Students who complete the English Honors Program graduate "With Distinction" in English. The program admits up to 40 students per year.
2012-13 Honors Cohort
Lucas McKinley Barash-David
faculty adviser: Kate Cummings
thesis:
Kelcie Anne Borton
faculty adviser: Kate Cummings
thesis:
Christopher Chance Campbell
faculty adviser: Kate Cummings
thesis:
Jon William Collier
faculty adviser: Juliet Shields
thesis: "Optimism - Analyzing literature through a rose colored lens."
Cassandra Louise Croft
faculty adviser: Kate Cummings
thesis:
Olivia Maria de Recat
faculty adviser: Juliet Shields
thesis:
Julie Feng
faculty adviser: Juliet Shields
thesis:
Jeremy Cameron Goheen
faculty adviser: Juliet Shields
thesis:
Alejandro Les Guardado
faculty adviser: Juliet Shields
thesis:
Thomas Teancum Gunn
faculty adviser: Juliet Shields
thesis: "Amazing Stories: Wonder as a Reader Response in the Contemporary Novel."
Shelby Morgan Handler
faculty adviser: Caroline Simpson
thesis:
Matthew Charles Hinnea
faculty adviser: Juliet Shields
thesis:
Joanne Huo Yuan Ho
faculty adviser: Kate Cummings
thesis:
Nicholas Benjamin Katleman
faculty adviser: Juliet Shields
thesis:
Samuel Kolodezh
faculty adviser: Juliet Shields
thesis:
Noah Jacob Lee-Engel
faculty adviser: Kate Cummings
thesis: "Decolonial Declensions."
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I am interested in examining the ways in which authors who self-identify with colonized sites position themselves - and the communities in which they are members and for whom they might be said to speak as proxies - as agents whose decisions and actions express subjectivity and ethical force. I will begin with Lisa Lowe's analysis of narrative as “an apparatus of European colonial rule," Audre Lorde's prescriptive assertion that “the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house," and Frantz Fanon's claim that “decolonization is always a violent event." A productive analogy may be drawn, I think, between the material violence that, in Fanon's estimation, the colonized must perpetrate upon the bodies of their oppressors in order to achieve liberation, and the figurative violence wreaked upon the corpus of the realistic aesthetic by decolonial authorship. This latter type of violence is most easily apprehended – in literary works, at least - in the various instantiations of that phenomena I will term “narrative transgressions” - e.g. the metaleptic intrusion of the until-then hypo-diegetic character Pucha at the end of Jessica Hagedorn's Dogeaters, or the similarly abrupt and equally enigmatic narrative interventions of Half-a-Crown in Sol T. Plaatje's Mhudi. If, as Lowe argues, modes of representation can be deployed as instruments of imperial initiative as effectively as military force, then the kind of narratological 'violence' just indicated might function tenably as an effective response to the oppression of an imposed or colonizing aesthetic. If, as Fanon claims, “Decolonization is truly the creation of new men...The 'thing' colonized becomes a man through the very process of liberation," then it is through such a praxis of violence that the colonized write themselves into the world, and incarnate a self capable of destabilizing that rupture or absence Homi Bhabha calls “the 'partial' presence” of the “colonial subject."
Tiffany Loh
faculty adviser: Juliet Shields
thesis:
Barbara Marie Marshall
faculty adviser: Kate Cummings
thesis:
Nicole Grace Mendoza Masangkay
faculty adviser: Kate Cummings
thesis:
Chris Brent Mulder
faculty adviser: Kate Cummings
thesis:
Catherine Cooke Opie
faculty adviser: Kate Cummings
thesis:
Geoffrey Aaron Paul
faculty adviser: Kate Cummings
thesis:
Reed James Perkins
faculty adviser: Juliet Shields
thesis:
Vincent Quang Pham
faculty adviser: Kate Cummings
thesis:
Anthea Piong
faculty adviser: Juliet Shields
thesis:
Samuel Philip Pizelo
faculty adviser: Juliet Shields
thesis:
McKenna Jean Princing
faculty adviser: Juliet Shields
thesis:
Leah Kathryn Rau
faculty adviser: Juliet Shields
thesis:
Sophia Alandra Siao
faculty adviser: Juliet Shields
thesis:
Chelsey L. Slattum
faculty advisers: Kate Cummings and Davinder Bhowmik
thesis:
Emilie Virginia Smith
faculty adviser: Juliet Shields
thesis:
Andrea M. Squires
faculty adviser: Kate Cummings
thesis:
Sarah Lucinda St Albin
faculty adviser: Juliet Shields
thesis:
Trevor Neil White
faculty adviser: Kate Cummings
thesis:
Jordan Douglas Whitlock
faculty adviser: Kate Cummings
thesis:
Annie Mie Yamashita
faculty adviser: Juliet Shields
thesis:
LingLing Zhang
faculty adviser: Kate Cummings
thesis:
Milo Umberto Zorzino
faculty adviser: Kate Cummings
thesis:
2011-12 Honors Cohort
David Christian Bahr
faculty adviser: Monika Kaup
thesis: "The Transnational Bildungsroman: A Historical Summary and Application
to Mexicotexan Borderland and Migrant Literature of the 20th Century."
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This paper investigates the transnational Bildungsroman,
a new genre that fully emerged in the 20th century (although there may have
been earlier antecedents). It can be described as a hybrid of two different
genres: the Bildungsroman, a German coming-of-age tale that dates back to
Morgenstern and Goethe, and the transnational novel that, by its depiction
of borderlands, migration, or diaspora extends across (in)formal boundaries
of land and time. My first goal is to investigate the historical foundations
and definition of the bildungsroman novel and the concept of Bildung. I then
test the usage of the transnational Bildungsroman genre as a heuristic tool
for understanding the transnational experience by performing close readings
of two transnational Mexicano novels, George Washington Gómez and The
Circuit by Américo Paredes and Francisco Jiménez, respectively. Based on my close readings, I hope to convincingly
demonstrate the value of applying the Bildungsroman to transnational literature by showing how, despite having unique experiences, transnational Bildungsroman characters share several qualities as coming-of-age youth. I also explore how a Bildungsroman reading of each of these novels reveals critical differences in the characters’ maturation
processes. Overall, it is my hope that the reader of this essay will more thoroughly
understand the current discourses of Bildung, the Bildungsroman, and transnational
literature, and how together they can be used to (1) debunk hegemonic notions
of borderland identity, and (2) call attention to the effects of transnational
displacement.
Tyler Leigh Britton
faculty adviser: Sydney Kaplan
thesis: "Woolf’s The
Waves: On Words."
Merzamie Sison Cagaitan
faculty adviser: Sydney Kaplan
thesis: "Transcending Fractured Geopolitical and Metaphoric Borders:
The
Mobile Trajectory of the Grotesque Female Body’s
Transformation from Object to Subject."
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My research conceptualizes the female body as a borderland
that is grotesque after being wounded and divided. I synthesize works by
Anzaldua and Bakhtin to project an image of a female body that bleeds when
grated against transnational forces and subjected to processes of dynamic
change. This representation allows the grotesque female body to be in continual
engagement with “acts of becoming”, and places it in a profoundly ambivalent position between the processes of renewal and decay. I invoke Hall’s diasporic identities to further argue that the never completed quality of the female body points to a profound discontinuity stemming from trauma induced by slavery, transportation, colonization, and migration. I critically analyze the experiences of fictional female characters in order to trace a mobile trajectory that begins with the female body’s forced transportation; continues with its wounding from displacements; and ends with its transformation. I want to uncover how the constant movements of the female body come to mold not only a body that is grotesque but also a mind characterized by a diasporic identity. I hypothesize that the female body’s porous quality and ability to overcome boundaries is what allows it to “live sin fronteras” and “be
a crossroads.”
Leah Audrey Roz Caglio
faculty adviser: Monika Kaup
Hannah Grace Campbell
faculty adviser: Sydney Kaplan
thesis: "Emily Dickinson: Religious Skepticism during the Second Great Awakening."
Alexander Catchings
faculty adviser: Monika Kaup
thesis: "Look Who's Laughing: Self-Making, Humor, and Subjectivity in the Neo-Slave Narrative."
Sarah J. Cole
faculty adviser: Sydney Kaplan
Casey Shea Dickson
faculty adviser: Sydney Kaplan
thesis: "Experience Structured by the Act of Looking: the Faulknerian Novel and Photographic Theory."
Caitlin Elizabeth Donnelly
faculty adviser: Sydney Kaplan
thesis: "Metafictional Dynamics of Grief and Coping in Turn-of-the-21st-Century
Literature."
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Examines grief and coping mechanisms of author-characters in three metafictional 21st century novels (Nicole Krauss's The
History of Love, Ian McEwan's Atonement, and Graham Swift's Waterland) and suggests that metafictional depictions of grief can be considered microcosms of fundamental postmodern queries.
Michael Charles Fulwiler
faculty adviser: Sydney Kaplan
thesis: "Baseball and Black Identity: Imagined Community, Baseball Literature,
and the Integration of Major League Baseball."
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Over the past century, sport has occupied a dominant position within American culture in producing ideas of racial difference while providing a powerful and public modality for forms of black cultural resistance. Ben Carrington, an American cultural theorist and leader in the growing field of sports sociology, argues that “sport reproduces race.” According to Carrington, in the past century, “sport has become an important if somewhat overlooked arena for the making of race beyond its own boundaries” (3). With baseball at the forefront, at least since the beginning of the 20th century, sports have provided “an opportunity for blacks throughout the African diaspora to gain recognition through physical struggle…for their humanity in a context where the structures of the colonial state continue to shape the ‘post/colonial’ present.” In this essay, I use Benedict Anderson’s theoretical model of “Imagined Communities,” reinforced by Stuart Hall’s model of cultural identity and diaspora, to argue for the way in which narratives of black baseball display and explain the shared sense of African American community and identity that was created and strengthened by baseball in the early 20th century.
Nicole Perrine Guenther
faculty adviser: Monika Kaup
thesis: "Reading George
Washington Gomez as a White Reader: Whiteness and Identification."
Dustin Cody Hansen
faculty adviser: Sydney Kaplan
thesis: "Imagination and the Role of Literature in Moral Progress During
the Victorian Era."
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My thesis was an application of John Dewey's final chapter
in his book Art as Experience titled "Art and Civilization" to Dickens' Hard
Times, Hardy's Jude the Obscure, and Lawrence's The Rainbow.
Stephanie Yi-Farng Hsieh
faculty adviser: Sydney Kaplan
thesis: "Perception, Creation, and the Space Between: A Consideration of Reality-Generating Devices in Science Fiction."
Elizabeth Caryn Hsu
faculty adviser: Sydney Kaplan
thesis: "Virginia Woolf's Metaphors for Thought, the Mind, and Consciousness."
Noelle Mina Jung
faculty adviser: Sydney Kaplan
thesis: "Asian American Youth Identity and Culture: Balancing Two Worlds
and Creating a New World."
Katie Alexandra Kowalski
faculty adviser: Sydney Kaplan
thesis: "A Double Consciousness: Fabricating Narrative Worlds in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Alastor;
or, the Spirit of Solitude and George MacDonald’s Phantastes: A Fairie
Romance for Men and Women."
Cherry Cui Hua Liu
faculty adviser: Monika Kaup
thesis: "The Internalization of Social Values in the Modern World: Tess
of the D'Urbervilles and George Washington Gómez."
Melanya Sophia Materne
faculty adviser: Candice Rai
thesis: "Teaching Literature for College and Career Readiness: A Response to the Common Core State Standards."
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My research as an undergraduate centered on the intersections between high school English language arts and English as a post-secondary field of study, between literature and rhetoric, composition, and critical thinking. During Winter 2012, in Frances McCue’s Honors course on teaching, I researched the new and widely adopted Common Core State Standards and the influence they will have on the arts in education. I conducted interviews with English Language Arts teachers in the Shoreline district in order to get a sense of how the Common Core was functioning “on the ground” in its first year of implementation, and if the standards changed the ratio of literary and informational (non-fiction) texts they assigned and taught. From this research, I learned how teachers negotiate between their personal philosophies of teaching and the expectations of administration and government, and concluded that although the Common Core would not likely change the amount of literature taught in the English Language Arts classroom, it might very well change the way educators framed literature’s relevance, usefulness, and relationship to skills such as composition, argumentation, and critical thinking.
During spring quarter 2012, I investigated this possibility as part of the research for my 32-page honors thesis and Undergraduate Research Symposium presentation. After performing a close analysis of the Common Core State Standards, I discovered that the Standards made the following assumptions about literary texts: they are not argumentative texts, they therefore cannot be used to teach students how to analyze and produce effective arguments, and they are therefore largely irrelevant to the Standards’ central goal of promoting College- and Career-Readiness. As a scholar of the humanities and an interdisciplinary writing tutor, I suspected that these assumptions were problematic and extended my research to investigate 1) the way postsecondary institutions framed literature’s relevance, usefulness, and relationship to skills such as composition, argument, and critical thinking, and 2) how a high school English Language Arts teacher could productively incorporate literature into the teaching of composition, argumentation, and critical thinking. After analyzing relevant academic literature from scholars of postsecondary education, composition, and literature, I concluded that the context of knowledge-production in postsecondary institutions demands not only the ability to write arguments, but also the habit of thinking argumentatively about everything, including literature. As a response to the discrepancy between how the Common Core and postsecondary institutions frame literature’s relevance and usefulness, I concluded my thesis by sketching out a theory for using a rhetorical framework to bridge the apparent gap between literature and argumentation.
