SNHU Academic Archive

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Looking For A Hero: The Development of the Christian Hero in English Literature
(Southern New Hampshire University, 2021-02-23) Tucker, Rafique Hakeem; Jones, Stephen; Lee, Chritsopher
The history of English literature is a history of cultural collision, fusion, and reappropriation. When the Germanic tribes who invaded England in the 5th century were converted to Christianity, their pagan ethos was reframed through a Christian lens, and a heroic literary and cultural tradition was born that reflected their spiritual and cultural outlook. The fusion of Germanic paganism and Christianity gave birth to the body of Anglo-Saxon literature, particularly Beowulf and “The Dream of the Rood.” As the Christianity of England matured, the Welsh legends of Arthur and the Round Table were appropriated to fashion a more mature heroic medieval heroic ethos, as expressed in such works as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Using the lens of New Historicism, this paper will trace the development of this heroic tradition, from the martial heroism of Beowulf, to the more explicitly spiritual heroism of Sir Gawain.
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Onward Toward a New Horizon with Junot Díaz’s Oscar Wao
(Southern New Hampshire University, 2020-06-25) Burdett, Cherene LeeAnne; Harrison, Marlen; Lee, Christopher
Most research on Junot Díaz’s Oscar Wao has been explored on diasporic negatives highlighting on an infinite regression in dictatorship and the resistance against these dictatorships in forming an authentic identity between conflicting cultures. Diasporic subjects are doomed to be assimilated and thrown back into the Hegelian rubric. What has been underexplored is the pull away from the negative nature of diaspora in creating a new consciousness in exploring transnational literature. I am pursuing this research because I want to highlight on how feminine recovery unpowers this infinite regression in creating a more modern approach in examining cultures and genders living between conflicting borders. I'm using Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands and Hélène Cixous’s Newly Born Woman because both theorists illuminate how the text performs as a mestiza who battles between opposing borderlands synthesizing a new consciousness within the divine feminine. I'm applying this theory by examining the text’s narrative, character identity, and language structures. This research is significant because embracing borderlands enacts feminine progression through difference which is significant in a growing cultural and gendered world. Future research on this topic should examine how transnational literature forms alliances, juxtaposed with other cultural literature, in sharing and borrowing from each other as a way to evolve.
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Magical Feminism: The Manifestation and Evolution of the Witch Under the Male Gaze
(Southern New Hampshire University, 2020-10-28) Rapson, Sarah Beth; Harrison, Marlen; Lee, Christopher
Since her fabrication, the Witch has been suffocated by the masculine voice and mode. Beginning with the witch-hunts, her social narrative has been completely dictated by men. All predicating texts were written by men, for men to use against women. From Macbeth to the King James Bible, from Glinda to Galinda, from Carrie to Sue, and from Myrtle to Madison, men have defined, silenced, and appropriated Witches’ voices in order to maintain social hegemony and hierarchy - man’s supremacy over women. Very rarely has a woman’s witchy voice been heard when set against overpowering patriarchal domination. While women have written Witches in the shadows, it is the male voice that has historically defined her as a threat to society, i.e., patriarchy. Women critics such as Matilda Joslyn Gage have defended the Witch as a source of Female power and an obvious display of brutal patriarchal persecution, but the literary Witch and her accompanying images that define public perception remain dominated by men, trapping her in a cyclical fallacy of female autonomy, fabricated by men. Through a Feminist theory of male gaze with New Historicism approach, this thesis will examine the manifestation and evolution of the Witch, starting with the Witch’s origin and connection to birth and death through Lilith. Next, it will provide an overview of the Witch in literary and visual mediums during European witchcraze in order to show its influence on William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the King James Bible, and Christian rhetoric, codifying the social perception of Witches’ - and thereby all women’s - inherent wickedness. Turning to the first modern Feminist wave, Matilda Josyln Gage’s treatise Women, Church, and State, brings forward and defends the Witch as an intelligently educated women who threatened the patriarchy by living outside the bounds of male influence and paints Witches as victims of masculine fear. Her treatise proposed an image of a kind, intelligent Witch, persecuted and murdered for her female intelligence. The legacy of Gage’s good Witch lives through her son-in-law’s children’s book The Wonderful Land of Oz. The words asked by the Good Witch of the North upon Dorothy’s arrival opened the door to represent women with power and magic as beings of goodness. However, L. Frank Baum’s lasting legacy is the Wicked Witch of the West, further solidified by Margaret Hamilton’s iconic performance on screen. In the second Feminist wave, this thesis will explore the use of Exodus in Carrie to show how the King James Bible is still being used to justify and persecute women as Witches out of fear and hate. In the third Feminist wave, the Wicked Witch of the West is reborn through Gregory Maguire’s Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, which explores the backstory and motivations of the Wicked Witch, exploring both her obsession with her sister’s shoes and her green hue. These Witches, echoes of the images of Witches throughout history, are further examples of the Witch under the male gaze. Ushering in the fourth Feminist wave, Witches have finally broken through patriarchal male gaze and limitations, opening new possibilities for a thoroughly Feminine literary structure. Ariel Gore’s We Were Witches is an extraordinary exemplar of the potential literary creation that happens when a Witch takes hold and fully claims her witchy power and forges an entirely new, magical literary structure - defining the Witch as a figure of women’s fortitude, love, and survival.
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Telepaths, Social Constructs, and Panoptical Power in Octavia Butler’s Patternist Series
(Southern New Hampshire University, 2017-09-05) Matthews, Aisha Alia; Schiffman, Marc
Taking Octavia Butler’s Patternist series as its primary source of inquiry, this paper examines the ontology of power, intersubjectivity, and social reality through the science and speculative fiction tropes of body-swapping and self-transmutation. Butler’s re-invocation of American slavery opens new possibilities for understanding the nature of being and the definition of humanity, while encouraging new perspectives in postmodernist thinking, most notably centered on the belief in the socially constructed nature of identity. More broadly, this paper places such dialogues in conversation with theories on Foucaldian power structures, Cartesian duality, and phenomenology, ultimately concluding that the socially constructed nature of the self obfuscates the truly human desires, such as that for power, which transcend the demographic differences defining current social realities.
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Where There Is Heroism There Is Hope
(Southern New Hampshire University, 2021-03-01) Schmidt, Emily; Jackson, Jennie; Lee, Christopher
Dystopian fiction, in many ways, reflects a broken, modern society that craves individuality, aches for purpose, longs for unity, and yearns for a sign of relief when there seems to be no hope in sight. With an ever changing, all consuming, life sucking, obsession with media today, coupled with the loss of individuality in a world that tries too desperately to sell the idea of uniformity for the common good, dystopian texts present an interesting perspective of the human existence. This paper seeks to add to the ongoing discourse on the human existence within the world of literature, which includes a close examination of several examples of dystopian fiction that demonstrate opposition toward modern reliance on consumer capitalism, criticizes mass manipulation through oppressive media propaganda, and calls for a response to an instinctive obligation for renewal of the human existence. George Orwell’s 1984, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, and Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games reveal an unsettling, yet realistic and unfiltered view of the human existence with a modernistic response that attempts to restore peace and balance to the human experience through the audacious actions of an antihero. Central to this examination are the fears and anxieties exposed in dystopian fiction that ask readers to consider life’s purpose, showing that without the ability to think and act freely, humanity is doomed to a life that is void of individuality without needed social change.