Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection
Barrett, The Honors College at Arizona State University proudly showcases the work of undergraduate honors students by sharing this collection exclusively with the ASU community.
Barrett accepts high performing, academically engaged undergraduate students and works with them in collaboration with all of the other academic units at Arizona State University. All Barrett students complete a thesis or creative project which is an opportunity to explore an intellectual interest and produce an original piece of scholarly research. The thesis or creative project is supervised and defended in front of a faculty committee. Students are able to engage with professors who are nationally recognized in their fields and committed to working with honors students. Completing a Barrett thesis or creative project is an opportunity for undergraduate honors students to contribute to the ASU academic community in a meaningful way.
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Description
Science fiction works can reflect the relationship between science and society by telling a story set in the future of ethical implications or social consequences of scientific advancement. This thesis investigated how the concept of reproduction is depicted in popular science fiction works. I reviewed and analyzed four popular science fiction works that all showed fear over the government controlling our choices in reproductive technology. The analysis of my thesis can be used as a way to understand how we view the ideas and the consequences of reproductive technology through concepts of reproduction. These perspectives and ideas as a reflection of society's concerns as we discuss the future of the ethics and politics of reproductive technology and reproductive issues.
ContributorsKim, Grace Dayoung (Author) / Maienschein, Jane (Thesis director) / Ellison, Karin (Committee member) / Hurlbut, Ben (Committee member) / School of Life Sciences (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-05
Description
This creative project consists of three short stories with a common theme of release, letting go, and exhalation. Nymphal Instar is a story about Tommy, a young boy, and his encounter with his uncle, a troubled man who has just returned from war. The story explores the idea of growth and maturation, and the ability to move past and let go of trauma. A Cat Goes Away is about a young man, Richard, who is required to simultaneously deal with the loss of his cat and the suicide attempts of his sister. He also runs into his sister's ex-husband and is forced to deal with him. The story explores the difficulty in recognizing one's own emotions and the importance of knowing the difference between what one can change and what one cannot. Since Diagnosis is a story about Kate, a woman who has just been diagnosed with cancer and who is unable to tell her loved ones. The story explores acceptance and the idea that letting go can allow one to live more fully. Though the three stories are disparate in their characters and events, they share a commonality in their endings and in the final realizations of the characters. There is a focus on the importance of breath and breathing, and the essentiality of acceptance and release.
ContributorsMyers, Alan Yutaka (Author) / McNally, T. M. (Thesis director) / Irish, Jenny (Committee member) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor) / Department of English (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-05
Description
"The Problem of Hope: Literary Tragedy in Mid-Twentieth Century American Fiction" examines Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, and Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar through the lens of tragedy. This thesis delves into how conflicts between internal and external identities can create a tragic individual, what kinds of success count toward achievement of the "American Dream," and whether the tragic "common man" is the socially normative one or the socially disenfranchised one. It raises a three-dimensional theoretical approach to American tragedy and, most importantly, considers the significance of tragic hope for American literature. This paper questions the construction of American identities across class, race, and gender according to social scripts. It seeks to uncover what forces these scripts exert on American cultural myths and rereads those myths through tragedy to explore Miller's idea of a noble common man. By moving from Miller to Ellison to Plath, this thesis traces the undercurrents of tragedy through some of the most identity-focused novels of mid-twentieth century American fiction to see how the overarching American narrative changed from 1940 to 1969 as the US underwent significant social changes domestically and image changes abroad. Ultimately, this paper concludes that tragedy in mid-twentieth century American fiction points toward a new idea of American success as a success that occurs beyond social scripts.
