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- ItemI Darena Lat You In: The Child Ballads, Academic Canons, and the Folk Tradition(2024) Bishop, Jared; Stadler, GustavusMuch academic criticism has been levied against proto-folklorist Francis James Child’s The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (ESPB), primarily focused around how he attempted to define and canonize an entire folk tradition. This thesis argues that while critics may be right about the extent to which the ESPB can be used as an anthology, there still is need and use for looking at this text, especially as it has sprouted adjacent traditions based solely around it. By tracing the ESPB from its origins to its placement in modern academia and the larger folk community today, I explore the canonization of the ESPB as a way of revealing the tension between the closed, rigid nature of academia, and the explosively mutable and communal nature of folk.
- ItemPlaying House(2024) Khanna, Bela; Solomon, AsaliTwenty-one-year-old Deepika is a romantic at heart, but so far, it seems like love is something that only works out in the movies. Time and time again, men’s failings have separated Deepika from her loved ones—most significantly, her sister, Chiara, who fled their broken home at eighteen and never looked back, and her college roommate, Sara, whose loyalty to a violent boyfriend drives the girls apart. From her family’s narrow escape from a violent father’s house, to her own midnight flight from her and Sara’s apartment, Deepika has gotten in the habit of keeping men at arm’s length by the time she meets Andrew: older, handsome, generous, well- settled and willing to give her everything she’d ever wanted out of not only a relationship, but out of life itself. After a picturesque meeting under city lights and a passionate night together, Deepika finds herself revitalized, reconnecting with Chiara over the phone and thinking about the future for the first time since graduating from college. But Deepika’s new, independent life in the city soon falls into chaos under Andrew’s touch, forcing Deepika closer and closer to him as nightmares of the past and the looming, uncertain future press in. “Playing House” is a story about freedom and futurity in young womanhood, set against a backdrop of masculine violence and psychological imprisonment. As Andrew becomes Deepika’s savior, her safety, and her lifeline, she sinks into a life and home with him as the outside world grows inhospitable and cold.
- ItemThe Future of Next Wednesday Night: Douglas Crimp's Queer Planning in an Early Year of AIDS(2024) Cohen-Mungan, Shana; Reckson, Lindsay Vail, 1982-In this essay, I close read Douglas Crimp’s 1987 weekly planner to offer a theory of what I call the “queer planning” that unfolds on and around its pages. Queer planning is the improvisational process of devising social connectivity through the quotidian gestures which underly and complement various scales of social movement to fashion an impossible future. I focus on the everyday acts of imagination, experiment, and collaboration that José Esteban Muñoz, Fred Moten, and Stefano Harney connect to queer of color potentiality and fugitive planning, hoping to open a sense of how queer relation sustained itself amidst the AIDS catastrophe’s decimation of social life. Queer planning revises theories of queer (anti)futurity which either deny queerness access to the future or situate queerness on a distant horizon, aligning with a death drive or utopia respectively. Instead, planning engages a queer future as physically and temporally proximate as the planner’s weekly scope, insisting on a temporality of possibility amidst mass death.
- ItemThe Palliation of Poetry: Expressing the Pain-Language Relationship in Theory and in Language(2024) McMillan, Olivia; Benston, Kimberly W.My thesis explores pain and its ostensible rejection of language. What makes pain notably difficult to properly express are its concurrent physical and mental elements. Existing on both literal and abstract planes of experience, posing a challenge to being captured in its entirety. Consequently, the pain experience is often left unarticulated by the sufferer and unheard by others. I argue that, although seemingly unable to adhere to words, pain can be captured by an alternative to normative language. I accomplish this by first presenting a well-established terrain of the pain-language relationship assembled by various literary critics. The two most significant poles emerge in this discourse: poetic language and diagnostic language. Diagnostic language aims to define pain in an objective, quantitative manner in order to come to a conclusive medical hypothesis and subsequent treatment. Poetic language, by contrast, is the abstractive yet also subjective means by which internal feelings are expressed through the use of metaphors, allusions, and other figurative devices. I assert that poetic language is best equipped for the task of wholly articulating pain expression due to its capacity to capture the physical aspects of pain while also expressing its abstract qualities, thereby not limiting a sufferer’s experience. I accomplish this with the assistance of various literary materials. First, I draw on critical essays, meditations, and cultural critiques written by modern critics from Virginia Woolf to Susan Sontag. Finally, close readings of pain poetry by Emily Dickinson demonstrate the efficacy of poetic language as a vehicle for pain expression.
- Item“Bearing something ordinary as light”: Anti-disciplinary Knowledge and the Cosmology of Black Birthing in Aracelis Girmay’s “The Black Maria”(2024) Yin, Isabella; Reckson, Lindsay Vail, 1982-A cosmology of birthing becomes a powerful idiom and force for Girmay, both in “the black maria” and in her 2020 essay, “From Woe to Wonder.” My thesis explores the intricate frameworks within Aracelis Girmay’s “the black maria,” a cosmological reading of black birthing as an insurgent ground for experimental gender and motherhood, alongside an examination of a ‘gestational temporality,’ the act of being born and reborn as a creative practice of resistance in an anti-black world. In this thesis, I read Girmay’s works in dialogue with Hortense Spillers’s foundational understanding of ungendering and atomization in the Middle Passage, as well as Katherine McKittrick’s anti-disciplinary reading of black creative knowledge making. The cosmological framework allows Girmay to resist the disciplines of knowledge that confine black bodies, generating her own knowledge practice through a poem that considers elements of narrative, astronomy, and physiology together. The creative practice of Girmay’s poem is a project that is both ante- disciplinary, existing before disciplines at the inception of our universe, and anti-disciplinary, resisting the violent disciplining of knowledge. The concept of a gestational temporality resists violence in a similar way. Girmay understands that the project of preparing a black child for an anti-black world does not end in the biological processes of gestation, but continues throughout the child’s life, as the child is constantly returning to the metaphorical space of the womb as a source of care, power and insurgence.