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Master's Research: Abstracts By Our Graduates

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As the culmination of their tenure in the Master’s of English and Joint Master’s in English with Women’s and Gender Studies degree programs, Brandeis students prepare a significant research paper under the supervision of two faculty readers. 

We invite you to explore the abstracts posted here, listed alphabetically by student.  Please join us in celebrating the work of our master’s students.

Ana Albinson, MA '13

The Adapted Cinderella of the 21st Century

If fairytales are used as a warning or an analogy to teach those developing socially how to behave, then it is more than fair to look at the development of fairytales as a way to clue into how social development has changed. In this essay, I take a look at why various versions of the Cinderella tale have faded in popularity throughout history and why other versions have remained consistent in their popularity. Further, I examine the most recent versions of the tale and consider how the adjustments or changes in the retellings reflect back onto modern culture and depict how the roles of women, wealth, class and other social stations have changed throughout the twenty-first century.

Ana Albinson works as an equity engineer and community manager at Hidden Equity, an online marketing firm in Boston. She plans to continue in developing a career in marketing. 

Anna Cooley, MA '12

"But no living man am I!  You look upon a woman": Role Manipulation in The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion

Due to the limited number of female characters in his works and the minimal roles they have in the plots, many critics accuse J.R.R. Tolkien of being a chauvinist.  In recent years, however, other critics have started to excuse this dearth, stating that it is either because of his Victorian upbringing or because he was a medievalist and utilized medieval conventions in formulating his plots and characters.  In my paper, I address the latter.  I analyze how Tolkien utilizes medieval gender conventions and archetypes in The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion, as well as how he manipulates them to reflect a progressive, rather than chauvinistic, view of gender roles.  Specifically, I analyze the conventions of the romance heroine, the garden scene, and the peace-weaver, as reflected in the characters of Arwen, Éowyn, Galadriel, Melian, and Lúthien.  I refute the accusations of chauvinism, not because he used medieval conventions in writing his novels, but because through his manipulation of these conventions he promotes active female characters, such as the ones listed above, rather than passive ones.

Anna Cooley is currently pursuing a career in administration in the Boston area.

Courtney Fields, Joint MA '12

Push and Pull: One Process of Queer Genealogical Re-Orientation
Investigating Queer Memoir in Alison Bechdel's Texts Fun Home and Are You My Mother?

This paper explores how in both of Alison Bechdel’s memoirs the author/artist is focused on ways of using the queer identity she has come to embody as a marker to retrospectively orient and dis-orient herself around her perception of her parents, creating what Sidonie Smith refers to as a “mobile subject[ivity].” Both of Bechdel's memoirs explore how recognition (in Butlerian terms) binds the author/artist to her parents. With this theoretical context in mind, this paper focuses on how Bechdel's creation of graphic memoirs employs the knowledge of her parents’ experiences in order to perpetually realign her artistic construction of 'self' along a tangential axis to them both through a representational push and pull of objects and signifiers in literary space. Bechdel uses the question of her own sexuality and gender presentation as a central point from which to re-orient her identity production in relation to her parents', and in these two texts, I argue that she challenges what queer subjectivity looks like in the post-modern queer memoir through retrospective, queer, psychological spacial re-orientation.

Courtney Fields has been hired as the Wilcox English Fellow at Concord Academy (Concord, MA) to teach tenth grade English, coach softball and work as a diversity coordinator on campus to proliferate knowledge surrounding social justice issues.  Read Courtney's alumni profile here.

Mary Kathryn Maher, Joint MA '12

"He fumbles at your Soul": The Erotics of Death and Religion in Emily Dickinson's Canon

Many of Emily Dickinson’s poems and letters illustrate her inability to separate the powerful experiences of sex, death and religion.  While these facets of life evoke a superficial binary between terror and exaltation for her, Dickinson depicts their simultaneous existence.

She explores her intense attraction to extremely dark experiences through a metaphorical lens.  Yet, Dickinson’s attraction to such experiences does not reveal itself as dismal.  Rather, her exploration of death and the erotics of religion ultimately reveal Dickinson’s intimate struggle to understand God and her eventual union with Him. 

Dickinson and her speakers’ religion can be defined through a negative theological lens, in which their religious understanding is attained through doubt.  Dickinson’s vision of God is complex and tortured and focuses more on absence than presence.  She explores the moments of crisis in one’s religious journey.  These experiences can be mistaken for doubt; yet, viewed from another perspective, it is clear that they are the most powerful religious experiences.   The speakers direct struggle with God validates the relationship in a way that is not possible in the absence of such intimacy. 

It is the speakers’ doubt that forces them to engage in a direct relationship with the masculine other, resulting in this greater intimacy.  Emily Dickinson’s language poses a controversy regarding the nature of the masculine other, since her rhetoric appears the same as an address to a lover who has disappointed her.  The intimacy created through the speakers’ uncertainty appears as an erotic connection with a lover whom they both rebuke and adore.  Yet, these female agents express their ambivalence toward God’s power, not knowing whether to submit or defy Him, based on their own desires to assert feminine authority in the face of masculine domination.

The central experience of negative theology centers upon that which one cannot understand.  However, contrary to prevalent beliefs, the struggle to understand God represents a mode of faith.  The negative theological approach forces Dickinson and her speakers to engage in a more intense spirituality – not a lack of spirituality.  The transformation of the speakers occurs when they realize that their relationships with God have become so intense that they can see in the absence physical vision; they realize an intimacy based on faith.  Thus, they abandon their doubts and desire the ultimate consummation of love with the Divine in the celestial realm. 

