Humanities Honors Program

Whipped Cream is a two Act ballet performed by the American Ballet Theatre, with choreography by Alexei Ratmansky and sets and costumes designed by pop-surrealist, Mark Ryden. The story follows the protagonist, The Boy, after he overindulges on whipped cream following his First Communion. As a result, he has a series of dreams that become progressively more bizarre as The Boy descends into a fantasy world. The emphasis on subconscious combined with the 1920s Viennese setting of Whipped Cream immediately recalls Sigmund Freud and his Dream Theory. By using Freud’s Dream Theory as a point of departure, the paper argues that the main ‘want’ of The Boy lies in a craving for control and a need to escape the confines of reality in favor of a fantastical world. He conjures up an alternative life for himself, a future in which he has power and resources otherwise unavailable to him. Buffered by Mark Ryden’s grotesquely cute set, props, and costumes, and reinforced by the cuteness theories of Daniel Harris and Sianne Ngai, we see how The Boy seeks to control the fears of growing up and the pressures that come with it, by recreating the world as he sees fit. By the end of the ballet and despite The Boy’s desire to reshape the world, his mental breakdown and the inherent violence present in such a cutesy facade, expose a darker ending and the enduring presence of the reality The Boy is actively trying to escape.

This thesis explores resistance work in Nazi-occupied France and Vichy France during World War II. The research uses paramilitary acts of resistance as a foil to political resistance, intelligence gathering and evasive resistance, and the home front as a site of resistance to spotlight women’s contributions to the French resistance. By exploring several types of resistance work and women’s participation (or lack thereof) in various resistance organizations, this thesis seeks to not only establish the extent of women’s participation in the French resistance but also explore their challenge to the established gender roles within the resistance. This thesis explores the extent of women’s resistance activities across World War II France through internal organizations, such as the French Communist Party and the French Resistance, and external organizations like the Bureau Central de Renseignements et d’Action (BCRA), British Special Operatives Executive’s F (French) Section (SOE), the British Secret Intelligence Service, and the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS). In the context of these organizations’ activities, this thesis analyzes the gendering of resistance while considering the presence of women in various resistance organizations and their resistance activities to contextualize scope and scale of women’s contributions to resistance work in occupied and Vichy France.       

In this thesis I argue that the influx of female writers of sensationalized Victorian supernatural fiction overlap with the female mediums and participants of the supernaturalist movement, for the ultimate dissemination of the separate spheres ideology, thorough transgressive boundary crossing, ultimately seeking to bolster women’s entrance into the professional sphere, ushering in the “New Woman.” Both movements converge to undermine the Victorian female condition and respective ideals of femininity and womanhood (True Womanhood, Real Womanhood, Public Womanhood, and New Womanhood) through periodicals, short stories, Spiritualist forums, and the séance, women became the catalysts for the “New Woman” of the twentieth century. Thus, the dead become the medium for silenced and oppressed women, a means through which they can transgress social boundaries. Through these figures of transgression, women were able to highlight the failings of various societal institutions and common narratives of Victorian society, such as the “angel in house,” the marriage narrative, and the domestic narrative. Furthermore, bringing attention to how the perpetuation of such narratives reinforce the ideologies of these societal institutions, ultimately leaving women vulnerable to a system, in which they have no place. Thus, the woman writer, the female ghost, the female medium, and the professional woman become similarly characterized by disembodiment, a displacement from society, which is created and sustained by patriarchal structures and systems in which women are relegated by notions of traditional gender roles through the perpetuation of harmful ideologies such as the separate spheres ideology. A societal oppression only transcended by death, which serves as a mode of boundary crossing. Thus, the threshold of death became analogous to boundary crossing of female mediums and female writers, which transgressing the boundaries of the domestic sphere securing their voices were heard in the public sphere.

The film adaptation of Suzanne Collins’ The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (2020) released in November of 2023, creating buzz among The Hunger Games fans, new and old. The novel and film detail the life of tyrannical dictator President Coriolanus Snow and his rise to power in Panem, a nation that rose from the ashes of North America after a series of natural disasters and political turmoil. The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes acts as a prequel to the events of The Hunger Games trilogy, and it demonstrates the development of the Hunger Games as a central part of everyday life in Panem. The novel begins in the Capitol, where Snow and other elite citizens reside, are planning the 10th annual Hunger Games. However, this year is special, students of the Academy, like Snow, are expected to participate in the Games as mentors for the selected District tributes; this is an event that will change the course of Panem and the Games forever. A total of 24 tributes, two from each of the 12 districts, are torn from their homes and transferred to the Capitol, expected to fight to the death in an arena until a sole victor remains. This death game is aired live across Panem, and it is mandatory viewing for all who live in the Districts and the Capitol. The Hunger Games are the Districts’ punishment for rebelling during the Dark Days. On top of this punishment, the Districts are exploited and heavily policed by the Capitol, limiting their access to resources and subjecting them to constant surveillance. Life in Panem is grueling and unforgiving, and The Hunger Games has been categorized as a dystopian young adult series. In this study, I would like to challenge that dystopian assessment and offer a different perspective.

