Undergraduate Honors Program - English Departmenthttp://hdl.handle.net/1803/2482024-03-29T15:24:20Z2024-03-29T15:24:20ZThinking with and Responding to Gone with the WInd as a Circulator of White SupremacyMaresca, Laurenhttp://hdl.handle.net/1803/180832023-04-27T17:52:14Z2023-04-25T00:00:00ZThinking with and Responding to Gone with the WInd as a Circulator of White Supremacy
Maresca, Lauren
This project aims to investigate the power of Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novel Gone with the Wind, its impact on readers, and their responses to the text and the ideologies Mitchell conveys in it, a particularly timely interrogation as the United States grapples with the consequences of white supremacist hate speech. An analysis of Mitchell’s narrative techniques, specifically we-voice and third-person omniscient narration, reveals the novel’s ability to circulate emotions and ideologies including white supremacy and anti-Blackness via Sara Ahmed’s theory of affective economies. The terminology of unresistant and resistant reader are used to differentiate between types of readers and draws on reader response theorist Kathleen McCormick’s writing on the negotiation between the reader and the text. The unresistant reader is one who either already has a nearer ideological proximity to Mitchell’s worldview or one who, unlike the resistant reader, has no knowledge or lived experience that would lead them to problematize it. Using a reader reception lens, contemporary book reviews and other media relating to GWTW are examined and collated for themes. After tracking GWTW’s transition from a book to a cultural idea through various mediums, Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone is presented as an appropriate response novel to address the harms GWTW enacts. This project illustrates that, despite the seemingly obviousness of its erroneousness, GWTW still benefits from, as well as requires, critical readers’ nuanced engagement with it as both an idea and as a text.
English Department Honors Thesis.
2023-04-25T00:00:00ZUnmasking History: Superhero Tropes and Historical Reimagination in the Watchmen FranchiseBressler, Sarahhttp://hdl.handle.net/1803/166062021-06-15T19:05:07Z2021-04-27T00:00:00ZUnmasking History: Superhero Tropes and Historical Reimagination in the Watchmen Franchise
Bressler, Sarah
English Department Honors Thesis.
2021-04-27T00:00:00Z(Re)Encountering Africa: Repatriation and the African Imaginary in Black Travel LiteratureNorford, Jasminhttp://hdl.handle.net/1803/164942021-05-12T19:33:53Z2021-05-12T00:00:00Z(Re)Encountering Africa: Repatriation and the African Imaginary in Black Travel Literature
Norford, Jasmin
English Department Honors Thesis.
2021-05-12T00:00:00ZGendering the Techno-Orient: The Asian Woman in Speculative FictionLu, Melaniehttp://hdl.handle.net/1803/164932021-05-12T19:08:44Z2021-04-27T00:00:00ZGendering the Techno-Orient: The Asian Woman in Speculative Fiction
Lu, Melanie
This thesis explores the complicated relations between the ontology of race and its gendered aesthetic representations within the phenomenon of techno-Orientalism, the prevailing tendency in textual and visual culture to imagine Asia and Asians in hyper-technologized and/or futurized terms. Although Saidian Orientalism has pointed out the constructed nature of the dichotomies between the modern, technological west and the ancient, mystical East, techno-Orientalism takes such discourse into the context of global information capitalism, producing nuanced yet troubling narratives of race and technology that reflect changing perceptions of modern personhood and identity. I focus specifically on the figure of the Asian woman in various works of speculative fiction, including the film Ex Machina and the Japanese animation Ghost in the Shell to interrogate the ways in which her embodied racial identity can be represented, reimagined, and renegotiated in both western and Asian narrative spaces. Ultimately, I critique the notion that postmodernist and/or utopian portrayals typical of SF legitimize the erasure of contemporary discourses of race and gender, since emphasis on either pure aesthetic signs or posthuman ontology loses sight of the fact that race is heavily intertwined with technology and can itself constitute a form of technology.
English Department Honors Thesis.
2021-04-27T00:00:00Z