Senior Thesis Overview and Sample Explorations in Literary Analysis and Creative Interpretation

In the spring of their senior year, all students will complete a Senior Thesis, a substantial academic essay that grows out of work they have completed in their English classes. The primary goal of the project is to offer students the opportunity to work on a significant, scholarly project, a process that will help to prepare them for the challenges of college writing and that will enable them to leave high school with a feeling of expertise in one focused area of study. At the end of the year, one paper from each school will be selected for the “Senior Thesis Prize.” This honor will be celebrated at the appropriate ceremony on each campus.

Requirements and Details:

• The Senior Paper is intended to evolve from students’ original thinking about literature and is meant to serve as a celebration of creative analysis. Students wishing to complete serious research should do so after discussing appropriate methods with their English teachers. All research must be credited using proper MLA citations.

• Students are welcomed to write about works they have studied previously. However, significant portions of previous academic work may not be incorporated into the Senior Thesis.

• Because the Senior Thesis will comprise the bulk of a student’s fourth quarter grade, students earning lower than a B- on their essays can expect to take a final exam in English.

• Students enrolled in two spring English classes must complete two distinct Senior Theses.

• Academic dishonesty associated with the Senior Essay is a most serious offense at both schools. A student who plagiarizes any portion of the Senior Essay will seriously jeopardize his or her standing at the school. Use of AI/Chat GPT is considered cheating. Turnitin.com and other resources will be used to ensure the originality of students’ work.

Below are your TWO options:

1. Analytical essay using 2-3 literary works (10 pages minimum, Double-spaced)
2. Creative Analytical using 1-3 literary works (12 page minimum, Double-spaced)

“Kurt Vonnegut: The Historical Context

Humor, Absurdity, and Satire within 20^th century America”

Kurt Vonnegut, the late American novelist and essayist, made his authorial debut in 1952 with the publication of Player Piano, a dystopian novel surrounding the relationship between mankind and machines. In an essay published in the “New York Times” in 1965, Vonnegut described how although the

novel was written as a satire on automation and capitalism, he had learned from the reviewers that he was considered a science-fiction writer¹. In fact, the majority of his works have at one time or another fallen victim to disparaging remarks as critics have been quick to label his work as pulp-fiction. Vonnegut himself wrote: “I have been a sore-headed occupant of a file drawer labeled ‘science fiction’ ever since, and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a tall white fixture in a comfort station².” It is certainly true that on the surface, the vast majority of his stories display elements of science fiction. Vonnegut’s plots have even verged on the edge of absurdity as he has written about plunger-shaped aliens, an ice-based chemical weapon that is capable of destroying the planet, and time travel. These novels, however, cannot be labeled as simply “science-fiction” for the weight of a true Vonnegut novel lies not on the surface, but rather beneath, as these “farcical” and fictional stories are tools used by the author to expose much larger truths about the world in which we live.

“BOTH SIDES NOW:

HOW SYLVIA PLATH AND JONI MITCHELL MAKE SENSE OF THEIR LIVES”

Regarded as two of the most poignant writers of the twentieth century, Sylvia Plath and Joni Mitchell each deliver a distinctive glance into their distorted existence. Widely considered Plath’s most celebrated book of poems, the posthumous Ariel exposes her twisted psychological torment. Perhaps that collection’s most well-known work, “Lady Lazarus” unambiguously examines suicide and death, as it immerses the reader in the solitude that weighs so heavily on its author. Alluding to Lazarus, a man Jesus resurrects from the dead, Plath becomes the female foil to this biblical figure, and through the chaos and loneliness her husband, father, and friends cultivate in her, they ultimately drive her to attempt suicide.

Like Plath, singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell introduces themes of turmoil and confusion, specifically in her 1971 album Blue, in which she considers her complex relationships with the men she loves. Written while in Europe, Blue includes the songs “All I Want” and “California,” both of which capture Mitchell’s journey away from her lover to evoke the same sense of isolation that Plath conjures in “Lady Lazarus.” Within their respective works, Sylvia Plath and Joni Mitchell explore tortuous relationships, loss of self, and disillusion in order to express their unique and dysfunctional realities. Where they differ is this: while Mitchell presents a complicated, nuanced world, juxtaposing its sorrows and delights, she ultimately overcomes her plight; Plath, on the other hand, offers up a bitter, scathing review of life that eventually overwhelms her.

“Thomas” (Creative Analysis)

…And so, when three months into his new life at Kent, Thomas saw the lovely Kathleen Chesterfield, he was thrown into a romantic stupor that he could have only imagined through his favorite of Shakespeare’s love sonnets. She was a junior, three years his senior, and she was nothing that Thomas imagined her to be, but he remained unaware of that for as long as he could manage. He first saw her on a cold Friday in November and quietly admired the curvature of her hips and the flight of her hair twirling behind her head in the wind as she crossed through the main quad. He could not move. She wore white, like the cool dresses of Daisy Buchanan and Jordan Baker in the

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beginning of Gatsby that “[rippled] and [fluttered] as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house” (8). When she finally entered one of the buildings for science class and fell out of sight, Thomas was left so vulnerable that he had to run back to his dorm room so that he could find his old weathered copy of The Great Gatsby to whisk him away to another world for a while.

The top corners of nearly every page in the book had been folded down at one point of another, and the cover was slightly torn at the end, but Thomas did not mind. It was his. It was too important to be bothered by issues of the cosmetic realm. What mattered to him lay beneath the cover – inside the cover. And so he jumped into his bed and buried himself behind those torn and beaten painted eyes to explore once again the power that Jay Gatsby had over him. He read of Gatsby’s young encounters with Daisy before the war, and he read so furiously that the image of Gatsby in his mind was not of a soon-to-be millionaire from North Dakota, but curiously enough, of himself – an awkward, gawky young adolescent covered in an unconquerable layer of acne. The image of Daisy was of Kathleen Chesterfield – several notches higher on the social ladder and two years his senior – and that image folded over itself and dissolved into Nick Carraway’s fluid prose.

One autumn night, five years before, they had been walking down the street when the leaves were falling, and they came to a place where there were no trees and the sidewalk was white with moonlight. They stopped here and turned towards each other. Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalks really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees – he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder. (99-100)

Thomas paused and dropped the book onto his chest. He looked out the window and admired the perfection in Kent’s buildings, the grace in which they lay together to form a whole campus and not simply a collection of practical structures studded into the green earth. He saw himself hopping across from one to the other, as Gatsby had jumped up the rings of his own imaginary ladder. But it was not complete. He needed more. He needed Kathleen.

His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy’s white face came to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete. (100)

He could not fathom such momentary perfection. He let his eyes drift away from the buildings and the page alike as he turned inward to the beat of his own heart and found it pounding at the same furious pace as Gatsby’s had been. He saw Kathleen’s white face, draped in glistening blonde hair and dreamed that he might kiss her as well and so calm his own mind as he believed Gatsby had done by similar means. He was too entranced by her white blouse, by the flow of her hair, by the grace in her steps to grasp the full meaning of that moment. And so, Thomas lay there for hours, missing two classes in the process, defeated by an insatiable lust and the strength of his imagination which, to him, seemed to romp like the mind of God.