Descriptions of Senior Theses
by our 1999-2000 Graduates

Seven students completed English majors in 1999-2000. Their senior thesis projects ranged from creative fiction to rhetorical analysis, from Shakespeare to the Internet, from psychoanalytic literary criticism to postmodern poetry. With a foundation in literary theory from Ways of Reading and the skills of critical analysis learned in four years of study, our seniors worked their way through a year's worth of bibliographies and drafts, to produce the following theses:

• Eric Boyer's thesis studied the rhetoric and impact of book marketing strategies in the publishing industry.
  
• Dan Bruning's thesis, "When Identity E-Scapes," analyzed the performance of gendered identity in the discourse of the Internet.
  
• Ryan Dee's thesis "Music" was a collection of his own poems framed and analyzed by his essay "Whole in My Soul," which argues against the distinction between poetry and song.
  
• Scott Guenthner's thesis, "'Agonizing Exhilaration': Oxymoron as a Way to Understand Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet," used the poetic figure of oxymoron as a way of understanding both the language and dramatic structure of Romeo and Juliet.
  
• Denette Jervey's thesis, "Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: A Critical Approach to the Unconscious 'Birth Myth'", used feminist and psychoanalytic theories to analyze Frankenstein.
  
• Michelle Musick's thesis was her short story "Through My Eyes" combined with an essay analyzing her own writing process in light of the writing theories of several contemporary fiction writers.
  
• Jenn Roche's thesis, "Divided Self: Oppression and Repression in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre," used psychoanalytic theory to understand the complex structural relationships among the characters of Jane Eyre.

Congratulations 1999-2000 Graduates

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