Meliora

Using Creatures of Flight to Explore the Mind-Body Relationship and Transcendence in Emily Dickinson’s Poetry

Rebecca Siegel — 2024-05-31

Emily Dickinson is recognized as one of the most illustrious American poets of all time, famous for her explorations of profound concepts surrounding the mind and body life and death and. Yet in doing so, she does not simply paint binary understandings of the universe, but also makes evident that these dualities are not to be simply reconciled either. This literary and philosophical approach is captured in various symbolic forms throughout Dickinson’s poetry, and I chose to focus on the recurring appearance of flying creatures, namely birds, bees, and angels. By first sitting down and reading hundreds of her poems in order to take a top-down approach that was thus less biased in its analysis, I pieced together what I thought were notable themes and consistencies amongst each distinct category of creature in order to weave a greater, transcendent image of how Dickinson views the world.

Transcorporeal Technobodies, Sensory Organisms: Recovering Nature in Trans Poetics

Siri Gannholm — 2024-05-31

Under the dominant nature-human binary, trans individuals are rejected from both categories on the grounds of their technologized embodiment. Contemporary trans poetic works, including Jos Charles’ Feeld, reject this dualism through its poetic form and Middle English dialect in order to recover access to both nature and the body. Taking a multidisciplinary approach across trans, ecological, and media theory, with particular attention to the subfields of transecology and somatechnics, this paper argues that technology and nature are compatible, not mutually exclusive. Feeld—which embraces a “natural,” embodying technology—is set in stark contrast with Titane, a recent horror film that manifests the violence inherent in “unnatural” technology. A varied approach of textual analysis and applied theoretical frameworks draws on Stryker, Butler, Haraway, and Kristeva, among others. A trans ethic emerges as an urgent and imperative path to recovering the body alongside the label of naturalness.

“The story we have together”: Written and Oral Storytelling in Juan José Saer’s The Witness and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony

Rachel Van Vort — 2024-05-31

This thesis explores the tension between written and oral storytelling in Juan José Saer’s The Witness, a novel about the narrator’s ten-year stay amongst a group of Indians in the 16th century, and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, a novel that recounts Tayo’s recovery from injuries sustained during World War II and his disillusionment with his Pueblo and white ancestry. While each text prioritizes one medium or the other, they also manage to surmount the difficulties inherent in both kinds of texts. Issues of written and oral texts, Western and Native American conceptions of authorship, and language itself are discussed in relation to Plato, Derrida, Butler, and Silko’s other work. An examination of Robert Hass’s “Meditation at Lagunitas” unifies the themes from both novels to argue that the limitations of written and oral texts can be surpassed and that we must salvage language, even if our system of semiotics is imperfect. Our human need for connection is so vital that the difficulties posed by medium and language may be overcome.

Through Silence She Speaks: The Rearticulation of the Female Voice in King Lear

Larissa Guerrini-Maraldi — 2024-06-14

This essay explores the minimal dialogue and voice of Cordelia in relation to feminine resistance and rearticulation through silence and the female body. I will investigate the methods through which Cordelia is silenced and restricted by the central male patriarchal authority figure, her father Lear. Her death will function as a key point of examination, as it is through this silence that Lear is unable to impose his language onto her voice, and is instead situated in her position of voicelessness. This essay aims to demonstrate how Cordelia forms an alternative mode of communication, one that is difficult to interpret for the patriarchal ear and therefore challenging or impossible to control. She becomes valuable, even becoming the lynchpin of the play, in imparting one of the central themes of the text; that human beings should mean and feel what they say rather than rely on false, flattering dialogue.