ContributorsMedeiros, Amy Marie (Author) / Holbo, Christine (Thesis director) / Sadowski-Smith, Claudia (Committee member) / Department of English (Contributor) / W. P. Carey School of Business (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-05
Description
Prince Shendi is a novella set in the semi-fictional continent of Great Africa, specifically in a proud and prosperous region called Serengeti. Our story follows the thrilling adventure of Serengeti's king-to-be, the young and naive Shendi. When Kovalu, the mighty king of Serengeti and Shendi's father, passes away due to old age, Shendi is thrust into the gauntlet of responsibility in an early and unprepared state. After a short foray as the amateur king heavily assisted by the tenured members of Serengeti's Plain Council, Shendi encounters disaster that results in the death of an important council representative and the young king's temporary exile from Serengeti. The journey produced by his one hundred day exile takes Shendi through an arid wasteland, a teeming jungles, a mystic desert, and every terrain in between before his return. Along the way, Shendi unravels the details of a prophecy that means the end of the peaceful and prosperous life his lion kin and other Serengeti dwellers had known for centuries. This prophecy held him at the center of it as the catalyst and ultimately it would be up to Shendi and his actions to stop the ancient evil at work from killing all the lions of his pride and plunging all of Serengeti into a desolate and dismal state. Will Shendi overcome the primal evil looking to dominate the land of Great Africa forevermore? And if so, what will become of him afterwards? Prince Shendi was written over the course of 2015 and early 2016 by Lucas Revelle, a student at Arizona State University studying Exercise and Wellness as well as a student of Barrett, the Honors College. The story was directed, advised, and edited by Honors Fellow Dr. Aviva Dove-Viebahn along with help from the project's 2nd reader, Rebecca Viles.
ContributorsRevelle, Lucas Benjamin (Author) / Dove-Viebahn, Aviva (Thesis director) / Viles, Rebecca (Committee member) / School of Nutrition and Health Promotion (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-05
Description
This project focuses on techniques contemporary American poets use in their work. Ten different poetry collections are analyzed for dominant writing styles and techniques, which I then apply to my own poems, concentrating on modeling that particular poet. I then reflect on those poems through an evaluation of my writing process, how those techniques were implemented, and how they affected the poem. In addition to these reviews and reflections, I also wrote three articles about the literary community and what I've learned from my interactions in that community. All these materials are organized into a website, which shows the connections between the different writings via links and menus. Creating this website brings all the materials together to demonstrate my growth as a poet, writer, and designer. This heavy focus on poetry and analysis has helped sharpen my critical thinking skills and has better prepared me for a career in design and journalism.
ContributorsHansen, Elizabeth Sarah (Author) / Murphy, Patricia (Thesis director) / Savard, Jeannine (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Department of English (Contributor) / Hugh Downs School of Human Communication (Contributor) / Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
Abstract "Empty Horizons": A Creative Writing Piece Max Harmon "Empty Horizons" is a creative writing piece composed of two different short stories sharing a common narrator. The first story "Can you dig it?" details a trip the narrator takes to South Dakota to go hunting shortly before starting college. On the trip the narrator contemplates certain aspects of his life and the events of the story serve as a vehicle to explore the narrator's mindset as an eighteen year old about to start a new phase in his life. The second story "Toads, Sharks and Beautiful Encounters with Uncertainty" takes place during the summer before the narrator begins his last semester in college as he attends the funeral of his recently deceased grandmother in Hawaii. During the trip to Hawaii, the narrator meets a girl his age and they are able to bond with each other over feelings of loss and uncertainty. In this story the narrator explores his feelings about life with college graduation on the horizon and comes to terms with some of the anxieties that have been plaguing him since the start of college. By detailing these two distinct and important time periods in the narrator's life the reader is able to gain a sense of understanding in regards to the narrator's own process of beginning life as an adult.
ContributorsHarmon, Max Doyle (Author) / Soares, Rebecca (Thesis director) / Popova, Laura (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor) / School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies (Contributor)
Created2014-12
Description
This thesis examines contemporary cinematic adaptations of the Ovidian Pygmalion story. The films Blade Runner (1981), Lars and the Real Girl (2007), Ruby Sparks (2012), and Her (2013) are analyzed. This thesis seeks to understand why this particular myth is so resonant in today's popular culture and what this relevance reveals about modern society. The roles of female subjugation, sexualization, and relationship with technology will be major areas of concern. Research includes film criticism, Ovidian scholarship, and new advances in computer technology.
