Thesis Theater: Emily Denny and Lola Lindle

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Thesis Theater Recording

Event Announcement

Join us on Friday, September 28, at 9 PM ET for a Thesis Theater with Signum MA graduates Emily Denny and Lola Lindle, who will discuss their recently completed theses. Signum graduate and thesis director Kris Swank and thesis advisor Dr. Peter Schakel
will facilitate the discussion.

About the Participants

Lola Lindle lives in Seattle with her family. She works at Seattle Cancer Care Alliance in healthcare quality. She is a wildly shy introvert who masquerades as a confident, independent extrovert for short periods of time. She is a published novelist, active in theatre, film, and writing groups. She received her BA from York University in English Literature with concentrations in Creative Writing, Editing, Film and Film Editing. She has greatly enjoyed her Signum Master’s program experience.

By day, Emily Denny is a middle school language arts teacher in Noblesville, IN.  She received her BA in Secondary Education from Indiana University East.  In addition to her academic endeavors and her teaching career, Emily enjoys playing piano and creating useful items out of yarn.

Thesis Abstracts

Lola: The Theory of Rereading provides a useful and effective way for readers, critics, and writers to examine every book, poem, film, and piece of music they absorb to find deeper meaning and explore their own individual reactions to each one. Rereading can deepen the meaning and mythology of a text through study.

In Harry Potter, J. K. Rowling created the Horcrux as a flaw, an evil within its main character, unknown to the reader and the protagonist. This flaw remains hidden from all but the author throughout the series of books, though it is a driving factor on the character and his interactions through all the books. Once revealed to the reader and protagonist, it fundamentally changes the readers’ perspectives on the protagonist and all the character’s interactions and actions.

This paper will highlight two significant gaps in the critical conversations surrounding Harry Potter: how rereading can deepen the meaning of Horcruxes and their effects; and how the Horcruxes impacts non-primary characters, especially the Dursleys, the Malfoys, and Kreacher.

Emily: This thesis uses the work of Richard Rohr as an interpretive lens for C.S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces.  Over the course of his work as a priest, Rohr discovered a pattern not only within his studies of the Bible but also within his ministry.  This discovery lead him to develop an analogy for the spiritual journey that he calls the three boxes.   Rohrs’ three stage paradigm of order, disorder, and reorder illuminates the complexities of the plot and important themes of Lewis’s final novel.

Suggested Readings

Lola: The Harry Potter series

Emily: A brief introduction to Richard Rohr’s paradigm of the three boxes

Signum University Thesis Theater

Join us on Friday, September 28, at 9 PM ET for a Thesis Theater with Signum MA graduates Emily Denny and Lola Lindle.