Friends of Fondren Library Research Awards

Permanent URI for this collection

https://hdl.handle.net/1911/21949
Launched in 2008 and funded by the Friends of Fondren Library, the Fondren Library Research Awards program recognizes students who demonstrate extraordinary skill and creativity in the application of library and information resources to original research and scholarship. Students submitted their research project and an essay outlining how they used specific library tools and resources to do their research. For more information about the awards, see here

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Browsing Friends of Fondren Library Research Awards by Subject "English"

Now showing 1 - 8 of 8
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    A Cry for the Lost: A Transitioning Native Worldview in Colonial California
    (Rice University, 2017) Sanchez, Kivani Ailene
    Historically, people have used legends across cultures as a means of transmitting moral values and socializing the young while providing a source of entertainment and education to their listeners. Contemporary versions of legends have the ability to provide insight to the underlying worldviews, which are shaped by the cultural context within a particular timeframe of history, that inspire revisions of a particular legend. In this essay, I use the methodology presented in Domino Perez’s There was a Woman: La Llorona from Folklore to Popular Culture (2008) to examine a story told by one of the characters in Jorge’s Ainslie’s novel, “Los Pochos” (1934), as a revision of the legend La Llorona that serves as a non-traditional historical narrative of the effects of Westernization on the native population within the missions of Alta-California. I argue that the areas of revision within the telling demonstrate a transitioning worldview of the villagers of San Fernando del Rey that is shaped by the cultural, societal, and historical contexts of Spanish Colonialism within mission communities of Alta-California.
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    The God King and the Selra Hero: Distribution of Territory and its Significance for Kingship in Beowulf
    (Rice University, 2015) Perez, Lexi
    In this essay, I close read chosen lines in the Anglo Saxon poem Beowulf to demonstrate how Old English formulaic expression and hyperbole are used to delineate territory between the hero Beowulf and the King Hrothgar. I argue that hyperbole grants all known territory to Beowulf, and as a result this weakens the Old English formulaic expression typically used to assert power. However, I conclude by arguing how this possession of territory changes after Beowulf himself becomes king.
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    Is there “something to save”?: Death and Hope in Afro-Pessimism, Queer Negativity, and the late Baldwin
    (Rice University, 2018) Clark, Crystal Brooke
    This paper explores the connections and dissensions between two fields of thought, which scholars rarely discuss alongside each other: Afro-Pessimism and Queer Negativity. Through interweaving Baldwin’s late nonfiction and interviews with these two fields, I ask theorists of Afro-Pessimism and Queer Negativity questions concerning their understandings of death, subjectivity, temporality, and hope. In doing so, I do not seek to compare these methodologies against one another to fashion a hierarchy; rather I place these theories in conversation with one another in the hopes to find how Afro-Pessimism’s logic can challenge Queer Negativity and how Queer Negativity’s logic can further Afro-Pessimism. While these two theoretical fields are immersed in death, negativity, irredeemability, and hopelessness, I use the insights of late Baldwin to unfold Afro-Pessimism and Queer Negativity and then tie them together. Ultimately, I argue that these modes of thought are anything but hopeless and assert that hope is located in the intense, provocative, and generative power of their works themselves.
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    Literary Landscapes: A Future for Post-Frontier Regionalism in Literature of the American West
    (Rice University, 2020) Wang, Jennifer
    Landscape portrayals—literary, visual, or otherwise—serve as recognizable features at the core of American Western iconography and aesthetics. Renderings of landscape point to an implicit gaze appraising the land—a gaze which often communicates its idealization, condemnation, or contemplation of the American West through physical and metaphorical description. Traditional western landscape portrayals may evoke images of breathtaking wildness, boundless freedom, and infinite potential—a sublime landscape that appeals to settler colonial gazes and fantasies. Through comparative analysis of three texts—The Way West by A. B. Guthrie, Jr. (1949), All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy (1992), and Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko (1977)—this essay examines textual treatment of the land to explore the legacy and future of the American West. Additional literary, historical, and theoretical concepts such as Frontier Theory, the Kantian Sublime, and feminist regionalist scholarship are introduced to explicate the shifting symbolic significance of the American West throughout history, the anthropocentrism underlying both American exceptionalism and settler coloniality, and the avenues of healing that may exist for Indigenous populations on a landscape marked by violence and destruction.
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    Poe's Paradox of Unity
    (Rice University, 2018) Lewis, Jordan
    This essay is an analysis of some of Edgar Allan Poe’s artistic works through the lens of his empirical, but often very pedagogical works. In many ways, his later texts, namely “The Philosophy of Composition” and “Eureka” serve as a guideline upon which to evaluate Poe’s poems. This essay explores the degree to which the “rules” postulated in both Poe’s essay and prose-poem are followed in two of his poems, “The Raven” and “Ulalume.” Consequently, the meaning of “unity” in Poe’s writing is explored, and the degree to which adherence of his own prescribed rules has an effect on creating unity within the poem. I argue that there are two types of unity that embody these poems in different ways: ‘unity of impression’, which Poe defines and discusses in “The Philosophy of Composition,” and ‘perfect unity,’ a term derived from his contemplations in “Eureka.” Through this analysis, we can better understand the subliminal elements that may be at work in these pieces of literature, and the reason that Poe’s works are uniquely known to generate such effects on his readers.
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    Shipwreck, Slavery, Revolution: History as the Open Secret in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette
    (Rice University, 2016) Celeste, Mark
    Is trauma a private or public experience? How do larger moments of historical, national, and imperial upheaval reverberate on the level of the individual? How readily do we forget a violent past, despite the traces that wash up on the textual margins? In this project I move against the critical current that posits Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853) as an autobiographical work. Although the parallels between the lives of Brontë and Lucy Snowe are perhaps tempting—much like her protagonist, Brontë leaves England for the continent, teaches English at a boarding school, and falls in love with a spirited, temperamental instructor—such an autobiographical reading imposes limits upon the possible interpretations of two traumatic scenes in the novel, Lucy’s journey to the continent and the (supposed) death of Monsieur Paul Emmanuel. Against an autobiographical backdrop, these two scenes read as simple textual symptoms of Brontë’s homesickness and unrequited love. By contrast, I place Brontë’s work in a longer, wider historical context, considering the uses and limits of framing Villette as a shipwreck novel. I contend that the flotsam and jetsam of a traumatic past—specifically, the violence of the British slave trade in the West Indies and the upheaval of the 1848 European revolutions—surface in Lucy’s pain and M. Paul’s apparent death. At stake in my project is the status of history: in Villette, I believe that history functions as an “open secret” (à la D. A. Miller), an absent-yet-present, repressed-yet-pervasive knowledge of the past that haunts the present.
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    The Horror of Natural History and Spenser's Bestiary of Extremophiles
    (Rice University, 2017) McAdams, Alexander Lowe
    This essay investigates a sea voyage in Book II of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, to which scholars have seldom paid much attention. I argue that the aquatic life forms the Knight of Temperance encounters on his journey shows Spenser’s investment in natural history, a leading force in the scientific culture of his day. By deploying original research, I assert that a careful examination of this passage shows Spenser’s theorization of extreme life, thereby anticipating our modern scientific focus on extremophiles, temperate environments, and the search for extraterrestrial life. This paper ends by proposing that a philosophical conundrum lies at the core of discovery, leaving humans once again questioning their status in the universe.