A Quick Look: English 404

With a staggering array of topics, seniors take to the roundtable to work on theses

by Tony Moore

March 20, 2013

The archives in East College house previous years' ENGL 404 theses. Once bound, this year's collection will join them.

Bilbo Baggins and a gaggle of Heathers walk hand-in-hand with first ladies. Peter Pan and Jonathan Swift are discussing queer theory and men who read Jane Austen, as Jay-Z and Robert Frost wax lyrical on capitalism and fairy tales. And Lady Bracknell may or may not be teaching a Sneech.

Such is a day in the collective life of 31 senior English majors as they discuss each other's theses as part of ENGL 404.

In place for more than 20 years now, Dickinson's senior thesis workshop, English 404, is a yearlong exercise in writing, editing and peer review not often experienced by undergraduates. When the program was created, "We wanted students to be able to synthesize everything they'd learned in the major and act as independent scholars," says Sharon O'Brien, professor of English and American studies, one of the vanguards of the class.

As it turns out, acting as an independent scholar is as rigorous as it sounds. "Writing a 50-page paper is definitely daunting," says Taylor Kobran '13, who is currently in the workshop. "The 404 process is designed to make this as stress-free an experience as possible, though. It's been a challenge, but I definitely enjoy it."

The below list reflects the final title of each paper and the titles when the papers were in their infancy.

Julia Eager

Early title: British Society's Treatment of Nature and Its Impact on British Character in Tolkien's The Hobbit 

Final title: The Hobbit: J.R.R. Tolkien's Reaction to Britain's Treatment of the Environment

Taylor Kobran

Early title:  Fight Like a Girl: Power and Violence in The Virgin Suicides  and Heathers 

Final title:

Emily Good

Early title:  Restrictions of Gendered Rhetoric: An Exploration of the Language of First Ladies

Final title: FLOTUS: Fixed Language of the Unspoken Stateswomen: A Study of the Restricted Rhetoric of a First Lady

Kate Good

Early title:  F. Scott Fitzgerald as Prophet of Decline

Final title: American Vitality: The Recursive Redemption of Fitzgerald's Tragic Hero

Jesse Fleischner

Early title:  Money and Corruption of the American Dream in Bonfire of the Vanities  and Wall Street 

Final title:  The American Dream and Money in Three Parts: Horatio Alger's Ragged Dick, Oliver Stone's Wall Street, and Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities

Marissa Berkley

Early title: Remembering the House of Commons: The Convergence of Feminist Ideologies in Two of Woolf's War Pieces

Final title: Forgetting the House of Commons: The Interconnectedness of War and Feminism in Virginia Woolf's "A Society"

Tessa Bowler

Early title: Philadelphia  and AIDS Activism

Final title: How to Represent a Plague: The Changing Goals of Portraying AIDS in Film and Television

Sara Fowler

Early title:  Contrasting Treatments of Inter-War Aesthete and Emergent Queer Identity in Brideshead Revisited  and Love in a Cold Climate 

Final title: The Other in a Cold Climate: Nancy Mitford's Love in a Cold Climate as an Assertion of Authorial Independence and Moral Maturity

Justin Taylor

Early title: Jay-Z and Robert Frost: The Effects of Capitalism on Two American Lyricists

Final title: Unchanged

Jeff Nelson

Early title:  Visions of Victorian Childhood

Final title: Visions of Victorian Childhood: Finding Balance between Restriction and Chaotic Freedom

Adam Krosnick

Early title: Pale Fire  and Nabokov's Hidden Patterns of Meaning

Final title:Pale Fire: Artistic Appropriation and the Quest for Literary Immortality

Chris Striker

Early title:  The Iconography of Bones: Relics and Legitimacy, Fiction and Reality

Final title: Saints' Bones or Sinner's Words?: Rhetorical Destabilization, Chaucer's Pardoner, and Boccaccio's Frate Cipolla

