Honors Projects

The Apartment

Jeesun Choi — Mon, 20 May 2013 12:36:04 PDT

Lenn never considered herself one of the foreigners in Bangkok. She believed that she was different from her privileged peers at international schools, the posse of multinational corporation workers and the unwitting tourists with a colonial mindset. But when she meets Jon Hayes Wichasak, a wandering luk khrueng, her conviction starts to crumble. She begins to question her motives behind returning to Bangkok and her desire for intimacy. Set on the road that stretches from the Thai-Cambodian border to the Chao Praya River, the novella explores expatriation in the twenty-first century.

Ausencia: A Novella

Sarah Mintz — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 12:25:33 PST

This honors thesis is an extended work of fiction that explores the effects of trauma on two generations of Argentine Jews. When Daniel Susterman is kidnapped by the government in 1970s Buenos Aires, his wife Marcela tries desperately to find him and bring him home safely. In the US nearly 40 years later, 14 year-old Nico begins to question what prompted his parents' feud with his grandmother, challenging their policy of silence about the past. Through alternating storylines, Ausencia explores the concepts of loss and family secrets band begs the question: are some memories better left buried?

Needle to the Eye

Angus McLinn — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 12:25:32 PST

Needle to the Eye is a collection of short stories that take place in the skeletal forests, dying small towns, and rural wastelands of the upper Midwest. The collection stares down the monstrous, absurd, magical, and above all uncomfortable aspects of the region right up until the point of contact and beyond, examining the character of those who dwell on the fringes of America's geographic center. Drunken funeral singers, a NTSB crash investigator, violent criminals, a disgraced beauty queen, and others cast adrift in the sprawling Great Plains and North Woods battle for salvation, acceptance, and dignity in these haunting tales of No Coast survival.

Blueprints: poems

Dylan Garity — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 11:55:27 PST

Each of the poems in Blueprints explores questions of creation: artistic and interpersonal, religious and scientific. As a writer whose work has often been based in performance, and thus explicitly focused on the relationship between author and text, i have long been fascinated by these questions: where does my voice end and the poem's begin? How do they influence each other? How does a creation, artistic or otherwise, shape its creator? Working on the page during this Honors Project has given me the opportunity to explore these questions in a more nuanced light. Many of the poems in Blueprints inform and interact with their own writing process. In the Lovers series, the characters within the poems actively create, shape and comment on the language of the poems themselves. In the Inventor poems, I explore the direct interplay between creator and creation, often giving the creation the stronger voice of the two, elevating its perception of the creator rather than the other way around. Other poems, such as Generation-- and The Familiar Names in the Credits/Undress the City Streets experiment with visual forms that force the reader to reconsider and recontextualize the language and structure of the poem each time they read it. Still others, such as Inheritance and Integration, work within more narrative forms and explore questions of creation through the progression of those narratives. My exploration of these questions was primarily aided by studying the work of a variety of contemporary page and performance poets, including Matthea Harvey, Jeffrey McDaniel, Karyn McGlynn, Anis Mojgani, and Sam Cook, all of whom have focused on similar questions in their own writing. McDaniel, for example, often uses his metaphors to comment on his own position as poet and creator. Mojgani utilizes shifting speakers to explore the relationship between himself, his characters, and his language. This project has been the culmination of four years of study at Macalester. I have drawn on experience not only from my Creative Writing and English classes, but also from my involvement in other academic departments and extracurricular opportunities made possible by the college. I look forward to continuing these explorations in my post-graduation work.

The Limits of Self and Sovereign: Performing Failure in Nabokov's Pale Fire and Rushdie's Midnight Children

Michael Ferut — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 11:50:33 PST

This project examines Vladimir Nabokov's 1962 novel, Pale Fire, and Salman Rushdie's 1981 novel, Midnight's Children, in conjunction with literary and political theorists including Mikhail Bahktin, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, and Achille Mbembe. Using Bahktin's assertion that the novel is "necessary incomplete," I examine how the authors' uses of irony and framing seeks but ultimately fails to achieve a complete, enduring representation of selves. By analyzing how this failure leads to the application of sovereign power - even its violent extreme, "necropower" - I argue that the novels revise the unified, teleological narrative structures of Bahktin and Benjamen. While not dismissing or attempting to transcend the problems of authorship, sovereignty, and teleological histories, the novels present them as questions which must always be reassessed.

The End of Her

Kerry Alexander — Mon, 21 May 2012 08:53:07 PDT

The End of Her is a collection of poetry that centers on ideas of celebrity, nostalgia, pain and healing, and collective memory. The poems depict the lives and times of tragic women: from Eve to Amy Winehouse. The project touches on both the real and the imagined in examining what it means to be famously tragic, as well as what it means to be a spectator of demise. Interwoven autobiographical pieces reveal the relationship between individual memory and shared history, as the collection positions personal accounts of love and loss in conversation with some of the world’s best-known stories.

Threnody

Amy Fitzgerald — Thu, 10 May 2012 12:35:21 PDT

Vera Anholt thinks of herself simply as a gentile with a conscience. But as a rescuer of Jews during World War II--and, later, the second wife of a Holocaust survivor--Vera faces choices and consequences that are anything but simple. She confronts the moral ambiguities inherent in even her seemingly noble role, the reality of lasting trauma stacked against hope for redemption, and the question of whether her actions ultimately make a difference. This honors thesis, which is also a "song of mourning," explores an overwhelming historical tragedy through the lens of a fictional couple's shared--and unshared--struggles.

