A Senior Capstone Experience by Joshua Torrence ’24

Submitted to the Departments of English and Psychology

Advised by Dr. Elizabeth Foley O’Connor and Dr. Kevin McKillop

Contributor Biography: Joshua Torrence graduated summa cum laude from Washington College in May 2024 as a Bachelor of Arts in English and Psychology. During their time as a student, they served as Copy, Prose, and Poetry Editor for Collegian, acted in multiple plays and musicals—most recently Matt Brader’s lighting design SCE, The Lightning Thief—and studied abroad at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Their thesis was awarded the Bennett Lamond Senior Capstone Award in English, and their creative writing portfolio made them a Sophie Kerr Prize Finalist. They are a member of Phi Beta Kappa and Sigma Tau Delta. They currently work as a vibrant living assistant at Brightview Senior Living in Towson, Maryland, acting in musicals and writing poetry as soon as their shift ends.

Description: In this joint English and psychology SCE, I argue that applying tenets of liberation psychology alongside more traditional methods of counseling will effectively help therapists tend to the social realities of their clients’ lives by allowing clients to develop a critical dialectic within themselves, one that permits the self to interrogate internalized cultural and political beliefs and ideologies. This critical dialectic begins by recognizing the self as ontologically social and de-ideologizing reality of imperial, exploitative, and harmful histories—processes that are reflected in the poetry I analyze. I argue that Anne Sexton documents this critical dialectic in “O Ye Tongues” and “Hurry Up Please It’s Time,” poems written in direct response to Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno and T.S Eliot’s The Waste Land, respectively. Through the poems’ dialogical elements and direct engagement with a collective unconscious, Sexton’s confessional speaker ultimately escapes the systems she finds herself within when she declares her own freedom from them. In doing so, Sexton collapses any notion of imperial systematization that Smart and Eliot establish in their Enlightenment-era and Modernist poems, challenging the patriarchal, capitalistic, racialized, and “true” nature of her reality by questioning its legitimacy.

Read Joshua’s SCE below: