English
http://hdl.handle.net/10211.3/5665
2024-03-29T06:40:20ZCharles Dickens’ Bleak House: How the Complexities of Disgust Lead to Elevation
http://hdl.handle.net/10211.3/211182
Charles Dickens’ Bleak House: How the Complexities of Disgust Lead to Elevation
Person, Angela
The subject of disgust in Dickens’ work has been thoroughly explored for decades
by literary scholars who discuss everything from disease, abject poverty, and death, to the
filthy, unsanitary conditions of Victorian era London. However, more recent research
conducted by psychologists has shed light on the ways in which the understanding and
expanding definitions of disgust elicitors have evolved, how people are affected by
different types of disgust elicitors, how people react to those elicitors, and the importance
of understanding elevation, which is the opposite of disgust. While disgust elicitors
motivate people to close themselves up, avoid, or expel substances or people who elicit
disgust, elevation motivates people to open up, draw closer, and to be associated with
places and people who elicit elevation by exhibiting beauty, kindness, charity,
compassion, and other prosocial behaviors. This thesis explains the complexities of these
universal emotions of disgust and elevation from a psychological perspective, and then
uses that lens to analyze the ways in which all of these complexities are manifest in Bleak
House, and how Bleak House—along with other great works of literature—illustrates
profound elevation in the midst of disgust, and ultimately serves as an elicitor of
elevation for the reader. This thesis is also a defense of great literature in general because
of its power to elevate humankind.
2019-05-01T00:00:00ZThe Broken Versus the Complete: Representations of the Female Body in Chicana Literature
http://hdl.handle.net/10211.3/211100
The Broken Versus the Complete: Representations of the Female Body in Chicana Literature
Gonzalez, Anna
This thesis will explore how Chicana feminist writers use various representations
of women’s bodies to redefine how women’s bodies are traditionally read and
understood. Drawing on the intersection of feminist studies and disability studies, I
explore how Sandra Cisneros’ House on Mango Street and Reyna Grande’s Dancing
With Butterflies challenge traditional dichotomies of the body as either healthy, and
whole, or weak and broken. Both texts address the fundamental feminist concern of
female bodies and who has control over them. I explore how the two authors include
depictions of female power or control of the body that are accompanied with pain,
danger, and loss. Cisneros and Grande confront so-called “normative” bodies and
“normative” experiences of women by blurring the distinction between female and
“disabled” bodies. I explore how Chicana writers engage in rewriting the body as a site of
potential strength and tool for challenging normativity. Finally, I look at how embodied
experience connects to Anzaldúa’s idea of conocimiento and how this serves a purpose in
challenging or resisting forms of oppression.
2019-05-01T00:00:00ZMaintaining Freedom: Exploring Injustice and Campus Unrest
http://hdl.handle.net/10211.3/211041
Maintaining Freedom: Exploring Injustice and Campus Unrest
Breuer, Robert Joseph
This project explores the institution of college education in the United States to
understand the phenomena of unrest on the countries’ campuses. It uses archival research
from California State University, Fresno to document the harsh time of unrest in the
1960s and 1970s. It aims to see both the positives negatives of campus unrest from that
era and compare it to modern day campus unrest in the hopes of generating awareness on
the issue and understanding best practices of both engaging in and addressing unrest. This
project engages in multi-modal documentation, exhibition, and curation of those ideas
through an online, digital humanities website titled “Maintaining Freedom: Exploring
Injustice and Campus Unrest” using the platform Omeka. This project recognizes that
unrest occurs when a culture is evolving, and evolution is something to be desired.
However, unrest can cause conflict, and that conflict should not interfere with the
primary goal of college instruction and the development of intellectuals. This project
argues that academic freedom is something needed by faculty instructing on college
campuses. However, no academic freedom would exist on campus if there was no unrest.
2019-05-01T00:00:00ZOpen-Ended Existences in the Narratives of Roberto Bolaño’s the Savage Detectives and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man
http://hdl.handle.net/10211.3/211036
Open-Ended Existences in the Narratives of Roberto Bolaño’s the Savage Detectives and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man
Garduño, Angel
This thesis engages with Latin American writer Roberto Bolaño and his novel,
The Savage Detectives (1998), and African-American writer Ralph Ellison and his novel,
Invisible Man (1952). This study will examine the ways in which the narratives contained
therein work to avoid hardened life trajectories and a fixed-identity formation in favor of
a more fluid becoming of self. Despite the fact that these two novels emerged out of
different national, historical, and political contexts, they both respond to similar social
and literary mechanisms. These mechanisms come in the form of expectations that are
held by not only U.S. book publishers, critics, and literary intelligentsia, but also by the
U.S. readership as a whole and these expectations collectively shape the ways in which
literary works written by authors who may be read as “other” are interpreted. Thus, this
thesis has two aims. First, to explore how the narratives in The Savage Detectives and
Invisible Man as well as Bolaño and Ellison as authors resist and exceed these ethnic and
national expectations. The second aim, in alignment with the first aim, is to tease out the
rich ontological configurations portrayed in both The Savage Detectives and Invisible
Man. Both of these novels consciously depict life as a process of “ceaseless becoming” –
a process that oscillates between forms and aims. In an attempt to provide a theoretical
framework through which one may see life portrayed as such, I will invoke Gilles
Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s philosophical concepts of the “rhizome” and “line of flight”
as well as Elizabeth Grosz’s reading of Darwin’s conceptualization of life.
2019-05-01T00:00:00Z