2018 Spring English Senior Honors Theses (MU)

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Into the darkness : the erosion of empathy in the age of connectivity
(University of Missouri, College of Arts and Sciences, 2018) Benson, Haley
“In an age of images and entertainment, in an age of instant emotional gratification, we neither seek nor want honesty or reality. Reality is complicated. Reality is boring. We are incapable or unwilling to handle its confusion,” (Hedges, 49). And so came the television, the computer, and the smartphone. Ours is a culture spurred on by spectacle, by entertainment, and it is something we’ve been taught to crave everyday. We have become addicted to distraction, to the need to be distracted. The screens we have created provide us with exactly that; amusement, spectacle, a realization that we never have to fear boredom again, and we never have to be alone. Screens offer us the opportunity to forever be an audience member because we always have something new to see. Television initially dictated the curriculum of our daily lives, as “a curriculum is a specially constructed information system whose purpose is to influence, teach, train or cultivate the mind and character of youth”, but the advent of the Internet has had a much more significant impact on that curriculum. The Internet allows us to have constant connectivity to every person we could possibly think of, but that connection is not real. We are conditioned to believe that we need our screens to feel connected at all times, however, all this really does is reaffirm the wish that people want to be connected to us. We want to be wanted, and often this need exemplifies the narcissistic qualities within us all. The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas is a story about a people who immerse themselves in their vanities, without guilt or remorse for the consequences of their actions. In Omelas, the people willfully imprison themselves within a life of constant distraction and luxury, sacrificing their independence and calling into question whether there's is a society worth living in.
Dreaming of love's elysium : the prodigal beauty of John Keats's Endymion
(University of Missouri, College of Arts and Sciences, 2018) Gallagher, A. A.
How death in young adult literature can teach us to live
(University of Missouri, College of Arts and Sciences, 2018) Pasternock, Michael
According to scholar Roberta Seelinger Trites, death is “the defining factor that distinguishes [young adult literature] both from children's and adult literature.” Death is pertinent to all young adult readers, not just the ones who happen to be dealing with death themselves: the proportion of teens experiencing death is a minority, but the prominence of death in YA literature is uncanny. It has to have a deeper purpose than counseling the grief-stricken. Two of the most popular YA books in recent years that focus on a death have been Jay Asher's Thirteen Reasons Why (2007) and John Green's Looking for Alaska (2005). Though both books are at least a decade old, they have both remained significant and popular with the critical reception of the recent television adaptation of Thirteen Reasons Why and with Looking for Alaska being implemented in some school curriculums. The deaths of Hannah Baker and Alaska Young, the main female characters in these novels, communicate larger messages about how to live; through Miles’ process of searching for existential answers in the absence of certainty, Looking for Alaska suggests that readers should engage in the same exploration. Through Clay's realization that he and Hannah Baker will never have closure, Thirteen Reasons Why suggests the importance of being an active participant in life because “everything affects everything.”
The end of Cape Town : neoliberal deception in K. Sello Duiker's Thirteen Cents
(University of Missouri, College of Arts and Sciences, 2018) Nutakor, Elorm
Centuries ago, white settlers arrived at the area that would become modern day Cape Town, making their first contact with Southern Africa. Today, the city emulates its past role by continuing to host foreigners. Cape Town stands as the premier tourist destination in Africa, popular among Western visitors who are drawn to the area's warm climate, beautiful landscape, and the natural environment. The city's prevailing mythic image, however, conflicts with late South African writer K. Sello Duiker's perception. He described how he experienced Cape Town in an interview with Victor Lackay saying, “I immersed myself in the culture of Cape Town, but in the end I had to run. I was too absorbed; I needed to escape. It was just meant to be a stopover” (Mzamane 20). Duiker's need to “run” and “escape” indicates his sense of urgency amid some danger in Cape Town from which he needs to flee, a subtlety appropriate for the interview. His statement here comes across as light criticism whereas his literary works more vehemently problematize the city. In his first two novels, Thirteen Cents and The Quiet Violence of Dreams, Duiker's characters experience a Cape Town that would make the city's tourists reconsider their choice of destination. In particular, Duiker appears ready for the city to come to an apocalyptic end, and the following discussion begins by questioning why Cape Town deserves such a demise.
Under the Bell Jar and across the Wide Sargasso Sea : women's mental health and wellness in novels by Sylvia Plath and Jean Rhys
(University of Missouri, College of Arts and Sciences, 2018) Kjar, Courtney
Many works of women's literature find their purpose by acting as ways to draw attention to what Maria Farland labels “the psychological implications of sexist stereotypes” (925). The 1960s saw an emerging trend of feminist fiction focusing on mental illness, especially as a way to indicate the negative influence of the standards set and the roles applied to women by the prevailing social order of patriarchy, eurocentrism, and capitalism. Several novels by women were published in the 1960s that follow accounts of women and insanity, such as Margaret Atwood's The Edible Woman, Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook, Joanne Greenberg's I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, and Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Sylvia Plath also noticed “this increasing market for mental-hospital stuff” and used it as an opportunity to document her own experiences in her work of autobiographical fiction The Bell Jar in 1963 (Kukil 495). The story follows Esther Greenwood's descent into depression from her time interning in New York City to her summer trapped in the Massachusetts suburbs. Set in the 1950s, Plath's novel is informed by her own experiences in the rigid world of the United States Post-World War II in which a woman who esteemed career aspirations over family aspirations were looked down upon. Plath's novel examines the ways the pressure of rigidity and uniformity creates a breeding ground for a mental breakdown. Jean Rhys explores similar issues in her 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea while also adding the additional layer of a historical and cultural complexity – which establishes the long-standing existence of a split between gender and the ability to accomplish individual ambitions and objectives. She spent much of the 1950s and early 60s writing her protagonist Antoinette Cosway Mason. Antoinette's internal fragmentation is exacerbated by her particularly divided surroundings of early 1800s, post-emancipation Jamaica, in which the split between black and white communities was especially prevalent, as well as her inability to find her place within that setting. The novel is a retelling of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre in which the concentration shifts to provide a history of the story's madwoman Bertha Mason. All of the novels mentioned find their central theme in madness – with The Bell Jar and Wide Sargasso Sea being cornerstones of this literature - which seeks to dismantle the traditionally held fixed notions of femininity such as chastity and purity, the necessity of wifehood/motherhood, and propriety. Though the function of madness in both The Bell Jar and Wide Sargasso Sea have been previously examined independently, the two works are rarely compared. As will be shown, there is more than foundational similarities between the two novels. The enduring lack of attention paid to this fact signals to prevailing sociological issues regarding the continued presence of adversarial feminism within literary criticism. With lack of recognition of the similarities between The Bell Jar and Wide Sargasso Sea, comes a lack of acknowledgment of the continued struggle for non-European and non-American voices to be heard on an equal playing field within the feminist community.

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