Descriptions of Theses
by the Class of 2004

Leslie Brittenham used Virginia Woolf's essays on fiction to analyze Woolf's own novel Mrs. Dalloway. Her title was "The Essence of Mrs. Dalloway"

Erika Bruening's thesis "A Case Study of Orientalism and Occidentalism: E.M. Forster's A Passage to India and Arundhati Roy's God of Small Things" used literary criticism from a number of different schools of theory to analyze the British Imperial view of India and India's postcolonial view of the west.

Jillian Craig tackled an controversial issue for both semiotics and feminist theory in her thesis, "Understanding Pornography and Erotica: A Multiplicity of Meanings

Yuri Nakamura wrote a linguistic thesis, "The Relationship Between Native Speakers' Verb Concepts and the Degrees of Acceptability of Double Object Constructions," that analyzed why speakers differ on the acceptability of particular sentences using both direct and indirect objects.

Danielle Nielsen's thesis "Encouraging Youth to Die for the Homeland: Patrick Pearse and the Sacrifice to Save Ireland" studied the influence of early twentieth-century Irish nationalism and the contemporary writing and teaching of literature.

Elizabeth Osterman argued against understanding Elizabeth Bishop's poetry as part of the Modernist movement, seeing it instead as a foundation of postmodern poetry. Her thesis title was: "Elizabeth Bishop and the Development of the Postmodern."

Lindsey Pinkerman's thesis, "An Objective Interpretation Is Hard To Find" juxtaposes Flannery O'Connor's essay "On Her Own Work" with Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia's theory of Constitutional intepretation.

Katie Schwenke identifies Euripides' Medea as fulfilling the cultural ideals traditionally applied to men in ancient Greece. Her thesis was "The Heroic Nature of Euripides' Medea."

Jamie Q. Tallman used The Lion King's adaptation of Hamlet for a young audience as a model for his own adaptation of Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing and Twelfth Night. His title was: "Disneyfying Shakespeare: The Lion King and A Children's Portrait of Shakespeare."

Adam Vander Tuig brought together theories from the fields of linguistics,literary criticism and cognitive science for his thesis "Parenthelese: Application of Bakhtin and Pinker to cummings' Parenthetical Device."

Natalie Wolf brought together her interests in philosophy and literature with her creative thesis "Pixel," a story that analyzes the concept of truth with respect to both knowledge and faith.