Sarah Pangia

Early title:  Conrad and James Calibrate the Artistry of Agency

Final title: James and Conrad Calculate Artistic Agency

Jamie Sweeney

Early title:  Lost Boys and Girls: Peter Pan and the Vampire Tradition

Final title: Unchanged

David Kirk

Early title:  Swift's Cannibalistic Obsession

Final title: Representations of Anglo-Irish Relations in Swift's Gulliver's Travels and A Modest Proposal

Ariel Klatskin

Early title:  Fifty Shades of Problematic Attitudes Towards BDSM and Women

Final title: Unchanged

Matthew Weddig

Early title:  Can Lady Bracknell Teach a Sneech?: The Shared Educational Mechanisms of Satire and Children's Literature as Seen in Oscar Wilde and Dr. Seuss

Final title: Can Lady Bracknell Teach a Sneetch?: The Learning-Relearning Spectrum and the Shared Mechanisms of Satire and Children's Literature as Seen in Oscar Wilde and Dr. Seuss

Mary Nolte

Early title:  Photography and the Intersection of Fact and Fiction in Hemon's The Lazarus Project 

Final title: Hopelessly Fragmented: A Psychoanalytical Analysis of Aleksandar Hemon's The Lazarus Project

Sarah Ganong

Early title:  Untitled environmental project

Final title: Rewriting the Apocalypse

Audrey Scott

Early title:  Jane's Gentlemen: An Analysis of Jane Austen Male Readership

Final title: Jane Austen With Her Boots on: Making Meaning Through Minor Characters in Kipling's 'The Janeites'

Hannah Levin

Early title:  In 1995, a Protagonist Is Born

Final title: The Great American Fairytale: The Wizard of Oz and Wicked as Representations of Gender Inequality in America

Chloe Golod

Early title:  The Unspoken Language of Sports: A Literary Comparison of Twelfth Night, She's the Man  and the Effects of Title IX

Final title: Separate but Unequal: A Contemporary Comparison on Shakespearean Cross-Dress, Women in Sport and the Existing Hegemonic Structure in Athletics

Christina Socci

Early title: A Suitable Tongue: Examining Language and Identity in Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy 

Final title: "Learn My Language": Exploring Translation as a Critique of National Identity in Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy

Elizabeth Harvey

Early title:  Untitled cancer poetry project

Final title: Writing Towards Connection in Contemporary Cancer Poetry

Joseph O'Neill

Early title:  Silence Speaks for the Ashes: The National Language of Mourning in the Poetry of September 11th

Final title: "A Vision Through the Smoke"; The Recovery of Poetry in Rowan Ricardo Phillips' The Ground

Kaitlyn Jurewicz

Early title:  Dredged up From the Unconscious: Stream of Consciousness and the Reception of Patrick White

Final title: "The Solitary Land of Individual Experience"; Landscape and Psychology in The Aunt's Story

Kristen Champagne

Early title:  A Comparison of Beloved and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Morality, Canon Formation and the Black Female Identity

Final title: A Commentary on the Melancholia of Slavery in Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Toni Morrison's Beloved

Jessica Cooper

Early title:  Once Upon a Time: The Evolution of Femininity Through Fairy Tales

Final title: Holding Out for a Heroine: Brave's Failure as a Feminist Film

Helen Hopper

Early title:  The Formulation of Queer Identity: E.M. Forster's Maurice  and Alison Bechdel's Fun House 

Final title: First We Look in Mirrors. Later We Use Each Other": Uses of the Mirror in the Queer Archive in E.M. Forster's Maurice and Alison Bechdel's Fun Home

Emily Arndt

Early title:  It Will Shock You How Much This Never Happened: Mad Men, Memory and Myths of the 1960s

Final title: The Personal, the Political, and Peggy Olson: Mad Men's Misrepresentation of 1960s Feminism

Alison Pogust

Early title:  Untitled Edith Wharton/House of Mirth  project

Final title: Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth:  The Futility of Society
  

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