AKΦ THE ALPHA KAPPA PHI REVIEW ANNUAL JOURNAL OF UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH IN THE HUMANITIES VOLUME V SPRING 2019 ΑΚΦ THE ALPHA KAPPA PHI REVIEW ANNUAL JOURNAL OF UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH IN THE HUMANITIES VOLUME V SPRING 2019 EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Caitlin Freeny EDITORIAL BOARD Avery Crews Dillian Hatfield Hope Poe Emma Turner ΑΚΦ REVIEW FACULTY EDITOR Karolyn Steffens, PhD Assistant Professor of English ΣΤΔ Sigma Tau Delta, Alpha Kappa Phi Chapter Lindsey Wilson College Executive Board: Kaylie Butler Caitlin Freeny Kaitlyn Jackson Hope Poe Gabe (Lance) Roberts Emma Turner Karolyn Steffens, PhD, Faculty Sponsor ΑΚΦ REVIEW FOUNDER Paul Thifault, PhD Springfield College, MA © Copyright 2019 All Rights Reserved 2 CONTENTS Preface 5 Acknowledgements 6 Kathryn Brown 7 Songs of Freedom and Oppression: Language, Identity, and Race in Césaire’s A Tempest Kaitlyn Jackson 12 French: A Vehicle of Oppression Reclaimed in Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation Justin Sturgeon 30 Magical Realist Representations During Troubled Times in World Literature Emma TurnEr 42 Unearthing Feminist Justice in the Characters of Sophocles’s Antigone and Homer’s Demeter Avery CrEws 50 Gender Roles and Societal Breakdowns in Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad CaitlIn FrEEny 55 Futurism, Misogyny, and Trauma in Blaise Cendrars’s The Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of Little Jeanne of France LeEAnn HutchInson 75 The Monster in the Closet: Images of Queer Experience in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein KEnnEdy SElbE 93 “If She’s Not Picketing, She’s Not a Feminist”: Intersectional Feminism in Adichie’s Americanah KaylIE ButlEr 100 The Mystery of John Donne’s Metempsychosis MIcah Stewart-WIlcox 109 The Affective, Traumatized Body of The Waste Land Paige Enlow 126 Travel Narratives Across World Civilizations LanE GEntry 135 The Diary of Alexandros, Soldier of the Most Serene Emperor Constantine XI Palaiologos 3 EllEn RIch 147 Stefania Korabik: The True-Life Story of My Grandmother Austin HIckman 156 Common Law and Originalism: Factions at War SamuEl KIger 165 The Detrimental Effects of Charismatic Religious Leadership Notes on the Contributors 178 4 PREFACE An institution puts forth a mission statement to capture its primary purpose, center of attention, and dedication. Lindsey Wilson College shows the depth of its love for education and the student body with its statement, “Every Student, Every Day.” The Alpha Kappa Phi Review is an extension of this mindset, with an interest in the work of all students at Lindsey Wilson College. This journal contains a broad range of student essays. These essays span a wide variety of topics and academic disciplines, including detailed analyses of works by major authors and solutions for pressing societal concerns that have major implications on our world today. All of the essays that appear in the Alpha Kappa Phi Review have gone through a rigorous peer-review selection and revision process resulting in the inclusion of only works that achieve the highest excellence. All of the essays rely on secondary research and/or extensive textual evidence to support their analyses and claims. The Review has sought to include a wide variety of writing from Lindsey Wilson’s student body with this grouping, encompassing the work of sophomores to recent graduates. This volume boasts fifteen student essays, the largest number of essays ever published by the Review. The reader will find the essays organized thematically, not alphabetically, into six different groups. The first three essays in this volume—by Katie Brown, Kaitlyn Jackson, and Justin Sturgeon— discuss works that deal with race, colonialism, and culture. All three authors chose to analyze works that were written in response to other literary works or world events. The second group of essays in the volume features two essays examining feminism and gender in Greek literature. Emma Turner and Avery Crews both use a feminist lens to explore the classic characters of Antigone, Demeter, and Penelope. The next three essays in the volume—by Caitlin Freeny, LeeAnn Hutchinson, and Kennedy Selbe— discuss the topics of misogyny, gender, queer theory, and identity. While these essays have a common thread, they explore a wide variety of literary works from a variety of time periods to wrestle with these feminist and gender studies issues. The fourth group features essays—by Kaylie Butler and Micah Stewart-Wilcox—providing detailed analyses of works that have caused, and continue to cause, much debate in the field of literary studies. The fifth group of essays shifts the focus to historical analysis, both of past world civilizations and of personal histories as they intersect with world history, with three essays by Paige Enlow, Lane Gentry, and Ellen Rich. These essays all feature historical narratives, both fictional and true, that weave historical facts into their narrative. The final group of essays examine social concerns in church and government. Austin Hickman and Samuel Kiger address questions of common law