Spring 2020, Thesis

Giulia Niccolai’s Abandonment of Photography: An Act of Subaltern Self-Awareness

BY BES ARNAOUT

In a Tortoiseshell: Using various feminist thinkers as a scholarly lens, her own primary source material from an interview she conducted, and a close reading of multiple artistic mediums, Bes puts forward a thesis that is clear, original, and motivated. In addition to containing all of the key ingredients for a powerful argument, though, Bes’s thesis is an exemplar model due to the way she deepens and refines that thesis as the paper progresses and as she gradually exposes the reader to more key concepts, relevant scholars, and pieces of evidence. In this excerpt, which appears towards the end of Bes’s paper, we see her thesis in its full complexity and nuance and get a taste of how Bes strategically goes about uncovering that complexity in gradual stages. Continue reading →

Motive, Spring 2018

Boys Beyond Binary: An Exploration of the Non-Identitarian Nature of Relationships in Umberto Saba’s “Ernesto” and Luca Guadagnino’s “Call Me By Your Name”

BY BES ARNAOUT

In a Tortoiseshell: In her essay about the relationships of the protagonists in Umberto Saba’s “Ernesto” and the 2017 film Call Me By Your Name, Bes Arnaout navigates the difficulty of arguing for the existence of a relationship paradigm that the theory has not considered. In doing so, Bes creatively extends her motive, that the critics have gotten the relationship wrong, to ground readers as they move through the paper. She is therefore able to motivate close-readings at critical moments to extend her thesis, which would otherwise become amorphous. In doing so, Bes opens up a new avenue for writers who want to argue something but lack the language to categorize it in existing theoretical terms.

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