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