Recent english_ucla_honors_theses items

The Fact of Fiction: Imagining Interiority in Petrarch, Chaucer, and Sidney

Tue, 9 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This thesis attempts to investigate the role and qualities of the authorial figure in written works of semi-fictionality. The first chapter examines Francesco Petrarch’s Secretum and his employment of the figures of Franciscus and Augustinus, representative of himself and St. Augustine, to suggest the necessity of separating the identity of the real-world men from their in-text counterparts. This separation and its implications are further explored in the second chapter, which focuses on Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, The Canterbury Tales, and the Retraction, to read further the ontological qualities and independent agency that must be extended to these written figures who, in the microcosms of their texts, hold the highest authority. The final chapter reads into the blending of reality and fiction through Sir Philip Sidney’s self-figure of Astrophil in his Astrophil and Stella. The aim here is to position Sidney as author and Astrophil...

CONDITIONED PERCEPTION: LANGUAGE, ENVIRONMENT, AND MORAL AGENCY IN ANTHONY BURGESS AND J. G. BALLARD

Thu, 4 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This thesis argues that Anthony Burgess and J. G. Ballard uses the formal structures of their fiction to condition the reader, making the reader’s own experience in the text an argument concerning the fragility of moral agency. Reading A Clockwork Orange (1962) alongside High-Rise (1975) and Crash (1973), my thesis examines two complementary formal strategies in which Burgess works from the inside out, using Nadsat to reshape the reader’s ethical response to violence. Ballard works from the outside in, using architecture and technological mediation as systems that alter behavior and erode moral perception. In both of these cases, conditioning operations through immersion, repetition, familiarity, and aesthetic pleasure are used to dissolve moral resistance before judgment can intervene. Burgess and Ballard illuminate a shared model of moral agency under modern conditions, one that is more fragile than previously supposed, and most effectively threatened...

THE ‘GODE’ OF ROBIN HOOD: PERFORMED COURTESY, YEOMANRY, SOCIAL BANDITRY, AND DISNEY’S CULTURAL TRANSMISSION

Mon, 1 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I am investigating the ambiguous ‘gode’ throughout my Medieval primary texts: A Gest of Robyn Hode, Robin Hood and the Monk, Robin Hood and the Guy of Gisborne, Robin Hood and the Potter. In the first section, I focus on Robin Hood’s exilic rank of outlawry. As an anti-hero, he resorts to two forms of extortion: performed courtesy and loan agreements. For example, in the Gest, Robin steals eight hundred pounds from a monk of Saint Mary’s Abbey after coercing the knight into a 400-pound loan agreement. Secondly, I analyze Robin Hood’s yeomanry through disguises that subvert the concept of agency as a direct measure of one’s rank. For example, in Guy of Gisborne, Robin Hood defeats Guy before claiming ownership of his horse-hide robe and confronting the sheriff. In Robin Hood and the Potter, Robin Hood uses the money he stole from the sheriff to compensate the potter as an economic form of social retribution. Lastly, I challenge the good-versus-evil binary in Disney’s Robin Hood;...

Ireland's Imperfect Hero: Yeats as Love Poet and Official Nationalist

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Though he is widely regarded as Ireland’s most famous nationalist poet, W.B. Yeats’ role in the Celtic Revival and Irish nationalist movement is regularly debated. My thesis examines how Yeats’s early poems used the love poem tradition to outline a specific set of social and political beliefs, in the process turning a future Ireland into an unattainable muse. I argue that Yeats was an official nationalist who relied on the struggle for Irish independence to produce poetry in the love poem tradition, and once independence had been achieved, he struggled to find his place in Irish society while becoming increasingly frustrated with the state of Ireland. By reading his early works like Cathleen Ni Houlihan, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”, and “A Poet to His Beloved” as love poems and stories directed to Yeats’ idealized Ireland against the bitter ragings of Purgatory, “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” “Sailing to Byzantium,” and “Under Ben Bulben,” I chart Yeats’ path towards embodying...

Beasts in Circuses: Environmental Weaponization in The Hunger Games

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In this thesis, I attempt to explore the ways in which nature can be both used as a weaponized political tool for counterinsurgency and a catalyst for resistance in the dystopian setting presented in Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games. This is emphasized through the exploration of themes of pastoral depictions, social class divisions, humanism and posthumanism, and self-identity, primarily through the series’ main character, Katniss Everdeen, and how her relationship with natural environments contributes to significant change in her world. The first chapter focuses on the relationship between class and nature, showing how the Capitol attempts to control both natural resources and people by manipulating access to food, landscapes, and education. I argue that through Katniss’s interactions with the natural world, the narrative diverges from traditional pastoral ideals, revealing that even seemingly free natural spaces remain subject to domination. The second chapter examines the...