ContributorsStory, Sara Katherine (Author) / Corse, Taylor (Thesis director) / Ellis, Lawrence (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Department of English (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
The title means nothing because the stories have little in common, aside from the fact that I wrote them. The common theme of anxiety was unintentional, though it is prevalent in the stories, poetry and my life. Each story is written from a different style, with a different interest in mind. The poetry that breaks up the stories is mine, and also free of common bonds. People whom I love inspired some of them; others stem from people with whom I was (or still am) angry. Some of them are just me trying to write poetry like other successful poets, who seem to know something I don't. I wrote this set of stories and poems because I wanted to see if I could do it. I wanted to challenge myself in a new medium (two new mediums really, if you separate literature and poetry). I wanted to prove to myself that I could do it, if I really set my mind to it. I wanted to have some wealth of words, which I could record myself reading. Overall, I hope that you enjoy these stories and words. I wrote them to entertain myself, and they seem to do that pretty well. If you don't like them, stop reading. If you do like them, keep reading and tell everyone you know about this collection. I'm proud of my work here, so anything beyond that is icing on my cake.
ContributorsRagatz, Zachariah Edward (Author) / Scott, Jason Davids (Thesis director) / Espinosa, Micha (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences (Contributor) / School of Film, Dance and Theatre (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
The seven interconnected short stories of Miserablists spring from a reality created by its protagonist and ostensible author: Paul Marston, a persistently melancholy undergraduate who tries to exorcise the ghost of a past love by adapting the story into a screenplay for a film entitled Miserablists. What happens to our identity, Paul asks, in post-narrative selfhood—that is, when the meaningful narratives we’ve told ourselves about others and ourselves collapse?
In other stories (wherein Paul tries—and often fails—to figure himself a secondary character), the tangled lives of his immediate social circle unravel, overlap, and disintegrate amidst the decaying milieu of the Scene and the maddening sprawl of Phoenix. A brief sampling of happenings: Sophie confronts ideological qualms with capitalism by way of a summer gig selling knives to depressed housewives; Brett nearly burns a house down on the Fourth of July; hallucinogenic kombucha is foisted upon a hapless Alex; black mold overtakes Paul’s residence; etc.
The core text is followed by an afterword supposedly written by (the perhaps psychotic) Saul P. Thomas Marton, Ph.D. and acts as an academic analysis of the nonexistent film adaption of Miserablists. There, Marton places Marston’s work in conversation with many influential critical text and works of fiction that shaped the formation of Miserablists (including Roland Barthes’ Lover’s Discourse, Slavoj Žižek’s The Plague of Fantasies, and Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Last Year at Marienbad).
In other stories (wherein Paul tries—and often fails—to figure himself a secondary character), the tangled lives of his immediate social circle unravel, overlap, and disintegrate amidst the decaying milieu of the Scene and the maddening sprawl of Phoenix. A brief sampling of happenings: Sophie confronts ideological qualms with capitalism by way of a summer gig selling knives to depressed housewives; Brett nearly burns a house down on the Fourth of July; hallucinogenic kombucha is foisted upon a hapless Alex; black mold overtakes Paul’s residence; etc.
The core text is followed by an afterword supposedly written by (the perhaps psychotic) Saul P. Thomas Marton, Ph.D. and acts as an academic analysis of the nonexistent film adaption of Miserablists. There, Marton places Marston’s work in conversation with many influential critical text and works of fiction that shaped the formation of Miserablists (including Roland Barthes’ Lover’s Discourse, Slavoj Žižek’s The Plague of Fantasies, and Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Last Year at Marienbad).
ContributorsWebb, Zachariah Kaylar (Author) / Gilfillan, Daniel (Thesis director) / Garrison, Gary (Committee member) / Department of English (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-05
Description
Medical Humanities is a growing field and much scholarship focuses on the promotion of empathy in professionals. I argue incorporation of literature is crucial as it develops critical thinking skills that guard against the dangers of collective thought. A Foucauldian analysis of three literary works, my own creative non-fiction short story, William Carlos Williams' "The Use of Force," and Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward offer the student perspective, the doctor perspective and the institutional perspective, respectively, and subversive undertones offer an example of the analytical thought developed in humanities education by challenging assumptions and elucidating implicit power relations in the medical institution.
ContributorsBlock, Courtney Samantha (Author) / Lussier, Mark (Thesis director) / Fox, Cora (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Department of English (Contributor)
Created2015-05