In the months since her mechanical-engineer husband confessed to cheating on her, twentysomething Lenore has moved back in with her parents, gotten a job as a barista, and reconnected with her best friend from college, ...
This project explores the ways in which Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter enacts a sort of generational trauma, as defined by Marianne Hirsch, as Hawthorne attempts to separate himself from his Puritan ancestors and ...
This paper examines the cultural dislocation/relocation of the hyphenated space in the term “Chinese-American” by looking at humor in relation to themes of multiplicity, transition, and instability in Gish Jen’s collection ...
Fun Home is a complex, gripping, and thought-provoking graphic novel. This autobiography, follows the coming of age story of author Alison Bechdel as she navigates the complicated and confusing relationship that she and ...
In the recent history of literary studies, audience-oriented criticism emerges as a dominant trope for understanding the relationships between texts, authors, and readers. Barthes’s reclassification of the reader as a ...
A focus on Claudia Rankine's use of the second person in her self-described lyric Citizen, in which I argue she invites all readers toparticipate in what ends up being a form of "wake work," a term coined by Christina ...
This thesis presents the ways in which confessional poet Sylvia Plath traversed literary boundaries through her anti-normative poetics and strove to rupture what psychoanalytic critic Julia Kristeva delineates as the ...
In confronting the influence of the railroad on literature and film, John Dos Passos’ 'U.S.A.' trilogy [...] is worth scrutiny. Written across the 1930s, 'U.S.A.' spans the first three decades of the new century and navigates ...
Humbert’s passing phrase—“photographic memory”—may appear to be a playful, yet eager attempt to credit his self-centered narrative focus and persuasive control of language with photography’s apparent believability. But for ...
Behind its mask, the problem this paper pursues is the problem of drama in narrative. Often when discussing narrative, describing the text's work in dramatic terms becomes a compelling, though largely metaphorical mode of ...