mass production and mass consumption.

Faculty: Thomas Gustafson, Melissa Daniels-Rauterkus

Eric Henrikson

“With Post-Truth, Genre Matters: Biography of X Makes the Case”

Catherine Lacey’s 2023 novel, Biography of X, is the fundamental text of my thesis. In reading and analyzing it, I aim to demonstrate a significant relationship between the genre of the contemporary novel and recent discourses of truth, namely Post-Truth. I do so through an analysis of Lacey’s use of multiple genres– the novel, the counterfactual or alternative history novel, as well as the biography. I argue that the decision to use each of these is of critical relevance because it enables a narrative that engages with considerations of truth specific to Post-Truth – such as the value of fact and perspective in determining truth.

Faculty: David Román

Sol Lagos

“A Brown Trans Commons”

In response to the increasing unlivability of this world, “A Brown Trans Commons” looks towards Ismail Khalidi’s play Tennis in Nablus in reading an embodied commonality of resistance across marginalized peoples, enacting a way of life in refusal of domination – what this thesis calls, a Brown Trans commons. As Tariq and Yusef undergo the physical affective markers of resistance, dysphoria/euphoria, “A Brown Trans Commons” analyzes the concurrent body/mind in demonstrating the characters’ re-orientation away from White humanity and colonial identitarian control, thus illuminating possibility for a coalitional otherwise. Thinking alongside the work of Black Feminist scholarship, Trans studies, and performance studies, this thesis rewrites the terms “Brown” and “Trans” to argue for an informed collectivity alongside difference, grounded in the history of colonial resistance, and propelled by the desire to know wellness.

Faculty: Corrine Collins, Eliot Dunn, Sarah Kessler