On the whole, my undergraduate research allowed me to explore the issues I care about most as an aspiring high school English Language Arts teacher and enriched my understanding of why the study of literature matters.
Alaska Lea McGann
faculty adviser: Monika Kaup
thesis: "Gaps in Transnational Translation: (Mis)Understanding Relationships in Martinez’s Mother
Tongue."
Jessie Weiling McMillan
faculty adviser: Joseph Butwin
thesis: "'The Woman Problem': Female Internalization of Societal Pressures
and the Rise of the New Woman in 19th Century England."
Sarah Carroll Neumann
creative writing faculty adviser: Shawn Wong
creative thesis: “Francis and the Perfect Candy.”
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My creative thesis was a story called “Francis and the Perfect Candy.” It was a children's story. About death and sugar.
Shelby Ann Parkin
faculty adviser: Monika Kaup
Greta Christine Pittenger
faculty adviser: Monika Kaup
Bailey Elyse Rahn
faculty advisers: Sydney Kaplan and Jan Sjåvik
thesis: "Trolls, Transition and Tradition: Rewriting Norwegian Identity
in Immigrant and Homesteading Literature."
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This thesis analyzes Norwegian identity and cultural preservation by studying important pieces of national literature. By looking as far back as medieval Norse documents and continuing through 19th century emigration novels, this thesis tracks the development of the Norwegian “sense of place,” a dual identity rooted in both history and homeland.
Prompted by the July 22, 2011 terrorism in Oslo that sought to reinstate a traditional, homogenous Norwegian nation, I hoped to lay the groundwork for future investigations of cultural preservation. I hope to resume this research in my Norwegian thesis this spring by analyzing contemporary attitudes of immigration in Norway.
Shane Christopher Sherod-Clyburn
creative writing faculty adviser: Pimone Triplett
creative thesis: "Exploration: The Poetic Legacy of Gerard Manley Hopkins."
Danielle Erin Skredsvig
faculty adviser: Monika Kaup
Samara Lynn Surface
faculty adviser: Sydney Kaplan
Katherine Sarah Tacke
creative writing faculty adviser: Pimone Triplett
Ajjana Thairungroj
faculty adviser: Monika Kaup
thesis: "An Exploration of Metaphysical Loneliness and Relationships
in Sputnik
Sweetheart and Kitchen."
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This paper explores the notion of existential alienation and metaphysical isolation of the individual, a core sentiment in Japanese post-modern literature, and how it operates in Haruki Murakami’s Sputnik
Sweetheart and Banana Yoshimoto’s Kitchen. I propose to argue that, though the sentiments of loneliness and alienation permeate the novels, the individual can still seek conciliation and ease the burden of existence through 1) achieving Moustakas’ concept of authentic communication and establishing connections with others, and 2) taking pleasure in small, seemingly insignificant matters in life, rather than attempting to futilely seek for a deeper essence in existence itself, an idea derived from a close reading of Camus’ “The Myth of Sisyphus.” This paper also addresses the paradox that, though forming relationships with others can ease metaphysical isolation, a large portion of the primary text’s sense of loneliness itself derives from the character’s realization that they cannot completely rely solely on those bonds as solutions to an existence without alienation.
Esther-Maria Tkacz
faculty adviser: Monika Kaup
thesis: "Under a Spell:
The fantastic tale of Orlando, its chronotope and its relation to A
Room of One’s Own.
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The novel, Orlando: a biography by Virginia Woolf
is a modernist tale of fantasy that works to establish a utopian view for female
writers. My explication of Orlando utilizes the concepts of fairytale
structure, the marvelous and Luis Brandao's explanation of Michael Bakhtin's
chronotope. The novel was written around the same time-frame as Woolf's extended
essay, A
Room of One's Own, which discusses how women should develop a new writing
style and invokes the use of imagination to support her thesis. My essay
discusses the intertextuality between Orlando and Room but primarily uses
Orlando as the framework to explain and justify Woolf's argument expressed
in both works.
Amanda Rose Whitbeck
faculty adviser: Monika Kaup
thesis: "Identity and Agency in The Fourth Century."
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I looked at Édouard Glissant's novel, which follows six generations of two rival families from Africa living in Martinique. One family is enslaved in the first few generations, whereas the other family lives freely away from the European colonists. I discussed the concepts of "root identity" and "relation identity" (as theorized by Glissant) within these families, and how each correlates with agency and perceptions of power.
Stephanie Rose Whitney
faculty adviser: Monika Kaup
Sher-Min Faith Yang
faculty adviser: Sydney Kaplan
thesis: “'This Inner Time
is Our Wife': Time, Separation and Love in Three Contemporary Novels."
english honors graduates