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- Item"Man is driven in total by his insecurities": Tony Soprano's Castration(2022) Martens, KairoHBO’s massively successful and influential crime drama series The Sopranos helped to usher in a new wave of complex, boundary-pushing narratives by confronting audiences with a fresh and subversive portrait of crime, family, and the legacy of Freud in American culture at the turn of the 21st century. The series centers around the daily life of mobster Tony Soprano as he navigates the challenges posed to his business by the RICO Act, to his family and marriage by his double life, and to his mental health by his deteriorating sense of power and identity. Previous analyses of the series have recognized that Freudian psychoanalysis is a major theme in the series as Tony visits psychiatrist Dr. Jennifer Melfi to find the root causes of his depression and anxiety, but few have produced psychoanalytic readings of the series itself. Through a scene-by-scene analysis of the series pilot through a Freudian lens, this essay examines how the characterization of Tony (and others) engages with the Freudian themes of castration anxiety and the Oedipus complex in a self-conscious manner and comes to the conclusion that Tony’s neurosis is driven by an unconscious resentment of his mother.
- ItemMother, maiden, matron: the origin of Morgan le Fay, as it pertains to Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur(2022) A., Y.The origin of the Arthurian mythos has long engrossed scholars and enthusiasts alike for centuries, and, perhaps, no character has bewildered scholars more than Morgan le Fay. Throughout the many iterations of the Arthurian legend, Morgan le Fay has been characterized in incompatible ways; as both an ally and foe to King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. In Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur, this juxtaposed characterization is fully established as he characterizes Morgan le Fay as both King Arthur's chief antagonist as well as the figure who welcomes him into Avalon at the end of the text. This essay serves to exam the origin of Morgan le Fay as a literary character and, by examining and understanding her influences, justify her conflciting and inconsistent portrayls in the Arthurian continuum, specifically within Malory's epic poem.
- ItemTarrying with trauma while improvising gender in Alice Munro’s 1978 collection Who Do You Think You Are?(2022) Sorensen, Brianna; Robinson, JackAlice Munro’s 1978 collection of linked stories, Who Do You Think You Are? enacts what Lorraine York calls Munro’s theory of fiction as “tarrying with difficult emotions and knowledges.” Judith Butler’s seminal 1988 theory of gender performativity postulated that improvising gender incurs obvious and covert social punishments, but that performing gender includes the possibility of innovation. Rose, the protagonist, succumbs to and contests norms imposed on women in the southwestern Ontario township of Huron County during the 1940s to 1970s. This thesis explores Rose surviving punitive social conventions in her cultural context which are contiguous with trauma. For Rose, failure to conform is what Jack Halberstam defines as “queer failure”: it is a triumph of personal authenticity over gender essentialism and an acceptance of human imperfection. In the journey towards self-knowledge, Rose’s surviving trauma and defying gender scripts cause the “sticky affects” of shame and humiliation identified by Amelia DeFalco; the feeling that women are not afforded hope; and, in stressful situations, emotional dissociation and emotional economies, as identified by DeFalco and York. Rose’s marriage fails because of a sadomasochistic power struggle. Rose tarries with disconnection from others and from self; however, she innovates gender and subverts the intergenerational cycle of victimvictimizer by achieving a sense of community and strengthening personal authenticity, which Margaret Atwood says is, for “Munro’s women,” “an essential element, like air.”
- ItemTarrying with trauma while improvising gender in Alice Munro’s 1978 collection Who Do You Think You Are?(2022) Sorensen, Brianna; Robinson, JackAlice Munro’s 1978 collection of linked stories, Who Do You Think You Are? enacts what Lorraine York calls Munro’s theory of fiction as “tarrying with difficult emotions and knowledges.” Judith Butler’s seminal 1988 theory of gender performativity postulated that improvising gender incurs obvious and covert social punishments, but that performing gender includes the possibility of innovation. Rose, the protagonist, succumbs to and contests norms imposed on women in the southwestern Ontario township of Huron County during the 1940s to 1970s. This thesis explores Rose surviving punitive social conventions in her cultural context which are contiguous with trauma. For Rose, failure to conform is what Jack Halberstam defines as “queer failure”: it is a triumph of personal authenticity over gender essentialism and an acceptance of human imperfection. In the journey towards self-knowledge, Rose’s surviving trauma and defying gender scripts cause the “sticky affects” of shame and humiliation identified by Amelia DeFalco; the feeling that women are not afforded hope; and, in stressful situations, emotional dissociation and emotional economies, as identified by DeFalco and York. Rose’s marriage fails because of a sadomasochistic power struggle. Rose tarries with disconnection from others and from self; however, she innovates gender and subverts the intergenerational cycle of victimvictimizer by achieving a sense of community and strengthening personal authenticity, which Margaret Atwood says is, for “Munro’s women,” “an essential element, like air.” Presentation notes.
- ItemTextual odalisque: from Roxolana to Hürrem Sultan(2022) A., Y.; Krys, SvitlanaMy thesis examines the trajectory of literary depictions of the enigmatic figure of Hürrem Sultan (otherwise known as Roxolana, circa. 1502-1558), the legal wife of Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent and the first Haseki Sultan, or Imperial Consort, of the Ottoman Empire. It will first consider Hürrem’s emergence on the European stage as a product of Orientalist discourse, then focus in detail on her more recent Ukrainian and Turkish cultural depictions. To assist my analysis, I will employ the theory of re-Orientalism, which is defined by Lisa Lau as an approach that determines “how cultural producers with eastern affiliations come to terms with an orientalized East, whether by complying with perceived expectations of western readers, by playing with them or by discarding them altogether." I will examine the Ukrainian opera Roksoliana (by Denys Sichynsky, 1911) and two contemporary Turkish productions, the television show Muhteşem Yüzyıl (The Magnificent Century, 2011, Tims Productions) and the play Gayri Resmi Hurrem (Unofficial Roxelana, by Ozen Yula, 2003) to show how they question, critique, and dispel Orientalist tropes associated with Roxolana in the western European imagination.