Honors College Undergraduate Research Conference
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10877/7615
The Honors College currently hosts two annual events that showcase undergraduate research on the Texas State University Campus: the Honors Research Forum in the fall and the Undergraduate Research Conference & Thesis Forum in the spring.
Undergraduate Research Conference Website: https://www.txst.edu/honors/opportunities/events/research-conferences.html
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Item Odysseus’s (Ulysses’s) Odyssey through Western Literature, and Virgil’s and Dante’s Quests for the Questor(2010-12) Gordyn, EdgarThe mythological hero Odysseus, better known as Ulysses, remains as engaging to modern audiences as he was to the ancient Greeks. His early travails in the Trojan War, as described in the Iliad, led to worse travails as the veteran struggled for ten years to reach home, pursued by the vengeful god Poseidon, only to find his house overrun with ignominious suitors pursuing his wife. Although his Greek epic the Odyssey reestablishes Odysseus in the Ithaca which he stabilizes at the epic’s conclusion, the Odysseus theme gained strong momentum in ancient Greece. Developments in the Greek epic cycle pursued this multifaceted hero to the variously-imagined end of his days, and Western literature continues this tradition. Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses” and James Joyce’s novel Ulysses are two of the Western canon’s more famous variations on the Odysseus theme, but these build upon two more significant developments: Virgil’s Aeneid and Dante’s Inferno. Both of these artists treat Odysseus in intriguingly complex ways, making him simultaneously the heart of their works and the target of their attacks. Their ambivalence towards Odysseus speaks volumes about his influence upon their epic poems. My essay first explores Odysseus’s character as Homer’s epics depict him, and glances into the ancient Greek culture that conceived him as their representative hero. Then, my essay analyzes key selections from the Aeneid and the Inferno to demonstrate how strongly Odysseus inspired at the same time that he antagonized these poets who so strongly influence our Western literary canon.Item Paralleling Reality: The Storytelling Tapestry of Don Quixote(2009-01) Gordyn, EdgarThe curious phenomenon of storytelling is unique to human beings, and has for millennia been a vital vein for the development of human civilization. Epic poems glorify the deeds of heroes, stories embody religious beliefs, and our world generally becomes more sensible through stories, both factual and fictional. Miguel Cervantes’ character, the story-obsessed Don Quixote, represents our collective fascination with stories. Cervantes, in his novel Don Quixote, employs the storytelling tradition to make Quixote’s worlds—both that of his imagination and that in which Quixote lives—more ingenious and sensible. Cervantes’ numerous themes seem at first as disconnected and disorganized as Quixote’s thinking. However, utilizing the storytelling tradition within his novel, Cervantes coheres his disparate themes into a harmonious whole. This approach mirrors our general storytelling tradition that makes our world—historical and modern —more sensible, however random some of its events seem. By focusing on Part I of Don Quixote, my essay will analyze not only Cervantes’ use of stories within stories, but also his layered narrative structure, both of which devices make the novel Don Quixote a microcosm of the storytelling tradition that is crucial to our civilization’s development.