interpretations of the U.S. Constitution and charismatic religious leadership, respectively. The Alpha Kappa Phi Review is devoted to publishing the best student scholarly work that Lindsey Wilson College has to offer. We believe the broad range of topics and arguments within this volume showcase the excellent writing and research skills of Lindsey Wilson’s student body. —Caitlin Freeny Editor-in-Chief April 2019 5 vvv The editorial board would like to thank the following English and History faculty members for serving as Faculty Reviewers for this volume: Dr. Tim McAlpine Dr. Kara Mollis Dr. Kerry Robertson Dr. Allison Smith Dr. Elizabeth Tapscott Each submission to the Alpha Kappa Phi Review undergoes an extensive review process in which it is anonymously evaluated by both student editors and faculty. We are grateful to Dr. Paul Thifault for founding and establishing the Alpha Kappa Phi Review in 2015, the sole undergraduate research journal at Lindsey Wilson College. Special thanks also to Dr. Tip Shanklin for continuing his legacy by editing and publishing the second volume. Finally, the last three volumes of the Review would not have been possible without the mentorship of Dr. Steffens. vvv Critical essays in the Humanities, broadly defined as the fields of English, History, Women’s and Gender Studies, Philosophy, Theology, Theatre, Film, Political Science, and Art, are welcomed and encouraged from current or recently graduated Lindsey Wilson College students. For more information, please contact Dr. Karolyn Steffens, Assistant Professor of English and Faculty Editor: [email protected]. 6 Songs of FrEEdom and OpprEssIon: Language, IdEntity, and RacE in CésairE’s A Tempest Katie Brown It is through language that people process and frame the world around them. Language not only provides us with a way to communicate but also serves as a way for one to establish and articulate an identity. Imposition of language is one of the first, and perhaps most influential, steps in the colonization process. When one’s form of communication is taken away or compromised, it alters one’s entire ability to connect to and reflect on identity. In his 1964 work, A Tempest, Aimé Césaire highlights the intricacies of language and identity within the scope of colonialism through a retelling of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. In Césaire's work, the identities of Caliban, Ariel, and Prospero are all heavily tied to the language they use and the ways in which others use language to oppress or empower them. Connecting language and speech with power, Césaire’s text focuses on the role of dialogue within the colonial system and how both the colonized and the colonizer can wield this power. In this essay, I will explore the ways in which Caliban’s rejection of the colonial dialectic empowers him to overcome his oppressor, how Ariel utilizes his liminal position to negotiate freedom through his speech, and the ways in which Prospero wields the rhetoric of colonialism to oppress others. In Césaire’s retelling, Prospero is a white colonist who has enslaved Caliban and Ariel, both of whom are native to the island. One of the primary ways in which Caliban rejects Prospero’s imposition of language is by rejecting the name of “Caliban” that Prospero arbitrarily gives him. Caliban decries the identity that Prospero has “given [to him] by [his] hatred” and rather chooses his own identity in being called “X” (20). Caliban chooses the name X for himself because he has become “like a man without a name. Or to be more precise, a man whose name has been stolen” under Prospero’s rule (20). Prospero, like white colonizers and the continuing effects of institutionalized racism, erased Caliban’s identity by arbitrarily choosing a new name for him, subjugating him as a slave, and imposing white ideas and values of civilization onto his existence. Prospero’s act of renaming Caliban stripped away his identity and sense of self, forever removing his native ancestral name from memory. The “X” is the absence of a history, the forced removal of the identity associated with ancestry. By taking on the mantle of namelessness, Caliban is appropriating the wrongs done to him by the colonial agenda and instead becomes a martyr figure of sorts for other victims of colonization who have also been robbed of their identities. 7 Aside from refusing the white identity thrust upon him, Caliban also rebels against Prospero’s colonial oppression through the persistent incorporation of Kiswahili words into his spoken dialogue with Prospero. Caliban’s refusal to totally conform to Prospero’s language serves as a consistent, understated resistance to Prospero’s insistence of white supremacy. Steve Almquist writes extensively on this topic in his essay, “Not Quite the Gabbling of ‘A Thing Most Brutish.’: Caliban's Kiswahili in Aimé Césaire's A Tempest.” Almquist’s essay breaks down some of the grander implications of Caliban’s usage of Kiswahili, primarily focusing on the historical evolution of Kiswahili as a language in relation to the decolonization of Africa and of the political and social weight the language carried among the post-colonial academic community in the 1960s.