Humanities Honors Program

“And where the words of women are crying to be heard, we must, each of us, recognize our responsibility to seek those words out. To read them, and share them, and examine them in their pertinence to our lives.” - Audre Lorde, Cancer Journals

I don't remember how he trained me; it was so subtle over many weeks, months. Was it the first time I recall "letting go" something that he had done, which felt so completely wrong? I don't know. It could have even started well before my awareness had time to catch up. Exes, friends, society, my mother, my father, from the moment I was born, was I trained? I do recall the times which I had said something I knew I shouldn't have; the characteristics of his rage had become familiar very quickly. I easily remember not objecting when I wanted to. I know that the build-up to a punch, kick, push, or slap is so much worse than the pain they illicit.

He trained me to anticipate anger, even while new angers were being built. He told me what abuse was and what it was not; it wasn't abuse when he threatened but never laid a hand on me. It wasn't abuse when he pushed me down but never slapped me. It wasn't abuse when he kicked me if it didn't leave marks. What about when it did? No, because he apologized. Nothing was abuse unless he said it was, not even murder. I had no idea what qualified as abuse. When one is living within abuse, it is nearly impossible to think that one is abused. The abuser “has a temper” or the relationship is “passionate,” not abusive, no matter how miserable, isolated, and afraid you may feel.

Recent years have seen a renaissance in horror media. The revolution in horror has crossed mediums, touching film, television, and literature. The expansion and evolution of horror captures previously untold terrors. Marginalized stories are being told with the classic tenets of the genre, turning the traditional narratives on their heads and offering new perspectives. Horror serves as an ideal vessel for storytellers who wish to convey the unfairness and cruelty they face in a brutal form. The expansion of the genre into the mainstream has opened discussions of the value of “pop” horror versus the value of “artistic” or “elevated” horror. The distinction between the two has become a point of contention among old and new fans of the genre. The new artistic and avant garde approaches to the genre capture a key aspect of horror: “Much horror depends upon destabilising our sense of security, defamiliarising the familiar, and questioning what is seen as an everyday norm–of the body, identity, family relationships, continuity, time, space, boundaries of life and death, alien, Other and self” (Wisker 145). The familiar slasher film has been met with high brow films that question what constitutes horror? Both traditional horror and its new imaginings ask the question: who is horrified?

It is undeniable that folklore has been a crucial aspect of human expression and connection for thousands of years. The nineteenth century saw interest in folkloric stories bloom thanks to the work of folklorists like the Brothers Grimm and fairy tale writers like Hans Christian Andersen. With these minds came widespread recognition of the literary fairy tale genre. Since then, fairy tales have skyrocketed in pop cultural prominence. Taking into account the fairy tale genre’s pervasiveness in storytelling, this thesis examines how the computer role-playing game (CRPG) series, Baldur’s Gate, utilizes this genre in an attempt to create a set of adult fairy tales for their players. In three separate chapters, this thesis will connect the Baldur’s Gate games to fairy tales in a way that exemplifies the latter’s influence on the former. The first chapter will focus on the “leaving home” plot arc as it is presented in the first Baldur’s Gate game from 1998, and we will examine how this narrative format is used in fairy tales to convey a message about self-actualization. In the second chapter, we will examine the hag character type, and how Baldur’s Gate 3 Early Access (2020—present) both reiterates and subverts this feminine archetype. Finally, the third chapter will focus on perhaps the most important aspect of RPGs and fairy tales both, which is choice. Essentially, we will analyze how the Baldur’s Gate series honors the fairy tale principle of moral exploration through choice. Additionally, we will examine how the Baldur’s Gate series takes this aspect of moral exploration from fairy tales and amplifies it according to their targeted demographic of adults.