Shakespeare: the greatest mind in English literature, the worst for the classroom. He’s been our pop culture for centuries, but it’s a struggle teaching his work.

I remember being a freshman in high school reading Romeo and Juliet. I’ve been captivated by Shakespeare’s vivid language and ideas since. As much as I loved the story, and Shakespeare, I knew my classmates were frustrated with it and didn’t like it.

As a fourth-year college student, I still think about my experience with Shakespeare in freshman year. My teacher summarized scenes and had us (the students) read the text out loud. Everyone was confused and our teacher’s succinct summaries were not enough for us to grasp his language. Although I was animated as we read the play, I couldn’t understand it.

I’ve realized that simply summarizing the happenings of a Shakespeare play is not useful because it’s the same as reading an online book summary in lieu of reading the entire book. Hence, teachers must help students decipher the meaning of Shakespeare’s words rather than giving them the main idea in each scene.

Before starting a play, teachers must demystify who Shakespeare is. Many students think that he was always a literary scholar, not that he was an entertainment icon in his era. Peter Sawaya, a retired high school teacher, explains "I would begin by teaching the history of theater because I wanted them to know that Shakespeare is primarily a playwright". Providing background information on Shakespeare’s era engages students in his work and guides their understanding and interpretations.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) has become the most popular film franchise in the world, setting box office records that are unlikely to ever be beaten. Due to the ongoing nature of the MCU, the superhero franchise has left an irreversible mark on society due to its transmedia storytelling abilities. Research has shown that the MCU’s depictions of race, gender, violence, and morality reveal something about the real world in terms of the social constructs that govern people’s way of life. Although the characters and events in the MCU are nothing more than speculative fiction, the influence these films have had on society couldn’t be any more real. In recent years, the MCU has seen a decline in popularity and Marvel Studios has made various efforts to reignite the excitement surrounding superhero culture. However, Marvel’s studio crisis may reveal something about the world that at first glance many might not recognize as a direct correlation between the societal issues today and the declining interest in the superhero genre. While the MCU has taken steps toward adapting to an ever changing world and political landscape, there is still much progress to be made before Marvel Studios can return to its golden days when superhero films were regarded as a worldwide phenomenon, cementing them in cinema history.

While there’s significant and well-deserved coverage of electronic music’s older female pioneers, there isn’t yet sufficient academic or professional energy devoted to understanding the achievements of young women working today.

Starting in 2012, USC’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative has since reported that 2023 was the year with the highest recorded percentage of female producers at 6.5%.1 This is still a remarkably low, disappointing amount. For that reason (and more), I’m excited to highlight three important female producers working today who, despite not reaching arbitrary standards of musical success (charting, for instance), have indeed managed to cultivate a formidable discography, release critically-acclaimed or well-received albums, establish themselves in a burgeoning music industry, have achieved name recognition, have signed to reputable recording labels, and regularly perform their music on tour.

I’m specifically focusing on three young female producers working primarily in experimental electronic music, each of whom carry a comparatively smaller audience. (For all intents and purposes, audiences at or under approximately 500,000 listeners qualify as small.) As such, notable contemporary performers like Björk, Karin Dreijer (Fever Ray, The Knife), Goldfrapp, Grimes, Imogen Heap, Laura Les, Santigold, Charli XCX (et cetera), while indeed qualifying as female producers of electronic music, do not qualify in the stipulations I’ve laid out with regard to age or size of listening audience (in other words, fame), and as such will not be my subjects of exploration. I’ll also be excluding analysis of artist groups—specifically, duos and trios. For this reason, I won’t be looking at collaborative EPs or albums done by my featured producers.

Derivative fiction is a genre of fiction that involves writing or reading about or within the worlds of previously established works. People often do not realize it, but many works of classic literature are, in their own ways, derivative fiction of other stories entirely. Dante’s Inferno is a derivative work based on The Bible, for example, but in addition to that, much of Arthurian legend—including all of Sir Lancelot’s legends, and the existence of Sir Lancelot in the first place—comes from derivative works, sometimes even from other countries such as France (which is where Sir Lancelot’s stories all come from). Even Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is based on an Italian play called The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet, but while the original play framed the deaths of the main characters as caused by their not listening to their parents, Shakespeare changed the ending and other parts of the story to focus on tragic love (Spencer et al.). Even nowadays, derivative works are popular—the superhero comic book industry, for example, is almost entirely derivative fiction, seeing as how almost all comic books nowadays (that are about the big-name superheroes, at least) are written by people who did not create the original characters, showing their own takes on popular figures like Superman, Batman, and Spiderman, and the worlds around them.