Tag: Mai-Lin Cheng

“Neat, Clean, Shaved, and Sober”: Philip Marlowe as the Modern Knight in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep

Presenter: Braden Prillwitz

Faculty Mentor: Mai-Lin Cheng

Presentation Type: Oral

Primary Research Area: Humanities

Major: Environmental Science, Clark Honors College

The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler is the epitomic hardboiled detective novel of the 1930s, with the primary character, Phillip Marlowe, as the modern iteration of the chivalrous knight. The knight is a literary character that has long represented idealized masculine values and behavior. This research project investigates the factors that informed Chandler’s depiction of masculinity through use of various primary sources, such as newspaper reviews of Chandler’s novel, in conjunction with secondary sources, such as biographical information on Chandler and scholarly articles examining The Big Sleep. This study found that other scholars of literature corroborate Marlowe’s similarity to the chivalrous knight figure, and that Chandler’s boyhood family situation and his time spent living in the population-dense city of Los Angeles as a young man seem to have informed his decision to center his novel on a morally-correct detective. The Big Sleep was Chandler’s opportunity to define his idea of masculinity for the readers of his generation.

“Strain of Black Blood”: The Role of the New Negro Movement in Passing

Presenter: Carly Bushman

Faculty Mentor: Mai-Lin Cheng

Presentation Type: Oral

Primary Research Area: Humanities

Major: Architecture

African American authors of the Harlem Renaissance used the term “New Negro” to represent racial progress and to unite the African American community around a mutual identity. Nella Larsen’s book, Passing, was affected by the rhetoric of the New Negro Movement in Harlem during the 1920s, as it manifests her perception of racial consciousness. Using Larsen’s text, scholarly journals and primary sources (specifically poems, short stories and essays from The New Negro: An Interpretation), I establish that the New Negro movement relates to the conflicts and character development of Passing as it reveals the contradictions surrounding the racial consciousness of the African American community during the time period. Specifically, African American individuals “passed” as Caucasian to survive in an environment of discrimination, but the act of “passing” negated the ideologies of the New Negro movement by conforming to Caucasian norms and shying away from African American heritage. This initial research on Larsen’s Passing could inform a study of her first novel, Quicksand, which has the potential to introduce additional ideas of racial consciousness in relation to the movement’s propaganda.

The More it Looks Like Queer Street, The More I Ask

Presenter(s): Guy Jones − Psychology

Faculty Mentor(s): Mai-Lin Cheng

Oral Session 2O

Research Area: Literature

The infamous Mr. Hyde from Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella “Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde” is remembered by most as monstrous, however one of Hyde’s most interesting qualities is his incredibly average, normal appearance. If Hyde functioned as a reflection of that which the Victorian populace feared, this begs the question of what his common appearance represented to the audience at the time of publication. The Victorian era was marked by increasingly nationalist sentiments and a great deal of insecurity regarding unseen foreign invaders polluting the purity of Londoners’ lineages. These invisible intruders were largely grouped under the term degenerate, popularized by Cesare Lombroso around the 1850s, and believed to be inherently evil. Among these degenerates were foreigners, the mentally ill, and homosexuals. These deviant identities were heavily interconnected as foreigners were believed to be the origins of homosexuality and other so-called mental illnesses. The subtle depiction of Hyde mimics the Victorian understanding of these supposed degenerates as documented in primary sources and in research done by Historians on the time period. Enfield, on page 14, declared that “the more it looks like Queer Street, the less I ask” however, anyone can admit a name like Queer Street demands questions.