Department of English

Capstone Project submitted for English 184.2: Early Ecologies (Professor Anahid Nersessian, Spring 2019).

Capstone Project submitted for English 184.2: Early Ecologies (Professor Anahid Nersessian, Spring 2019).

Capstone Project submitted for English 184.6: Magical Realism (Professor Jenny Sharpe, Winter 2019).

All Rivers Run East to the Sea is a mixed-genre, poetry and prose collection that stems from my own journey as a female, bilingual, second-language writer, exploring the multidimensional experience of displacement. English came to me as a convenient place to start anew, to be honest and free. Only much later did I realize the cost of exiling oneself into another language. I was so far gone into the pursuit of liberation that when I finally stopped, all I could see was the smoke coming out of the house of who I used to be. However, poetry serves as a space where one does not have to conform to a pre-existing vernacular. This collection attempts to create a poetic place of unity and coherence despite the transience and mutability of life. Language, because of its inevitable errors, often leads to a failure to communicate, but writing is the creation of something beautiful out of the ruins, capturing the infinite proximity to fully knowing someone else or ourselves. The mixed-genre format of my collection mirrors the fragmentation I experience, but also fuses a coherent narrative through this linguistic, formal, and cultural diversity. The inbetweenness, upheaval, and fluidity that this collection explores in form and flesh calls for a reimagination of home and self-identification. In telling our stories through language, we are creating "a room of one's own," to quote Virginia Woolf, and in this room of our own, where no one can take our story away, we can always belong.

In this autofiction novella, a young Chinese and Korean-American girl goes to college with a strong protestant Christian background. Hoping to take more ownership of her faith, she joins Genesis Church, a hip Asian-American church in Los Angeles during her freshman year. She quickly makes friends, finding the community and sense of belonging that she’s always searched for and enters her first relationship with a Chinese-American student involved in the college ministry’s leadership. As this seemingly perfect Christian relationship progresses, her religious boyfriend pressures her sexually, while also blaming her for not preventing this “sin.” After painful experiences a therapist later defines as rapes, she finally leaves her boyfriend. The novella opens after she’s left the relationship; she goes to the church’s pastor and his wife, but their support is flimsy and non-committal. She seeks comfort from her family as well, but her parents are judgmental about her lapsed virginity. Her roommate, a non-believer, becomes her main source of support. The novella follows her recovery and her attempts to integrate the ideas she inherited from her upbringing about virginity, femininity, and Christianity, with the person she’s now becoming.

This thesis examines the influence of the divine right theory in George Peele’s The Love of King David and Fair Bethsabe , and the way that ineffectual monarchs are protected under this theory. The early modern period was heavily influenced by the divine right theory, as well as the Protestant theology that undergirded much of everyday life. I look at Peele’s play through the lense of Protestant theology, and show that Peele does adhere to the traditional orthodoxy by condemning those who disobey and rebel against their monarch. However, as much as Peele’s work is a product of his time, his play raises the issue of what to do with a weak monarch, who must nonetheless rule due to divine right theory. He puts forth an answer to this theoretical issue by way of the counselor, someone who is able to correct and criticize a weak monarch, without being considered damned for their disobedience or rebellion. I put forth that the disobedience and rebellion that is apparent in Peele’s counselor, although subverting from traditional orthodoxy, are necessary in the success of David’s kingdom.

This chapter analyzes two love triangles involving not only same-sex love, but also liaisons between two men who are a generation apart, and between two women a generation apart. These stories reveal the invasive social gaze on individuals who do not conform to traditional gender codes; the heteronormative pressure that drives gays and lesbians to seek refuge in sham heterosexual unions; and the contrast between the interdependent Chinese ethos that values lasting commitment and the independent US ethos that prioritizes personal fulfillment.

In Allegories of the Anthropocene Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey traces how indigenous and postcolonial peoples in the Caribbean and Pacific Islands grapple with the enormity of colonialism and anthropogenic climate change through art, poetry, and literature. In these works, authors and artists use allegory as a means to understand the multiscalar complexities of the Anthropocene and to critique the violence of capitalism, militarism, and the postcolonial state. DeLoughrey examines the work of a wide range of artists and writers—including poets Kamau Brathwaite and Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner, Dominican installation artist Tony Capellán, and authors Keri Hulme and Erna Brodber—whose work addresses Caribbean plantations, irradiated Pacific atolls, global flows of waste, and allegorical representations of the ocean and the island. In examining how island writers and artists address the experience of finding themselves at the forefront of the existential threat posed by climate change, DeLoughrey demonstrates how the Anthropocene and empire are mutually constitutive and establishes the vital importance of  allegorical art and literature in understanding our global environmental crisis.