Department of English

This project examines how gender shapes the representation and critical reception of queer narratives in Dracula and Carmilla, asking why male-coded queer narratives have historically received greater scholarly and cultural attention than female-coded queer narratives. Through close reading, the project identifies queer subtexts in scenes of desire and transgression, while a comparative analysis places the two texts in conversation to examine differences in tone, narrative framing, and characterization. A reception study further analyzes critical scholarship and cultural engagement to investigate disparities in academic and popular responses. The analysis suggests that both texts construct the vampire as a queer, destabilizing figure that threatens Victorian heteropatriarchal order; however, female and male queerness are represented unequally. In Carmilla, female queer desire is hyper-visible and punished, whereas in Dracula, male queerness is obscured and contained through narrative control and reaffirmations of masculinity. These gendered dynamics persist beyond the texts themselves, shaping their reception: Dracula is privileged while Carmilla remains comparatively marginalized. Ultimately, the project argues that the Vampiric Gothic does not represent queerness neutrally but structures it through gendered hierarchies. Recognizing how Victorian gender bias continues to shape both the texts and their reception highlights the need for a comparative, gender-conscious approach to expose ongoing imbalances within literature.

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; Robin’s image of a likable red fox contrasts with Prince John and the sheriff’s mischievous personas. But Disney filters Robin Hood’s Medieval complexities by oversaturating his courtly love with Maid Marian. Interestingly, Disney’s film adaptation obscures the social ambivalence of Robin Hood’s disguises while establishing a questionable hero with no visible imperfections. However, Robin Hood’s multifaceted ‘gode’ reveals his economic savvy as a lender and tradesman who challenges the social structure of Medieval theft through his clever disguises and coercive loan agreements.

The KPop group BTS is often dismissed in the Western music industry as being simplistic or catering too much to their fanbase. However, they’ve incorporated several intricate levels to their artistry since their debut, the most prominent being the creation of the Bangtan Universe, the fictional storyline that accompanied much of BTS’s discography and is an intricate tale of coming-of-age. In 2016, BTS released their fourth studio album, WINGS, which alluded to several Western works; the most prominent was Hermann Hesse’s bildungsroman, Demian. Although the group confirmed that the album was directly referencing Hesse’s work, they never confirmed what the references meant or how they tied into the Bangtan Universe. Several scholars have analyzed the allusions scattered throughout the WINGS content, and numerous fans have come up with their own theories over the decade. However, there is no official scholarship that explains the WINGS narrative in the context of BTS’s mainstream narrative. In this thesis, I analyze the short films, music videos, and the teaser trailer that accompanied the music album to argue that WINGS is a reimagined, non-linear version of Demian that underscores the darker aspects of youth and self-actualization. Furthermore, I argue that Jin represents Sinclair, and the other six boys are subconscious manifestations that help him come into adulthood, just as Demian did for Sinclair. In the larger conversation, I argue that BTS offers a new understanding of what it means to have a coming-of-age, and encourages a general audience to reconsider how intricate KPop is.

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 blurred boundaries between humans and animals, drawing on posthuman and humanist theory to analyze how they are exploited within the Capitol’s system. Through the recurring symbol of the Mockingjay and other genetically modified animals, I explain that the Capitol's attempts to control nature ultimately fail because natural forces are unpredictable, and how Katniss herself becomes a posthuman figure with a hybrid identity that challenges the limits imposed by the government and exposes their fragility.

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 as textual authority alongside each other, where this project reasons in favor of reading Astrophil’s existence as an authorial persona, mimetic of but not identical to the true Sidney. The overall argument presented in this thesis is to nuance the hermeneutic approach to figures of semi-fictionality and enable these personae with human qualities of interiority.

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 aspects of Cha’s narrative voice, focusing on the influence of Cha’s previous artistic practice and training. By incorporating cinematic direction and visual spacing, it argues that Cha transforms reading into a performance, making the reader the co-creator of meaning and interpretation. The final section analyzes the limited presence of Hangul within the text, arguing that the dominance of colonial languages such as English and French reflects the linguistic erasure produced by colonial education systems. Ultimately, this thesis explores how Dictee resists narrative coherence in order to represent the many fractured realities of the Korean diaspora. Through multilingual experimentation and the intentional use of silence, Cha creates a literary space within Dictee where suppressed histories can be remembered and performed beyond the boundaries of traditional historical discourse.

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 by systems that present themselves not as control, but as pleasure, freedom, and the natural texture of everyday life.

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 through his pervasive experience with economic instability. I parallel each character’s struggle with individual insecurity to expose the inferior/superior assignments in the situationship as rooted in its cyclical structure of shame. In outlining the cycle of shame, I break the situationship into three phases: the provocation of insecurity, the subordination as the inferior, and the assumption of affective shame. By focusing on a novel oriented towards a global audience, I argue that Rooney’s insights about the situationship resonate far beyond Ireland. Over the course of this thesis, I contend that the development of the situationship signals changing conventions of modern love in Western culture at large.

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.