2011 Spring English Senior Honors Theses (MU)
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The items in this collection are the 2011 spring semester Senior Honors Theses. Click on one of the browse buttons above for a complete listing of the works.
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Item Beneath, before and beyond: how characters achieve a true identity through alternative education in Song of Solomon, The bear, and Things fall apart.(University of Missouri, College of Arts and Sciences, 2011) Krieg, Annie; Foster, Gregory M. (Gregory Mark), 1960-Dear Reader, let me tell you a story. In Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, a black man named Milkman goes in search of his true identity. He had grown up learning to be a certain type of person: one who, like his father, valued commercial success, an affiliation with the white community, social authority, and conventional wisdom, and someone who distanced himself from all members of his family who were outcasts of this society. Pilate, Milkman's aunt, exemplifies everything her brother despised: a disregard for money, fashion, manners, school and socially acceptable behaviors, but also, Pilate is a woman who understands and accepts her black heritage. Milkman is forbidden to go near his aunt, but against his father's wishes, Milkman goes to meet Pilate, where he immediately realizes from her he cannot stay away. She becomes his guide on his journey toward a truer identity: one that is unique to him because it is rooted in the legacy of his ancestors. Thus, unhappy in Michigan, he heads to Virginia, where he is taught the history of his family and consequently, Milkman learns about himself. And so, reader, Milkman rejects an untrue identity inherited from his father and uncovers a true self-understanding via an alternative education: one not learned in the classroom, but through experience; one not taught by an un-related teacher or American History textbook, but by his aunt Pilate; one not in mainstream society, but in the Virginia country and society of his ancestors. Milkman discovers what it means to be an individual in a homogenizing world--a world that asks him to sacrifice his true identity because it distances him from his ancestors and the natural world. By showing us, reader, how to achieve identity through an alternative education, Toni Morrison not only suggests what we've lost from forgetting ourstory in favor of history, but shows us the value of finding our own narrative. She is not alone in this suggestion. William Faulkner, in his The Bear, and Chinua Achebe in his Things Fall Apart, suggest something similar through a similar story, and by showing the patterns among these three works, this thesis draws conclusions as to what it means to be a writer and reader in the 21st century. So now reader, let me prove to you this pattern in Song of Solomon.Item From the boulevard to the boudoir: the prose poem's evolution from Baudelaire's scenes of French daily life to Nin Andrew's contemporary portrayal of the individual(University of Missouri, College of Arts and Sciences, 2011) Washburn, Caitlin; Ronci, Ray, 1954-Compared to many forms of poetry, the prose poem is one of the most experimental and understated. It is a "genre of poetry, self consciously written, and characterized by the intense use of virtually all devices of verse" (Benedikt 47). By doing away with line breaks, it "uses means of prose toward the ends of poetry" (Lehman 13). Though when speaking of this form only a few long dead French poets may come to mind, "the prose poem has achieved an unprecedented level of popularity among American poets" (Lehman 24). Over time a range of contemporary American poets utilized this French tradition.Item Judgments on witness reliability from written transcripts(University of Missouri, College of Arts and Sciences, 2011) Hartman, Julia G.; Gordon, Matthew J.A myriad of research has been done on the ways in which different linguistic features can affect perceptions made about the speaker. The judgments made about a speaker can be particularly important in legal settings, like trials. The purpose of this research was to study how witnesses are evaluated by jurors and the aims of the study were: 1) to examine how differing representations of speech may affect judgments made about the speaker; 2) to examine how speakers belonging to differing socioeconomic classes may be judged differently; and 3) to examine how men and women speakers may be judged differently. Participants in the study read witness testimonies of a car accident, and then judged the speakers of each testimony on a five-point scale. The findings of the study were that class and writing style do have an effect on perceptions made about the speaker, but gender does not. This suggests that the way speech is represented in written transcripts, does have an effect on our judgments of the speaker, as does class of the speaker. However, the gender of the speaker does not affect perceptions about said speaker.Item Making Pierre Menard author of the Quixote: critics, creators, and context in Borges(University of Missouri, College of Arts and Sciences, 2011) Strong, Sara; Cohen, Samuel S.Though it has not always been so, it is now possible to conceptualize the act of reading as a process in which we necessarily form an interpretation of a piece of literature, and in so doing, create the work, or the meaning of a piece of literature -- meaning which is intrinsically tied to both the linguistic event of the work, or its text, and the context out of which our reading has come. For this model, critical theory is greatly indebted to the work of Jorge Luis Borges. The title character of Borges's "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote," a minor French Symbolist whose "visible works" can be "easily enumerated," undertakes a project which fundamentally questions the relation not only of a literary work to its text, but -- perhaps more importantly -- investigates the processes through which a work comes to be and who may lay claim to it. Though in the end, Menard's project is unfinished, invisible, and, we are informed, impossible, it is nonetheless, from an intellectual point of view, an ambitious scandal: attempting to write the Quixote, a text which has already been written and has, as a context, itself. Menard does not seek to rewrite or duplicate the Quixote, nor to translate it, but to actually produce the Quixote, linguistically identical to Cervantes's seventeenth century Spanish novel but written from the experience of Pierre Menard and attributed to him.Item Influence: the linked stories of Olive Kitteridge and developing creative work(University of Missouri, College of Arts and Sciences, 2011) Scheese, Scott; Swick, Marly A., 1949-This collection of stories stemmed from reading Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence. For this project, I chose to “misread” Olive Kitteridge, a Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Elizabeth Strout. Strout's novel is a collection of 13 linked stories - or stories that share specific attributes but each stand alone as unique, complete tales. Linked stories build upon one another, continuing to explore the depths of characters and their actions. Olive Kitteridge, as a novel of linked stories, is founded and connected by two characteristics: character and setting.