Undergraduate Journal of Humanistic Studies

Spring 2025

The Undergraduate Journal of Humanistic Studies is pleased to publish our seventeenth issue, presenting three papers that close-read a variety of creative literature, from plays to novels, to challenge traditional understandings of human nature and history. By reinvigorating the importance of literary texts in scholarly work, these authors travel through time and space, from Ancient Greece and the English Renaissance to Partition-era India, to demonstrate the importance of rethinking whose narratives are centered in intellectual conversations, and how we interpret them.

In “Point of Pride: Ancient Sexuality, Heternormativity, and the Politics of Difference in The Song of Achilles”, Matthias Grosser compares the Iliad’s original “queerness” with Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles. Acknowledging that modern-day queerness is a widely cultural phenomenon, one which has somehow found itself superimposed onto the sexual lives of people who lived thousands of years ago, and that ancient sexuality is incredibly different from modern-day conceptions of it, Grosser finds that Miller’s text operates on a widely hetenormative level and therefore makes her text significantly less queer than the original. While the Iliad’s Achilles and Patroclus could be understood as queer due to their non-normative relationship to one another (even if this relationship was not sexual in nature), it is important to maintain that this points not to a universal queer identity but rather to the existence of non-normative existences. This modern heteronormativity, Grosser argues, is indicative of the broader modern understanding of sexuality and love and highlights a glaring issue in queer politics.

In “Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie: Self-Fashioning, Virtue, and Nobility in All’s Well That Ends Well”, Abby Ryan examines Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well, where the Renaissance notion of self-fashioning and the social structures that govern this process take center stage. The play is also centrally concerned with a “nobility crisis” that the King identifies between the ruling class’s older and younger generations. Helena’s project of self-fashioning succeeds not because of simplistic fairytale justice based on the triumph of good over evil or the power of individual actors’ merit to entirely change their material conditions, but because of its accordance with the King’s project of restoring “virtue” to nobility and reproducing the family unit following these nostalgic noble conventions. This essay closely focuses on Helena’s reproductive capacity and both social and bodily reproduction references in the play. Ultimately, Ryan argues that through the play’s entanglement of legal and fairytale justice, Shakespeare engages in a debate about the meaning of virtue in Renaissance middle-class and elite society, and questions the potential for virtue to govern one’s worldview.

Finally, in “Alternative Archives of the 1947 Partition of India in Anjali Enjeti’s The Parted Earth”, Ellie Simon builds on scholars who, since the 1990s, have increasingly attempted to center the perspective of everyday South Asians and the lasting impacts of the Partition on members of the South Asian diaspora by using novel historical methods and sources, such as oral histories, art and cinema, and twentieth-century Partition fiction. Simon seeks to contribute to this ongoing scholarly discourse through a close examination of Anjali Enjeti’s 2021 novel The Parted Earth as an alternative archive for the 1947 Partition of India and its lasting effects on the South Asian diaspora. She argues that in its depiction of three generations of characters using oral, spatial, artistic, and literary modes as a means of processing their trauma and testifying to their experiences of the Partition, The Parted Earth buttresses the testimonial cause and affirms the novel form as a possible archive for subaltern histories.

We appreciate all the submissions we received in anticipation of this issue and the work of our editorial board. We are also especially grateful for the ongoing guidance and support of Professor Baird Jarman, our faculty advisor, in putting together this issue. Additionally, this publication would not have been possible without the expertise and patience of the Digital Humanities Team, who consistently take a collection of papers and turn them into the journal we bring you today. On behalf of our entire team, we hope you enjoy reading the Spring 2025 issue of the Undergraduate Journal of Humanistic Studies.