Department of English

“Millennial Literature” is a new term in the critical literary space, which has described a slate of literary fiction works written by Millennial authors, featuring Millennial protagonists and themes. The present debate has to do with defining not only what this genre is, but what it means as an indicator of the contemporary zeitgeist. This paper intervenes in the standard narrative, that Millennial Literature is just a 21st-century recycling of typical literature by young people, who are often disillusioned, dreadful, and existential. Rather, my thesis argues that Millennial Novels are distinct for their latent conservatism. These novels criticize neoliberal feminist modernity for its dreadful, depressing lifestyle. Protagonists often feel bad about their lives working in sought-after white collar jobs, and then feel bad for feeling bad, knowing that under late stage capitalism, life could be worse. Instead of proposing a more radical alternative to the corporate work life, late stage capitalism, and environmental collapse which pervades the dread of these novels, the books support conservative values as a means of making meaning in a meaningless time. Millennial Novels are populated by stories about traditional religious practice, family values, and motherhood. In response to the question “What Now?” that Millennial protagonists ask themselves upon entering adulthood, many embark on plots fixated on the creation of families, children, and patriarchal modes of existence.

This thesis argues that the memoirs Object Lessons (1995) by Eavan Boland and A Ghost in the Throat (2020) by Doireann Ní Ghríofa epitomize how the memoir genre may record cultural memory as well as personal memory. Irish poets Boland and Ní Ghríofa highlight the ways in which the past permeates the present in depicting the repetitions and resonances between the lives of cultural predecessors, specifically the Irish women that came before them, and their own. They identify with these women on the basis of shared gender and national identity and construct attachments to these women through sparse or general historical records, oral storytelling, and personal writing and bolster them through fictionalization informed by their own experiences as Irish women writers. Boland and Ní Ghríofa predicate these relationships on the long-lasting, often traumatic reckoning between Irish conceptions of gender and nation. The relationship between these poets and their cultural ancestors is one grounded in postmemory, an understanding of cultural trauma as an inheritable, affective knowledge, passed through storytelling, that can be felt nearly as deeply as one’s own memories. Both of these memoirs probe the convergences and conflicts between women, literature, and history in Ireland, and, as Boland and Ní Ghríofa reach back into the past to make sense of their present moment, each sketches the Irish woman as uniquely positioned to reshape visions of the past by writing of the lived experience of themselves and their forebears.

At first glance, the concept of a sadomasochistic relationship seems to be relatively modern as its presence often co-exists with the practice of BDSM (Bondage, Discipline/Domination, Sadism/Submission, Masochism) in the 21st century. However, as this thesis argues, the nineteenth-century roots of the term demonstrate that the practice of sadomasochism is not only apparent in Victorian fiction but central to its discussions of power. By examining Charlotte Bronte’s novel Jane Eyre, this thesis will explore the ways in which different characters in the novel gesture towards performing sadism, masochism, and sadomasochism in their relationships. The analysis of these practices will take place through a psychological lens, thus reflecting on how sadomasochism occurs in Jane Eyre as a psychological exchange of power instead of a sexual one. Furthermore, by looking at different institutions in Jane’s life, including Gateshead, Lowood School, Thornfield Hall, Moor House, and Ferndean Manor, I will investigate how they helped her come to terms with suffering, find pleasure in pain, and develop sadomasochistic desires.

My thesis project is a video game.

The matter of how much George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series drew from William Shakespeare’s First Tetralogy of History is a debate among critics and academic scholars. George R.R. Martin defends the darkness of his work with the claim of historical accuracy, particularly concerning the Wars of the Roses. What becomes overlooked is the influence of William Shakespeare’s Henry VI (Parts I, II, and III) and Richard III in the perception of the Wars of the Roses. A few critics accuse Shakespeare’s First Tetralogy of History of diminishing historical complexities to promote what is known as the Tudor myth. The Tudor myth is a form of realist mythography that takes historical figures and makes evil of them by painting them as larger than humans. They achieve this by generating discourses on supernatural creatures. The Tudor chroniclers then attach these discourses to historical figures like Richard III and Margaret of Anjou. Thus, academics often accuse Martin’s, A Song of Ice and Fire series of promoting a form of historical mythography. My thesis examines this reductionist framing of William Shakespeare and George R.R. Martin, specifically regarding Richard III and Margaret of Anjou and their parallels to Tyrion and Cersei Lannister. Despite the Tudor influence, Shakespeare and George R.R. Martin demonstrate how families and dynasties become forums for creating power. The construction of these powerful systematic forums ends up breaking people. My thesis will look at some of these characters who end up on the sidelines rife with anger due to the stark ethical schema of evil forced upon them.

Evergreen is a collection of poems about many things: mothers, Korean women, tragic love, and trees, both evergreen and not. It traces a line through the women, real and imagined, who have shaped my family, and whom I deeply desire to know, because their lives have led me to where I am now. May these voices of dancers, musicians, court ladies, and others be a way to remember my ancestors, and more deeply and fully know myself.

