Vassar College Digital Library

Vassar Scholarship

Vassar Scholarship, the institutional repository formerly known as Digital Window, reflects the research and scholarly output of the Vassar College community.  It provides access to a variety of collections, including senior theses and projects across a wide range of disciplines.

"O'me alone?": Aristotle and the failure of autarky in Shakespeare's Coriolanus

Publication Date
2020-January-01
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This thesis offers an Aristotelian reading of <em>Coriolanus, </em>with the goal of assessing the viability of individual self-sufficiency.<em></em> As political and moral treatises, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and Politics are valuable intertexts through which Shakespeare's more imaginative work may be analyzed...

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Covering Islam: National Trauma and The Politics of the Imagination

Publication Date
2015-January-01
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My thesis scrutinizes the U.S. media construction of the events of September 11, 2001 as "national trauma," and the way in which this framing of the attacks has allowed '9/11' to invoke a visceral imagination of the deterministic relationship between...

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Duelling and the Fantasmatic Spectre of Male Honour in Imperial Germany: The Kaiser’s Will and Theodor Fontane’s Effi Briest

Publication Date
2022-May-15
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Underneath the historiographical disagreements about military honor and dueling in Imperial Germany there lurks a consensus that most duelists simply internalized the dictates of honor. This article troubles that presumption by attending to the Prussian-German military honor code’s mixed messages...

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Streaming Females 2.0: Que(e)ry-ing Sites of Lesbian Counternarrative & Exhibition

Publication Date
2014-January-01
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The lesbian/queer female audience has a history of being elated with news that its community will be represented on the small screen, then grossly disappointed with how it's represented. For many lesbian, bisexual, and queer women, especially those lacking a...

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The Captain of Köpenick and the Uniform Fantasies of German Militarism

Publication Date
2022-June-15
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This article examines a famous 1906 event that occurred when a con man dressed in a captain's uniform commandeered two small contingents of soldiers in Berlin and took them to nearby Köpenick, where he proceeded to arrest the city’s mayor...

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The Emperor’s New Uniforms: The Uniform Fantasies of Wilhelm II and His Critics

Publication Date
2024-February-15
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In light of Wilhelm II’s well-known predilection for military uniforms and displays, many of his contemporaries regarded him as a real-life version of the titular figure in Hans Christian Andersen’s fable “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” This essay uses the concept...

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