Featuring...My Honors Thesis

Like Lauren Cyr, I also have been working on an Honors Thesis this year. While I could give tips and tricks on navigating the process of very-long paper writing, I think Lauren already put it best (follow this link to see her post: http://clarkenglishblog.blogspot.com/2013_09_01_archive.html.) Instead what I would really like to do is just to tell you about how I came to my topic and what I have so far learned about it. Because for the first time in a while, I have found a topic for which I cannot exhaust my enthusiasm.

I knew I wanted write an honors thesis basically since declaring my major. To me, it had always been a part of my plan. However, when it came time to start thinking of a topic, I was 100% burnt out. My junior year beat me down and I found that during that summer I didn't want to think of anything academic at all. Furthermore, I knew I was tired of all the topics I had explored before. I never wanted to read Jane Eyre or Evelina again; no longer was I interested in the gendered advertising techniques employed by Dr. Pepper, Coca-Cola or any other company; I would not want to look at another colophon in the confines of Clark's archives; I did not want to read another autobiography. I wanted to take everything I had read and done and throw it across my room in a fit of childish catharsis. But more practically and reasonably, I knew I wanted to be excited about what I was going to do for a whole year, and I thought in order to do that, I needed to find something new.

It wasn't until I went to see The Great Gatsby movie--which I hated--that my thesis began to take shape. Nick, to me, is an iconic narrator. Yet in that movie, I felt he barely even needed to exist. He was just a vehicle for reporting the plot of the book and means through which the morality of the text could be interpreted. Looking deeper into Nick and narrative style, I began to realize that Nick's distance and possible objectivity allowed him to become a moral authority within his text. Furthermore, I saw this pattern in other narrators throughout the literary cannon:  Walton in Frankenstein, Dr. Watson in Sherlock Holmes. As I accumulated more examples, I began to find one major gap emerging. There were no female narrators of this type, no female authors writing this type.

Skipping forward a bit, I, with the help of Professor Huang found Jazz. Written by Toni Morrison and voiced by a complicated, implicitly female character, the novel happens to focus upon the same time period as The Great Gatsby, the Jazz Age in the United States. However Jazz focuses upon the Blacks of Harlem who barely enter the world of Gatsby's moneyed elite. Using these two books as my texts, I began to explore the world of narrative voice and narrative ethics, gossip and claims to knowledge, gender and canon-building.

I am not going to give you a huge summary of my paper. If you want a sense, look at the word cloud.

 

Word Cloud of my Thesis courtesy of Word it Out

No, instead I want to tell you what I learned. What I learned, topic-wise, is that Toni Morrison is a literary genius and a wizard. I learned that Fitzgerald's Nick is way more interesting than I or that dumb movie gave him credit for. More seriously though, I learned that gender still matters, especially in terms of what is taught and what books/characters become iconic. In excluding female authors and female narrators from the canon, female experience is discredited and erased. I also learned that reliability and objectivity are not intrinsically linked. There is truth in subjectivity, and there is reliability in acknowledging one's own subjectivity.

 

The most important things I learned, however, had nothing to do with my topic. I learned that I can sustain a project for a long period of time. I can do research, make deadlines, write pages I did not know how I was going to fill. I learned that I can be ambitious and push the limits of my own analysis. My topic was often messy and seemingly full of holes, and I was able to push past that.

 

I'm immensely proud of the work I have done. When I started this academic year, I really did not understand the word "Capstone". How could any one thing have been the pinnacle of achievement in my education? But this project/paper is my capstone, my crowning glory. I may not have worked on it through out my years at Clark, but my years at Clark lead me here and I am so glad they did.