Blake's Symbols of Heaven and Hell (May 2024)
William Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell is beautifully illustrated. Lines of text begin and end with leaves, birds, ribbons and clouds, the shadows of serpents and horses. These illustrations are small as letters and act as letter stand-ins, as if the sentence, secretly unended, leaps into and persists in stick figures, curlicues and flames.
Blake's diverse symbols are roughly of four kinds: Beasts (snakes, horses and birds), Nature (mud, flower and flame), Angels (and demons – celestial but manlike things) and Men (all human forms). I interpret the meanings each kind takes on in this work, based on recurrent geometric and stylistic relationships between instances of each symbol and the text they frame and follow.
Written for English 366F: Media Theory for Literary Studies, taught by Mark McGurl.
The Dead Priest in Ireland (October 2022)
About a story by James Joyce called The Sisters, from Dubliners. I argue that Father Flynn grows mad because he is a fraudulent priest; unable to die to his own desires, he is denied that share of divinity which would enable him to perform his duties.
Written for History 207B: The Irish and the World, taught by Robert Crews and JP Daughton.
Reception of Divine Light in Christ’s Transfiguration (June 2022)
About the mosaic of the Transfiguration at Daphni, an eleventh-century monastery near Athens. Moving from this specific example, I interpret why the three men arrayed below Christ's exalted form react so differently to God's light and voice, and what this says about the relationship between fear, faith and mediating love.
Written for Art History 208A: Abject Subjects and Divine Anamorphosis in Byzantine Art, taught by Bissera Pentcheva.
Visible and Invisible Wounds in Christian Mystical Experience (March 2022)
Treats the questions: "What is the significance of this explicit presentation of the wound, and of the wound itself as a concept in Christianity? How do visible and invisible wounds feature in Christian mystical experience, and how are they defined and distinguished? And how does the wound-cult relate to Christian concepts of humanity and divinity?"
Written for History 318: Saints and Spiritual Power in Medieval Europe, taught by Fiona Griffiths.
On the Showings of Julian of Norwich (February 2022)
I argue that Julian, in the short text of her sequence of sixteen visions, communicates the following:
Sin divides us from the good and the bliss of God. And yet man should sin, for it is an honor to him to be redeemed. Redemption comes by the white, hot pain of awareness, white and hot like the light on Julian’s cross. She wishes this pain would be so great as to feel akin to Christ’s Passion, because just as he loves her, she loves him. And that love keeps her soul penitent, until its pain and longing grow so large that beside them, sin is made nothing. Even the greatest sin, the original sin, could be shone out of existence by the pain and thirst of Christ, whose thirst is his love for man. And we men thirst in reciprocity, in compassion, that we may know him completely, and suffer out the sins of our lives, that we may be fit to be joined with him."
Written for History 318: Saints and Spiritual Power in Medieval Europe, taught by Fiona Griffiths.
Female Sexual Agency in the Poetry of Walther von der Vogelweide (April 2020)
This work won the 2020 German Club of Stanford Essay Award. In it, I conclude that "the only refuge of sexual love is minnesang itself: the singer, free from censure or constraint, can refer to a choice that belongs to no one by name. Thus he reveals what on its own would silently corrode."
lara arikan