In George R. R. Martin's magnum opus, A Song of Ice and Fire, the fragmentation of the land mirrors a fragmentation of the self as many of Martin's characters lose their grips on their sense of identity due to the chaos caused by the ongoing civil war in Westeros and ultimately undergo an identity crisis. This thesis seeks to explore the ways in which George R. R. Martin utilizes the identity crisis as an instrument for obtaining a sense of agency and autonomy over oneself, particularly through the lens of trauma.

This thesis contemplates Walt Whitman's role in the lives of 19th and 20th century women writers and his significance to early American feminism. I consider the ways women inspired him to develop pro-feminist ideas about maternity, womanhood, and female liberation.

This thesis will focus on two similarly positioned characters: Peggy Olson and Leslie Knope, both of whom are female characters who successfully navigate male-dominated workplaces. Using Bonnie Dow’s lifestyle feminist framework and critique of postfeminism, Sheryl Sandberg’s advice for women who wish to succeed in the workplace, and bell hooks feminist theory, I hope to use this thesis to locate Peggy and Leslie’s respective places in the tradition of feminism on television, and I will argue that describing characters like Peggy as “feminist” is outdated.

Young adult novels are undeniably popular and yet they are simultaneously dismissed as inconsequential or light – conventionally deemed low literature, these novels are generally not considered worthy to be discussed in the same spaces as the less popular, more traditional high literature. If a genre of young adult novels were given a place within literary history, it would not only legitimize these novels as more than guilty pleasures or the provinces of adolescent readers who will come to grow out of them, but it would also open up the possibility for other forms of literature to be similarly recognized as worth reading or thinking about. The Bildungsroman, also known as the “novel of formation” or the more colloquial “coming-of-age” novel, is a genre grounded in the traditions of multiple literary histories and is commonly understood to be high literature. Marianne Hirsch models the European Bildungsroman, which is useful for both American novels due to the predominance of European and particularly English canon. This paper is interested in determining how contemporary young adult dystopian novels, examined through the Scott Westerfeld's Uglies and Veronica Roth's Divergent, both work within and depart from the conventions of the traditional Bildungsroman.

Asian American literature has continued to evolve since the emergence of first generation Asian American writers in 1975. Authors have continued to interact not only with Asian American content, but also with different forms to express that content – one of these forms is genre writing. Genre writing allows Asian American writers to interact with genre conventions, using them to inform Asian American tropes and vice versa. This thesis focuses on the genre of science fiction, specifically in the subgenre of time travel. Using three literary case studies – Ken Liu’s “The Man Who Ended History,” Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, and Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life” – this thesis seeks to explore the ways in which different Asian American writers have interacted with the genre, using it to retell Asian American narratives in new ways. “The Man Who Ended History” explores the use of time travel in restoring lost or silenced historical narratives, and the implications of that usage; How to Live Safely is a clever rewriting of the immigrant narrative, which embeds the story within the conventions of a science fictional universe; “Story of Your Life” presents a reimagining of alterity, and investigates how we might interact with the alien in a globalized world. Ultimately, all three stories, though quite different, express Asian American concerns in new and interesting ways; they may point to ways that Asian American writers can continue to write and rewrite Asian American narratives, branching out into new genres and affecting those genres in turn.

This paper examines the way in which Robert Frost incorporates Dantean ideas and imagery into his poetry, particularly in relation to the pursuit of reason and truth. Similarly to Dante, Frost portrays human reason as limited. Both authors nevertheless present truth as a desire that often drives people’s journey through life. Frost differs from Dante by dwelling in apparent contradictions rather than appealing to a clarifying divine light. The paper considers themes of loss, human labor, suffering, and justice, and it also analyzes Scriptural and Platonic inspirations. It focuses on the image of the journey used by both Frost and Dante to describe the experience of living and exploring ideas.

This thesis is the start of a novel that explores the psychological complexities of maneuvering local politics, tense family dynamics, and romantic love through the lens of a man who proves to be unapologetically selfish, cunning, and surprisingly relatable. Set in the desert of Albuquerque, New Mexico, this piece forces the reader to engage with characters who are propelled by their own biases, experiences, and goals instead of a moral compass. The campaign trail raises questions of loyalty, prejudice, empathy, and determination in a city where nearly everyone is intertwined. Below is the official synopsis: James Rochford is technically the underdog in the 2012 New Mexico State Senate Election. He is the youngest to run for senate, has no prior experience in office, and has comparatively fewer resources in terms of money and name recognition. But James' charisma and cunning seem to give him an edge that no one else has. As the race heats up, James is caught up in a whirlwind romance and subsequent breakup which complicate his public image. Whispers of corruption and impending scandal jeopardize his chances. As James' family, romance, and election unravel, his sanity seems to depart with it, in a desperate attempt to win it all and maintain the grandiose life he clings to.

This thesis endeavors to intervene in the manner Plath’s maternity poems have been discussed by examining the psychological negotiations of identity that occurred while the speaker’s in Plath’s poems are pregnant with child. The method of this thesis is also a departure from the historicized criticism and interpretations of Plath’s poems that often conflate the experience of the speaker with the details of Plath’s life. This analysis will focus on the poems “Metaphors,” “You’re” and “Nick and the Candlestick” which feature subtle imagery that not only illustrate the speaker’s preoccupation with her own pregnancy but also constructs a metaphorical representation of the maternal body as the locus for the mother’s negotiation of identity. The different forms that the maternal body is represented through, from inanimate objects to a cavernous opening, allow the speaker to fully explore a broad gamut of emotions related to motherhood. The enlargement and reduction of the maternal body, the use of relational language and local instances of transformation are all motifs and conventions that the speakers in Plath’s poems use to navigate the shifting terrain of individual identity during and after maternity. In examining the more abstract poems related to maternity that depict the maternal body through metaphor, this article endeavors to explore the disparate sensations and experiences conveyed in Plath’s poetry.

This thesis argues that Claudia Rankine's two American lyrics destabilize the subject-object dialectic underwriting American lyricism. First, I consider Don’t Let Me Be Lonely’s rejection of spectatorship, insofar as spectatorship objectifies the suffering of the Other. Second, I analyze Citizen’s subversion of the lyric “I”, particularly as it vocalizes the “you”-position traditionally relegated to poetic object. I suggest that both works, by returning power to the object, manifest an aesthetic disruption to the racially-based power dialectic underpinning American lyric tradition. Eventually, I propose that Rankine mobilizes the poem as a future-space for the realization of an ideal politics.

This thesis is a collection of nine short stories about real people dealing with unreal problems. In one story, a small-town man answers a knock at his door, only to find three wisemen, who have followed a star and proclaimed him as their new messiah. In another, a reporter travels across the snowy length of Canada looking to interview people who have witnessed the Virgin Mary materialize above Toronto. Deranged Egyptologists, vampires with diseased blood, wacky witches, and unhappy mediums all inhabit tales whose landscapes span the distance between Chattanooga, Tennessee and the afterlife.