This thesis explores the ways in which the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges used devices, principles, and strategies that today we would call deconstructionist, to write poetry that could transcend the communicative limits of language, which according to the author himself, it is not an effective tool to truly represent what is real. To accomplish this task, we first frame our work in the context of Derrida’s Deconstructionism, specifically in the area of literary criticism, defining what it means to take a deconstructive approach to critical theory. We then introduce Borges and his ideas, situating him within the sphere of deconstructionist theory as a sort of precursor (a word that we want to use carefully here, as we will be arguing for something different from a precursor). Next, we present the hard data obtained from an experiment involving thirty-two participants, analyzing the interpretations our volunteers gave to verses and poems by Borges, and we use the significant variety of meanings that emerged from the experiment to support some of our points, offering a different and new perspective. Finally, we engage in a critical analysis of Borges’ poetry, elaborating on concepts such as symbolic system, the use of opposites, referentiality, paradoxes, circularity, reversion of author-reader role, among others. This analysis supports our theory, which posits that the processes we now classify as deconstructive play a fundamental role in Borges’ construction of poetry. In fact, it is through these processes that the Argentinian transcends the limits of language, creating labyrinths of meanings – as we call them, using some borgean terminology – where the author relinquishes control to favor readers’ own agency and, in turn, the readers can get closer to some of the author’s intentions.

This thesis is an exploration of the video game Disco Elysium, analyzed through some of the most popular and well-known Modernist works with the goal of proving that Disco Elysium is, at its core, a Modernist work. The incorporation of other Modernist pieces to arrive at this conclusion is mainly to examine reoccurring themes and ideas, some as broad as “obliteration” and others as specific as “identifying with a taxidermy bird after being dissatisfied with the course of one’s life”. In deciding how to structure the analysis, the works of the most prolific Modernist authors were selected with respect to their relationship to Disco Elysium’s core player skills. T. S. Eliot was selected to represent “Intellect”, T. E. Hulme for “Psyche”, and W. B. Yeats for “Physique”. The last skill, “Motorics” was not represented by a specific author but rather acts as a collection of final ideas and themes that help to show Disco Elysium as Modernist in its entirety, not just in select scenes or characters.

Broadly speaking, video games are not typically analyzed in an academic way. Hopefully, the exploration of Disco Elysium alongside Modernist giants like “The Waste Land” demonstrates that this lack of analysis is unwarranted and that video games are worth as deep analysis as any other piece of media. There are countless games just as complex and stimulating as Disco Elysium, waiting patiently to be analyzed. This thesis concludes by stating that Disco Elysium is in fact clearly a Modernist game, and that the themes of fragmentation and obliteration especially are near-perfect fits for discussing many of its most fundamental components: plot, characters, setting, and more.

This thesis examines the vicissitudes of masculinity as it presents across three late-Victorian novels in order to unpack the anxieties produced by the shift of power from aristocratic to professional communities and the tensions this shift produced between and within those communities. The various models of masculinity on display in the examined works of Gothic literature operate on ideas that came into play during the period surrounding sexuality and gender structures. Furthermore, each work takes on a particular perspective on masculinity as it works on the physical body and how that body interacts with others of its kind. The common themes of mutation, metamorphosis, and bodily decay or degeneration stand in relief to the ideal of masculinity they implicitly reference, which points toward the focal point of power relations between men and the world they inhabit as well as between each other.

Chapter One examines the world of the Victorian professional man as it exists in Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. This formulation of masculinity is modeled both on a rejection of aristocracy in favor of a professional cohort of male socialization and on an implicit moral structure which works on a continuum of degeneracy to sophistication. Chapter Two focuses on Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and its portrayal of the late-Victorian aristocratic man in the form of the dandy. This text, of the three, comes closest to incorporating an explicit homosexual valence into the interactions of the male characters, so the analysis here will adapt Eve Sedgwick’s adaptation of René Girard’s work on “erotic triangles.” However, instead of the typical formulation (as seen in Dracula) of two male rivals competing for the female romantic/erotic object, Dorian Gray’s triangle consists of three men, blurring the lines between homosocial desire and homoerotic desire. Chapter Three traces the reification of heterosexual masculinity in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.