▼ This thesis explores how the novel Possession brings together the sensibilities of postmodernism and the romance in its approach to the world and to narrative. In bringing into focus this conflict between archetype and postmodernism, Possession provides a kind of guide to both the status of the romance in the postmodern era and how we might look at postmodernism with more clarity. The story of the romance can be seen as evolutionary, in the sense that it has adapted to its surroundings with each new literary era while maintaining recognizable features. It has traditionally had something to say about love, desire, transcendence and idealism, all things which the postmodern perspective rejects in their simple forms. In Possession, the romantic quest takes as its object the existence of narrative itself. Under the revisions of postmodernism, the romance becomes a quest for a cohesive text, for some kind of a whole in the postmodern world’s seemingly insurmountable pluralism. Narrative is deconstructed and shown naked as it is simultaneously reconstructed and fulfilled; Possession is always consciously and simultaneously following and creating its narrative structure. We see relevance stripped away in some ways, but also restored to the romance narrative if for no other reason than for its familiarity and its intelligibility. Even if we no longer see a particular meaning attached to the structure of the romance, it is still relevant in that it provides shape by which people organize and understand their lives. Certainly, in Possession, the meat of the story is the attempt to find a story, to fit the events into a recognizable narrative structure in the hope that it will provide some kind of clarity. The clarity we and the characters seek is both elusive and obvious: first, there is no story except that which we create, and second, we cannot help but create stories in the search for meaning. Advisors/Committee Members: Day, William Patrick.

▼ An interdisciplinary analysis of Marilynne Robinson's second novel Gilead. Investigates the novel's interactions with various figurations of the Middle West, specifically the production of an affective reality in this supposedly affectless region. Uses the contributions of New Regionalist social historians to frame Robinson's work. Advisors/Committee Members: Johns, Dr. Gillian.

▼ This essay examines the function of language during a time of genocide as displayed in Imre Kertesz's novel Fatelessness, the story of a young Hungarian's experiences in Auschwitz. Language provides the tool for fate's imposition, here the imposition of an identity, a history, and a future upon an individual that does not necessarily cohere with the experience of the individual. Since language provides the mechanism for the unwinding of fate, a fate ultimately hostile to victims of genocide, the old language (the native language of the victim, whether it be French, Yiddish, Hungarian, etc.) becomes an inadequate vehicle of communication—but one with no alternative. Thus, with few ways to communicate, survivors have no choice but to succumb to using the old languages hostile to themselves. Declaring language utterly incapable or, conversely, completely without fault, represents a gross oversimplification of language's more subtle intersection with society. This essay contextualizes these ideas, focusing on the concept of the subsumed authentic narrative, with Fatelessness as an example of such a narrative, and the subsequent importance of authentic narratives in light of the fact that the Holocaust shapes the normative standard for genocide. Advisors/Committee Members: Needham, Anuradha.

This project examines the boundaries and definitions of 19th-century American realism in relation to the critical and literary writings of Walt Whitman and Henry James. Advisors/Committee Members: Zagarell, Sandra.

▼ In this essay I undertake to describe how the continuous present might persist on Lowell's page. I move from "Epilogue" first to a Heideggerian critic, Adam Kirsch, and then to Heidegger, whose theory of language establishes a space where the continuous present is always possible on the page. But here, where Heidegger says it should succeed, language proves insufficient for Lowell. Lowell exposes his own failure to shape his material using literary devices like journey and climax. His attempts to align his writing with visual media allow his specific literary failures to become sites of the successful preservation of a continuous present. Advisors/Committee Members: Harrison, DeSales.

▼ Jack Spicer’s poetry is often a mess of obscenity, convoluted references, and opaque language. It resists any attempts to reduce it to a system of proscriptions or abstract ideas. However, it consistently engages the reader on the level of bodily interaction. In the introduction to Admonitions, Spicer describes his poetry as a “frightening hall of mirrors,” and this grotesque exploration of the body demands a sympathetic awareness in the body of the reader. Further, the obscenity scattered throughout his work evokes a response not only through the attractive/repulsive paradox of any obscenity, but also in that it showcases an orality of his words which co-opts the voice of the reader as participant in the violent language. Even when Spicer is at his most obstinate in refusing interpretation, the frustration in approaching his poetry is another way of forcing the reader to become involved with his poetry physically. Each of these methods leads to a poetics that shifts the site of meaning making from the author/poem complex to the reader/poem relationship. It is in the way that the body responds to the writing that the force of the poetry comes through. This device shows similarities to the more explicit poetics of later L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writers, who, with their postmodern sensibilities, intentionally crafted poems in order to create a more democratic production of meaning: one in which, again, the reader is the agent of meaning production. The connection here leads to a methodology of reading where searching for a locked-away meaning from the poem is set aside, and the reader is free to explore a fruitful, constructive relationship of body with poem. Advisors/Committee Members: Pence, Jeffrey.

This paper examines the uncanny object in Emily Dickinson's poems and letters through the lens of critic Susan Stewart's writing on souvenirs. Advisors/Committee Members: Walker, David.