Emily Niska, Joint MA '13

"Then she usurps upon another's right / That seeks to be by public language graced": How Cary's Mariam Provides Insight into Women's Use of Alternative Literacies as a Means of Negotiating Their "Official" Absence from Symbolic Power

In my Master's paper, I argue that some scholarship on the Renaissance and Early Modern period assumes a “straight-forward” approach to research, which suggests that access to linguistic and social authority happens in a singular, top-down fashion. In this top-down fashion, Aristocratic men, linguistically, socially, and intellectually superior by virtue of birth and physiology, enact a form of symbolic domination  by enforcing symbolic violence on those deemed inferior; symbolic and linguistic violence occurs when an elite male reveals the inferiors’ speech to be ineffective, impotent, absurd. When approaching Elizabeth Cary’s text, The Tragedy of Mariam, from a “straight-forward” analysis and analyzing it according to this type of prescriptive model, Cary’s vocal agency can be lost. Approaching the text as an open signifier of meaning that cannot be fully explained by a prescriptive, “straight-forward” analysis allows for the play to attest to multiple means of achieving symbolic power. A historically-contextualized approach to the text allows for the possibility that Cary achieved linguistic authority in a manner other than the “top-down” approach assumed as “official.” I argue that in The Tragedy of Miriam, Elizabeth Cary asserts female linguistic legitimacy and enacts symbolic domination in a somewhat non-traditional manner.  Cary resisted and quite possibly could have aided in reshaping the production of knowledge in early modern England that both enforced and was reinforced by the “naturalized” connection of masculinity, elite class status, humanism, and verbal authority. By revealing the impossibility of complete vocal control by anyone in the drama, Cary destabilized the aforementioned linkage.  I see Cary as either subverting, taking advantage of, or revealing a different avenue for accessing linguistic authority and with that authority, I claim, she achieves agency and social power.

Emily Niska is currently working as an 8th grade humanities teacher at Community Charter School of Cambridge.  She hopes to explore her love of teaching by working in urban public schools for an undetermined period of time. In the future, she plans to expand her knowledge of her subject area by pursuing a Ph.D in English Literature, with a focus on the Renaissance and Early Modern period as well as Women's/Gender Studies.

Brenden O'Donnell, Joint MA '12

Toward an Aesthetics of Queer Negativity: Anti-Humanism in The Living End

Many debates in queer theory revolve around its tendency toward negativity: why is it valuable to suspect homosexuality’s ability to contribute to or change the heteronormative social order? Why must, instead, queers invoke negative affects like hopelessness, melancholy, and vengeance in their processes of calling for justice or radical awareness? By navigating discussions surrounding the queer aesthetic archive, my paper analyzes how art can resist queer negativity while simultaneously refusing to disengage from it. Theorists have located negativity in the queer archive in two major ways: Lee Edelman uses a theoretical lens to analyze elitist, academic art, and Judith Halberstam uses low theory to observe pop- and sub-cultures. My paper tries to establish a new category of texts that can be categorized in either or both archives, channeling both the negative affects of Proust or Woolf and the punk aesthetic of the Sex Pistols. Instead of the bitter irony of "God Save the Queen," we can declare, per The Smiths, "The Queen is Dead": an enigmatic and affectively conflicted statement. My paper searches for these declarations in texts such as Gregg Araki's 1992 film The Living End and Oleg Kulik's 1994 performance art piece, Mad Dog: Or the Last Taboo Guarded by the Lone Cerberus. These texts mix the blatantly irreverent with the melancholic, misanthropic, or contemplative, and manage to produce a more dynamic queer negativity that does not exclude companionship, satisfaction, and even love.

Brenden O'Donnell is taking a year off from school to work while he applies to Ph.D programs for Fall 2013.

Jayne Ziemba, Joint MA '12

'At odds and ends of time': Performative Futures in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse

Virginia Woolf's novel To the Lighthouse is widely read as an elegy, or even a tragedy, as a novel that represents an immobilized sadness brought on by death and war. Such elegiac readings of the novel risk overlooking Woolf's "mistrust" in the absolute significance of an event.  I argue that To the Lighthouse is Woolf's aesthetic argument for an open-ended temporality, not necessarily an argument for progress but for potential. The characters in the novel turn toward performative modes of innovation via metaphor and identification with objects in order to find that the differences between the future and the present, between the virtual and the actual are not strict determinations but an opening up of possibilities. Resisting the precipitation of the virtual into the actual, Woolf anticipates Elizabeth Grosz's philosophy of temporality. In particular, the novel provides temporalities of futurity and possibility which perform latent or deferred significance through descriptions of "deflection," "intrication," and "elaboration." In the novel, the linguistic referent which attaches meaning to the word is made complicated through "intrication"; it ricochets through "deflection"; but it aesthetically persists through "elaboration." As I argue at length in this paper, Mrs. Ramsay identifies with the lighthouse and performs and personalizes its significance. Similarly, Lily Briscoe identifies with her process of painting and performs its "distance" and "space." These subject-object relations, in their intimacy and self-reflexivity, both enable and constrain the access to knowledge and even reality. By extension, the status of the object, in relation to the subject who defines it, designates the subject and her time as ontologically resistant; the time of the object is a "direction without destination" and selfhood is a becoming, a "movement without prediction." Ultimately, Woolf's experimental narrative temporality, when described in Grosz's terms of phenomenology, reconciles it to feminist and queer commitments to denormalization of metaphysical givens.

Jayne Ziemba plans to apply for Ph.D programs in English, with a specialization in British modernism.