2017 Honors Thesis Presentations

the

english honors program

wednesday , april 5, 2017 | THH 420

12:00p.m. Amy Hutto

Lost Voices, Found Images: Intersections of Poetry and Photography in Stories of Marginalized Groups

12:45p.m. Kevin Volkl

The Crisis of Man in the Americas, 1933–1973

1:30p.m.

Allison Smith

The News from Nowhere: William Morris’s Icelandic Landscapes

2:15p.m.

3:00p.m.

3:45p.m.

Constance Chan

Rejecting Utopia: Representations of the Body in Chinese American Poetry

Arianna Allen

His War, Her Pen

Kathryn Kelly

The Inevitability and Impossibility of Return: An Exploration into the Relationship Between Trauma and Literature in the American South and Central Europe

Each year, the Department of English faculty invite outstanding candidates to apply to the English Honors Program.

in the english honors program , which is open to students in

both English Literature and Creative Writing, students have the unique opportunity to pursue in depth critical research projects of their own design. These projects are proposed in the fall semester and completed during the spring semester, but students are often drawn to their ideas much earlier in their studies at USC. They work independently, but under the direct supervision of faculty readers who guide them in their research and writing.

We thank faculty from the department of english and across usc dornsife and the research librarians at usc libraries for their generous support in guiding our students to complete their thesis projects.

Congratulations to our students for their exceptional work.

You are invited to join us for the public presentations of our students’ honors thesis projects. Drop by, engage in stimulating conversation, and see the work our students have put into their projects this year.

Learn more about each student’s project in the following pages.

Arianna Allen

Constance Chan

His War, Her Pen

Rejecting Utopia:

His War, Her Pen aims to show how war is illustrated as a masculinized process and how female writers distort and shape this rhetoric in telling their stories of war. By using a selection of texts from World War I and the Vietnam War, this thesis explores how female writers creates a space in war if it is perceived as a masculine spectacle.

Representations of the Body in Chinese American Poetry

emphasis in creative writing minor in global communication

readers:

Thomas Gustafson Richard Berg

emphasis in creative writing minor in law and society

This thesis explores the symbol of the body in Chinese American poetry, how it is a site for commodification and internalized melancholia—and how that narrative is subverted. The paper analyzes the works of poets such as Li-Young Lee, John Yau, H. T. Tsiang, Shirley Geok-Lin Lim, Nellie Wong, Monica Ong and Victoria Chang, and asks if there is a way in which the Asian American body can be portrayed as beautiful or triumphant, without this image of the victim that has been imposed upon the body. Does a “transcendence” of this framework necessitate a quixotic erasure of race (essentially, a transition to whiteness) or is there a way to reject the “utopia” of racelessness? readers:

Viet Thanh Nguyen David St. John

4

Amy Hutto

emphasis in creative writing minor in marketing

Lost Voices, Found Images: Intersections of Poetry and Photography in Stories of Marginalized Groups This thesis examines two multimedia poetry collections: Bellocq’s Ophelia by Natasha Trethewey and The Work-Shy, published by the anonymous collective, the Blunt Research Group. These works delve deep into the lives of the marginalized groups they discover, working from primary texts and research to provide readers with a more in-depth understanding of how these people may have lived. However, the ethics behind assuming a person’s voice or editing their words may destabilize the authors’ honorable intent to rediscover these voices. readers:

Alice Gambrell Molly Bendall

Kathryn Kelly

emphasis in creative writing double major in international relations minor in classics

The Inevitability and Impossibility of Return: An Exploration into the Relationship Between Trauma and Literature in the American South and Central Europe By referencing Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being as key and influential voices in their respective American South and Communist Central Europe historical narratives, this thesis seeks to identify the individual, witnessed and inherited traumas portrayed in each novel.

Through establishing an active discourse between literature and theory, I hope to explore regional and transcendental traumatic tendencies. readers:

Viet Thanh Nguyen David Treuer

5

Allison Smith

Kevin Volkl

The News from Nowhere:

The Crisis of Man in the Americas, 1933–1973

William Morris’s Icelandic Landscapes

My thesis explores an intellectual moment in the American midcentury which sought to understand the nature of man, and whether or not that nature was being changed by contemporary forces.

emphasis in creative writing

In looking closely at William Morris’s most intimately personal work—his detailed journal entitled A Journey of Travel in Iceland (1871)— it is possible to trace the impact of a landscape so entrenched in aspects of his own creative psyche: myth, the fleeting sublime, and the beginnings of an acute awareness of the poor and working classes. readers:

Margaret Russett Devin Griffiths

6

emphasis in english literature

readers:

David Treuer Anthony Kemp Sharon Lloyd

we tell stories , and stories make us human .

We use them to tell us what should be, what could be, and the human truth of what now is. We collect them over centuries, tell them to our children, and they define us as cultures. We change our stories, start new ones, rethink old ones and experiment as we shift our sense of who we are and what we value. Take away our stories, and there is not much left of us.

our academic programs BA English (Literature) BA English (Creative Writing) BA Narrative Studies Minor English Minor Minor

Narrative Structure Early Modern Studies

MA PhD PhD

Literary Editing and Publishing English Literature Creative Writing and Literature

connect with us @usc_english @usc_english /DornsifeEnglish dornsife.usc.edu/engl