Remembering and Recording the Vietnam War

Margaret Brunk — Fri, 04 May 2012 13:38:36 PDT

In this project I consider the process of narrative construction in Vietnam War memoirs and oral histories, with special emphasis on Michael Herr’s Dispatches, and I examine the interaction between traditional narrative norms and the irregularities of the Vietnam War. Beginning with an exploration of the unique nature of war stories, I discuss the difficulty of communicating the war experience. I then explore the interplay of public accusation with authorial confession and justification, arguing that the desire to explain the particular conditions of the war informs not only the content but also the language and structure of the texts.

Joy Home

Jeffrey C. Henebury — Mon, 02 May 2011 11:12:52 PDT

Meet Edgar Jones, the fast-talking, woman-wooing septuagenarian with a penchant for sticking his nose where it doesn’t belong. But when a resident at his nursing home nearly dies under suspicious circumstances, Edgar’s the only one asking the tough questions. Who pushed Frank, the depressed resident with a secret, over the edge? What’s Maria, the brunette who likes to water her plants with gin, hiding? When is Edgar’s daughter coming to visit? And why the hell isn’t there anything better on TV? Noir meets nursing home as Edgar struggles to find some answers—and to keep those answers from slipping away.

Outhouses, Plant Monsters,and the Nowhere City: The Grotesque Body

Mark Verdin — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 08:54:57 PST

I consider Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of the grotesque representation of the body in dialogue with literary and critical works of the twentieth century. Focusing on its fundamental traits - openness, heterogeneity, connectivity, multiplicity, and historic becoming - I trace a selective genealogy of the grotesque. James Joyce's Ulysses, Paul Auster's City of Glass, and Alan Moore's run on Swamp Thing are analyzed for their respective takes on the human body, the body of the city, and the body of Nature, each of which is understood as grotesque in its own particular way.

The Gala

Anna R. Joranger — Mon, 10 May 2010 11:40:41 PDT

This honors thesis is an extended work of fiction, in which I utilize the dystopian or anti-utopian genre to explore themes of alternate social realities and the complexities of human, especially inter-family, relationships. The near-future society depicted in this novella attempts to eliminate personal agency and decision-making by replacing it with random chance; marriage matches, housing decisions, and careers are all blindly selected out of a box by each citizen. The story follows 22-year-old Lily Pierce as she completes her Gala, or marriage ceremony, and experiences the trials of life in a society that claims itself as a utopia.

Anxiety de la historia: Understanding the Roots of Spanglish in the Texts of Junot Díaz

Kelsey A. Shanesy — Wed, 05 May 2010 12:52:36 PDT

In exploring Junot Díaz’s use of Spanglish, I propose that Díaz is driven by the anxiety of history—a phenomenon similar to the anxiety of influence, as articulated by Harold Bloom, but which focuses on the role of the Latino minority in this postmodern moment. I compare Díaz’s texts to Piri Thomas’s autobiography Down These Mean Streets, one of the original texts to utilize Spanglish, and Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed, a satirical novel about minority culture. Díaz’s vision of a future, Spanglish-speaking America is revealed to be the ultimate outcome of the anxiety of history’s influence on Díaz.

The Definitive Guide to the Downfall of P&W

Alice M. Anigacz — Tue, 04 May 2010 08:22:03 PDT

This honors thesis is a fictional work that tells of the downfall of P&W DNA. It utilizes multiple narrators, including a blonde bombshell, a deceptive recent P&W hire, and a rabbit, to show how a combination of flawed personalities led to the demise of a corrupt DNA testing company. The plot mostly follows Aaron Kelley, a P&W-agent-cum-detective, who is attempting to avenge his partner’s death by taking down gubernatorial candidate Lyle Saunders. Combining elements of classic noir with a modern comical tone and a mixture of voices, this work asks the question: does the truth really matter?

The Things I Wish I Could Tell You When You Cry The Most: Stories

Celeste A. Prince — Mon, 03 May 2010 06:11:29 PDT

My collection of short stories explores the formation of identity for Black characters while living and working in predominantly-white settings. Suburban neighborhoods, schools, and other supposed “neutral” sites – for example, restaurants, public transportation, and night clubs – can be welcoming, uncomfortable or hostile spaces for people of color when they are the only ones represented in the room. Through topics such as passing, assimilation, and interracial relationships, my project asks how people develop a Black identity in the absence of Blackness and how this absence can both positively and negatively affect later interactions with people of color.

The "Salient Point": Henry James and the New Woman in Portrait of a Lady and The Wings of the Dove

Adam Troldahl — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 10:54:24 PST

In the nineteenth century, gender relations were rooted in social dogma that promoted separate spheres. This project explores the redefining of gender relations at the turn of the century that enabled the rise of the New Woman, who transcended her domestic sphere and ventured into new geographic and social spaces. For Henry James, geographical mobility connotes social progress, and textual/geographic thresholds and passages track representations of the New Woman's body in both Portrait of a Lady and The Wings of the Dove. James depicts the New Woman's body as alternately a spectacle on public display and a pathologized, dying subject.

Mason Bonnereau

Tyson Morgan — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 07:18:47 PST

Showstoppers: An Original Screenplay

Cassedy Mahrer — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 07:12:39 PST

Henry James and the Performace of Women

Alison Liss — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 07:06:03 PST

The Conscript

Timothy Lehman — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 06:59:34 PST

Young Love

Legacy Eyes-of-the-Moon Russell — Tue, 20 May 2008 08:23:43 PDT

“Young Love” explores the meaning of love and youth within a contemporary framework. At what point did young love lose its projected verdure, stepping away from the sphere of the naïve, the candied, the untouched, into a darker, more monstrous and sullied realm, resembling its actual antonym—hate? Where is the divide? It is this intricate discourse which simultaneously revolves around and shatters the concept of “young love”. This work investigates the symbolic migrations between the many worlds that compose one’s identity, and the emotional and psychological landmarks that are integral parts of coming into one’s socio-sexual being.