▼ Can words ever express a truth beyond language? Virginia Woolf explores this persistent question most directly in two of her late novels, The Waves and The Years. The two appear to sit at opposite ends of the spectrum of her writing, The Waves embodying interiority and vision and The Years embodying exteriority and fact. The apparent realism of The Years, following on the heels of the impressionism of The Waves, has caused many critics to dismiss it as an aberration. But in fact the later novel is far from a regression to traditional realism: it takes up where its predecessor leaves off, attempting to find a transcendence through language while looking honestly at the conditions and limits of that transcendence. Examining them as a pair illuminates both novels, showing The Years to offer a surprisingly strange and even mystical model of language and the world. Advisors/Committee Members: Walker, David.

▼ My Honors thesis, An Infinity of Questions, explores the performance of science on stage using two plays: The Life of Galileo, challenging the status quo, by Bertolt Brecht and Copenhagen, examining the origins of intention, by Michael Frayn. I focus on these two plays because not only because they impress me personally, but both spring from historical events and are thematically concerned with physics and the atomic bomb. They also make an interesting juxtaposition since Galileo has a decidedly political agenda, while Copenhagen is a philosophic inquiry. I argue that these dramas are exceptional science plays because of how they literally enact the ideas that they examine and bring science to life on stage by means of modeling ideas. Advisors/Committee Members: Tufts, Carol.

▼ This project follows the strangely consistent fascination in modern and contemporary poetry with vessel objects. From Wallace Stevens' "jar [placed] in Tennessee," to "That vase" of Philip Larkin or James Merrill's "clear vase of dry leaves vibrating on and on," even so far back in literary history as the shapely "Grecian Urn" of John Keats' famous ode among numerous others, the genre is teeming with vessels. I argue that these kinds of objects open up distinctive possibilities for poetic exploration because of the unique way that they engage with space. Consequently, by using these objects as metaphors, poets are able to reflect upon the nuanced relationship between poetry and a non-poetic reality on the one hand, and between an interior subjective life and an external objective world on the other. My analysis reflects the spatial trajectory of this 'object-metaphor' itself, examining the three main topographical components that constitute all vessels: 1) the vessel's contained interior space, 2) the realm surrounding or exterior to the object, and 3) its creatively constructed surface which functions as the physical boundary between the other two spaces. Advisors/Committee Members: Harrison, DeSales.

▼ This essay addresses fragmentation and connection on multiple levels in relation to E.M. Forster’s 1908 novel, A Room with a View. George Emerson, the novel’s Romantic hero, loves Lucy Honeychurch and wishes to connect with her. But Lucy cannot decide to marry George for love until she realizes she loves him, the latter of which is not possible until she connects two fragments of her self. Music – in particular that of Beethoven, Schumann and Wagner – brings Lucy to the brink of connecting her inexperienced social self with her sophisticated and intuitive musical self. Forster’s act of combining aesthetic and literary traditions – Romantic, Victorian and Modernist – invites us to step back and look at fragmentation from two angles. Forster believed that fragmentation in the early twentieth century was caused by modernity’s “absence of social cohesion.” On this level, Forster as a novelist uses Romantic music to accomplish the Modernist goal of connecting the fragments of early twentieth century society. He does this through A Room with a View’s Lucy Honeychurch. In the scope of the novel, I map Lucy’s progression toward connection onto the development of classical music through the nineteenth century: the music she plays drives her toward connecting her two selves. The first section of this paper (“Forster, Romantic Music, and the Novel”) explicates Forster’s use of nineteenth-century classical music in his fiction, focusing on Lucy’s position as an expressive female musician and the influence of Romantic music on Forster’s fiction-writing. Section two (“Lucy’s Obstacles”) sets up Lucy’s personal obstacles at the beginning of A Room with a View, including her struggles with propriety and inability to define her feelings, both of which lead to the divide between how she plays the piano and how she lives her life. In the third section (“The Muddle and its Representatives”), I define the term “muddle” in the context of Forster’s novels, discussing the muddle’s antitheses – the spontaneous or the real – and music’s role in pushing Lucy out of the muddle and toward connecting the fragments of her life. The final section of this essay (“Lucy at the Piano”) addresses Lucy’s innate musical sensibilities and how the specific music she plays is significant for her development as a character. This section builds on the previous sections in its illumination of how music helps connect Lucy’s musical and social selves, bringing her out of the Muddle and into “real life”-the life in which she acknowledges her love for George Emerson. Advisors/Committee Members: Baudot, Laura.

▼ This study analyzes late-seventeenth and eighteenth-century autobiographies in order to address questions regarding the relationship between the history of reading and the "history of the self" in the West. More particularly, it examines the treatment of reading and textuality in John Bunyan's "Grace Abounding" and Jean-Jacques Rousseau's "Confessions" in order to suggest that the historical phenomenon Michel Foucault describes as the "emergence of Man" can be understood in terms of the rise of mass print culture and subsequent development of extensive reading practices during the eighteenth century. Advisors/Committee Members: Baudot, Laura.