A Celebration of Senior Theses at Undergraduate Distinction Day
Each year, the Duke English Department proudly showcases the exceptional work of its graduating seniors during Undergraduate Distinction Day. This special event honors students who have gone the extra mile to graduate with distinction—through completing a senior honors thesis crafted with tireless dedication, insight, and creativity. Here is a glimpse into the works presented by the first panel:
Drew Temel
"The detective simply asked about Eric's history. Keegan had no reason to lie. Some part of him was relieved to be talking to another human being, one that wanted to listen. ‘The best I know,’ Keegan started. ‘It started four years ago when he got his first job at the Fancy Academy…’”
Temel, an English minor, developed a series of short stories depicting an authoritarian government with absolute control of education. He read aloud a short section of his work, which detailed a man’s experience forced to testify at the posthumous trial of his brother. Temel’s words are vibrant and engaging, immersing the listener into his written universe through vivid sensorial and emotional descriptions.
In Temel’s dystopia, the only individuals able to vote are those who have graduated from the state-run university. Through crafting five linked short stories from different character perspectives, he explores such complex themes as “the tension between merit and privilege, democracy and oligarchy.”
Arielle Stern
“Knowledge of death is only accessible in the moment of death, the moment of dissolution, therefore the concept of knowledge of death's essence is merely a non-designation that relates to itself.”
Through examining the depictions of death in modernist poetry, Stern’s thesis contends that death’s most important property is that “it must retain its secrecy to remain itself.” She hones in on two poets: Wallace Stevens and Yves Bonnefoy, each of whom focused on the “metaphysical bound” that separates “what can be known from what is beyond knowing.”
Stern read aloud a section from her first chapter, which analyzes a poem of Stevens’s: The Owl in the Sarcophagus. She contends that Stevens’s writing is unique in that it is destined to “erase all traces,” intentionally failing to complete the motif of his title of the ‘owl’ or ‘sarcophagus.’ Just as an individual can never truly comprehend the experience of death, “the possibility of knowing is given to us as forbidden.”
Tyler King
“If he's sending some coded message under the radar, when I curse her over the blacked out text, there's nothing beneath as if somehow between here and at the valley, someone has sifted through Sam's message and plucked out the words, leaving voids in their wake.”
In his creative work, King concocts a rich science fiction narrative envisioning life on a human outpost on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. In the section he read aloud, the narrator has received a hard drive of family photos from home, and reflects upon their childhood memories back from Earth. From their friend Sam, the narrator receives a cryptic message with missing phrases, and attempts to puzzle out its meaning.
King’s work is deeply layered, blending beautiful depictions of childhood life with a developed futuristic world. He leaves the audience on a cliffhanger—what could be the meaning of this message?
Charlotte Haidar
“The opening ends with the water settling. This, we understand, is the journey that Laura's dead body takes. Murdered in the thick of the woods, not far from the factory, and its smokestacks, her body is delivered by the force of the waterfall rushing up to meet her flesh … At the start of every episode, we are forced to take this pilgrimage of Laura.”
Beginning her talk, Haidar explained that she had initially planned to write about female victims of patriarchal violence before falling upon her ultimate topic: women doppelgängers. In her thesis, Haidar honed on the character of Laura Palmer from the TV show Twin Peaks, who Haidar identified as the “first girl [she] knew who had been raped.”
Haidar played a clip of the show’s theme song, and commented on the woods depicted in the scene. She explained that in this show, woods served as a boundary against evil “enacted by men.” Laura was murdered in these woods, Haidar said, and the seemingly benign visuals simultaneously track the experience of her death. Through this character and TV show, Haidar attempts to capture “the continual production and reproduction of trauma.”