Geocriticism in Depictions of the American West: An Analysis of Claire Vaye Watkins's Battleborn

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Critical Thesis: Geocriticism in Depictions of the American West outlines how physical geographies inform and define the social geographies defining contemporary short stories set in the Black Rock Desert, Angels Camp, and San Francisco.

I Miss You Mother: The Korean Diasporic Experience and Colonial Silencing in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This thesis examines Dictee by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha as a diasporic text that reconstructs Korean cultural memory through matrilineal storytelling, performance, and linguistic fragmentation. Drawing on the long, complex history of the Japanese occupation of Korea, it argues that Cha’s experimental form of prose and poetry reflects the cultural and linguistic rupture experienced by Koreans displaced through imperialism and colonialism. The first section explores how Dictee centers women’s stories, particularly those of figures such as Yu Guan Soon, otherwise known as the Korean Joan of Arc, and Cha’s own mother, Huo Hyun Soon, to challenge patriarchal interpretations of Korean history. Through a matrilineal framework, the section highlights oral storytelling traditions and the transmission of “diasporic maternity” and trauma from mother to daughter, putting memory in a position where it serves as a form of cultural survival. The second section examines the performative...

CRUEL AND CASUAL PUNISHMENT: THE SITUATIONSHIP IN NORMAL PEOPLE BY SALLY ROONEY

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This thesis draws upon Normal People by Sally Rooney as a foundational text for understanding the elusive yet emotionally-destructive situationship. I contextualize my analysis of the situationship between Marianne and Connell in the historical situation of Post-Celtic Tiger Ireland, revealing the situationship as a reaction to broader social upheaval. To define the unique structure of the situationship, I employ Lauren Berlant’s theory of Cruel Optimism to explore its affective underpinnings. I then investigate the power structure of the situationship, assigning roles of “inferior” and “superior.” With these theoretical concepts in mind, I engage in separate close-readings of Marianne and Connell’s reactions to their painful breakup during university. I first unravel the origins of Marianne’s devalued self-concept, pressuring its relation to the collective culture of shame in Post-Celtic Tiger Ireland. I then work towards a characterization of Connell as the romantic precariat...

The Bell Jar and Whiplash as Fugue States: Tortured Artists' Pain and the Language of Their Stories

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This thesis examines the trope of the tortured artist to explore how pain restructures language, memory, and identity. I argue that fugue provides a dual framework for understanding this trope’s relevance in literature. Drawing on disability studies and trauma theory, it positions pain not simply as an experience represented in texts but as a force that disrupts linguistic coherence and reorganizes narrative form. Engaging in debates on pain’s ineffability (Elaine Scarry), its epistemological productivity (Margaret Price; Alyson Patsavas), and its recursive nature (Cathy Caruth), the project develops fugue as both a psychological condition and compositional structure that models the fragmentation of a protagonist under pressure.

Fugue operates in two key ways across the thesis’ primary texts, Sylvia Plath’s semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar (1963), and Damien Chazelle’s film, Whiplash (2014). First, it describes the protagonists’ ambition and suffering, where...

To See and Be Seen: Sight, Surveillance, and Witness in Wanda Coleman's Poetics of Los Angeles

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

To See and Be Seen: Sight, Surveillance, and Witness in Wanda Coleman's Poetics of Los Angeles

The Norman Trinity: A Study on the Development of the Norman Bates Character from Psycho

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Many continue to acknowledge Norman Bates as a creation of acclaimed director Alfred Hitchcock, featured in the blockbuster film Psycho (1960). Scholars attribute the narrative and the characterization of Norman to Hitchcock but fail to acknowledge Psycho’s true author, Robert Bloch. Failing to recognize Bloch’s novel offers a problem, as most studies of the narrative pertain to Hitchcock’s film. This thesis traces the development of the Norman Bates character through different interpretations beginning with Robert Bloch’s novel. The study aims to understand why his character becomes younger as time progresses. The research adopts a psychoanalytic approach as well as behavior studies. Theories include Freud’s concepts of the Oedipal complex, with commentaries by known film critics such as Slavoj Žižek. By dissecting Norman’s into three main personalities – the son, the mother, and the adult – Norman can be carefully examined and provide information on elements of identity,...

"The Wonder of the Visible": Fantasy, Reality, and the Prism of Story in the Work of Patricia A. McKillip