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.
The fin de siècle writers fictionalized the autobiography and derived a concept of authenticity that develops from the suffering of social otherness. Wilde praised the poor over the bourgeois in a British Philistine society, while Johnson’s narrator argued for the authenticity of an African-American class striving for economic and social justice. Both writers redeemed suffering through the ideals of the subjective self, a turn inward that resembles Rousseau’s own look into his natural, innermost self. Overall, this project focuses on how the development of the genre between these two pairs of thinkers gives multiple accounts of self-making leading to the social Other becoming an agent for authenticity; how is the self to be read, understood, and made authentic through its imperfections and sufferings? The fictionality of the later works casts an overarching question: is attaining authenticity through autobiography merely fictional?