Nicholas Hawksmoor was an 18th Century English architect responsible for building six churches in London as a part of the Fifty New Churches Act of 1711. Throughout time, a theory arose that the Hawksmoor churches are occult objects that cast psychogeographical forces onto the urban landscape of London. This thesis argues that the occult recontextualization of the Hawksmoor churches presents a resistance to the original intent of the churches as sites of surveillance and domination over the urban landscape of London. First, I introduce the concept of psychogeography, which is what drives the entirety of this thesis. Next, I will trace the history of Hawksmoor and his churches, paying close attention to how the locations and architecture enforce the Church of England’s intentions. Then, I will examine two London-based texts that center the Hawksmoor churches as occult objects: first, Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s 1989 graphic novel From Hell and then, Iain Sinclair’s 1975 poetry collection Lud Heat. Sinclair’s text was the first to introduce the theory behind the Hawksmoor churches as occult objects. This text then went on to inspire and influence texts such as Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s 1989 graphic novel From Hell — a fictional retelling of the Jack the Ripper murders that follows the popular Gull theory and centers the Hawksmoor churches as significant sites of occult power. And finally, I turn to London as a dynamic urban space and the ways in which psychogeography can be a tool to resist capitalism.

This thesis analyzes the 2015 novel A Little Life’s numerous connections to melodrama, drawing links between Hanya Yanagihara’s writing and historical characteristics of the melodramatic mode. Beyond a basic conception of melodrama as exaggerated and over-the-top, there lies a complex history dating back hundreds of years. Yanagihara does not, however, simply provide an overview of melodrama’s past in A Little Life ; she also looks forward into melodrama’s future. The central argument of this thesis concerns our traumatized main character, Jude: what if we dare read his repeated self-harm as a kind of art that pushes the limits of melodrama to the body? Backed by close readings of Jude’s cutting, I will propose that his daily private acts of masochism can and should be read through the lens of artistic creation, as he navigates an aesthetic realm defined by both immense pain and utopian possibility. I will suggest Yanagihara queers melodrama by imagining Jude’s cutting—an act of intense feeling he deliberately performs without an audience—as an anti-theatrical, yet melodramatic art form. In making this argument, I will touch upon multiple facets of art history ranging from the body-art movement of the 1960s and 70s, to the earlier history of the modernist closet drama originating in the 19^th century. By theorizing Jude’s self-injury as art, we allow for the queer possibility of a nonnormative, audienceless melodrama that ultimately allows Jude to glimpse a utopian world where he is no longer afflicted by his childhood trauma.

This thesis reconsiders the classic Bildungsroman coming-of-age narrative by looking at contemporary Young Adult speculative novels Legendborn by Tracy Deonn and Six Crimson Cranes by Elizabeth Lim. Unlike the White male protagonist which the classic Bildungsroman centers around, these novels feature young women of color who, discover within a speculative genre, that they have magical capabilities. This thesis traces various directions of growth that complicate the idea of “growing up” by looking for moments that expose the characters as looking backwards within their memories, moving through time and space in unanticipated ways aided by magic, accessing a multitude of “selves” within, and making negotiations between their interior and exterior world. This paper will suggest that instead of following a linear coming-of-age trajectory, growth emerges in the texts as entangled, spontaneous, unpredictable, and inscrutable. In this case, the Bildungsroman provides a narrative structure to talk back to, or look around. I argue that these movements are made by a fragmented collection of “selves” that the protagonists embody, granting them an elusive quality, making their identities hard to categorize. The Bildungsroman classically follows a White heterosexual male character as they leave the shelter of home and integrate into society. My thesis intentionally shifts away from this model by reconsidering this narrative when it is applied to marginalized subjects and intervened by the presence of magic. In the end, my thesis argues that these protagonists evade static endings when we reconfigure the Bildungsroman as spontaneous, relational, and never ending, granting the characters potential and agency rather than assigning them a specific role in society. Here, I evade linearity in my own writing by discussing opinions within the footnotes and bringing poetry into each section to willfully undermine a voice of scholarly authority. Inspired by feminist writers who infuse their work with vulnerability and embodied approaches to the text, I delve into lived-experiences to express the fact that like these protagonists, my own personhood has stakes in how we reconfigure the Bildungsroman.

This paper focuses on the figure of the Titans in Hajime Isayama’s best selling manga series Attack on Titan. Grotesque, horrifying, but most certainly entrancing in their violence, I argue that the Titan is a representation of the mecha (humanoid robot) trope in manga and anime, at once human and monster, in form, and technology, in allegory. The connection between human and technology, though known, is often taken for granted. The body of the Titan is where the human and machine meet, the site where their interdependent dynamic is explored. Just as the pilot is necessarily connected to the mecha, humanity is necessarily connected to technology, being its creator, user, and thus the autonomous agent behind its operation. In the doomsday setting of Attack on Titan, the vehicle of the apocalypse is neither explicitly technology nor humanoid machine, but rather the Titan: giant, macrocosmic manifestations of the human. On a larger scale, the Titans become a site of self-reflection, magnifying some of the more neglected aspects and tendencies of human nature.