Digital Commons Network^™

Final Master's Portfolio, Hammed Oluwadare Adejare

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

This portfolio contains four related essays concerned with issues of race and migration in literary creations of diasporic African writers and film texts by African American film producers. The first essay offers a general exploration of contemporary African diasporic writings and the pervading Afropolitan politics of home and belonging. The next essay in the collection provides a theoretical grounding for this writing genre, tracing the connections between the theory, Afropolitanism, and earlier modes of theorizing global race relations such as postcolonialism and cosmopolitanism. The third essay explores the application of these theories to Teju Cole’s diasporic novel, Open City, explicating …

Redefining Ceremony And The Sacred: Short Stories From The Dinétah, Stacie S. Denetsosie

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This is a creative thesis comprised of three short stories centered on the experiences of three Navajo protagonists living on the Navajo reservation. The short stories fit within the field of Native American Literature and highlight issues of mortality, sexuality, and ceremony. The stories illustrate the experiences of modern-day Navajo youth grappling to understand how to connect traditional knowledge with modernity. The three stories featured within this thesis are offered as a way to understand these challenges. Each protagonist is faced with an issue of morality, sexuality, or ceremony, and each reach differing conclusions about these topics within their lives. …

Text By Mus, Mustafa Abubaker

Graduate Scholarly Works

This is why I have created a Twitter bot to generate interactive thread-based creative writing in the form of short stories called Text By Mus as my interactive media project in the graduate level course Web Content Development: Writing for Interactive Media PRWR 6850 instructed by Dr. Sergio Figueiredo. The account features “choose your own adventure” stories written in the literary fiction style. I would like to use the Twitter bot to combat the mass-market production of what is called literature in lieu of digital fiction being just as good as classical, all-time great fiction. This project presents a software …

The Meaning In The Music: Music And The Prose Of Chopin, Joyce, Baldwin And Egan, Colin Perry

Senior Theses

Kate Chopin, James Joyce, James Baldwin, and Jennifer Egan are collectively gifted in the art of prose, yet each author also experiments with music in their literary works. An analysis of Chopin's The Awakening, Joyce's "The Dead," Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues," and Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad reveals a trend of authors utilizing music to enrich their texts and convey major themes.

The Gen Z Zombie: Ya Takes On The Undead, Jason Mccormick

Theses and Dissertations

After the terror attacks of 9/11, zombie stories experienced an unprecedented boom, or for some critics, a renaissance. Fears of mass death, infiltration by the Other, and life before and after the apocalyptic moment were played out through zombie stories. The longevity of the boom also saw the zombie myth move into strange new places including Young Adult novels, resulting in what I refer to as the “Gen Z zombie.”

In his discussion of the sympathetic zombie, Kyle William Bishop mentions YA zombie texts including Carrie Ryan’s The Forest of Hands and Teeth and Isaac Marion’s Warm Bodies but groups …

The Most Beautiful Place On Earth: Wallace Stegner In California, 1945-1993, Matthew Dougall Stewart

Dissertations - ALL

This dissertation explores the life and work of the writer Wallace Stegner (1909-1993) and his intellectual efforts to create, clarify, and defend the contours of a “geography of hope” in the American West. Chapter 1 begins with Stegner’s move to California in 1945. In the context of his developing regional vision as expressed in early articles and books, it traces Stegner’s attempts to build a range of institutions in California as well as his first writings that either adopted the state as its subject or used it as a setting for fictional work. Chapter 2 explores a research project that …

Dark Smoke Rising, Matthew Knutson

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

A collection of short fiction set in and around Southern California.

How We Live Today And Other Stories, Gregory W. Rohloff

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

How We Live Today is a collection of stories about family connections and the process of making amends to keep a family whole. The families are not just traditional families, but also arrangements constructed out of necessity, circumstance, or convenience. The title story tells how a man ends a lengthy divide with a stepmother for the sake of her, his son, and ultimately himself. We see adolescents do the right thing in their circumstances at the risk of losing peer standing or to avert future social damage. An older golfer encourages a younger golfer, easing guilt but realizing that respect …

Philadelphia Stories, Leigh A. Stuart

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

These stories provide a look at a Philadelphia family over decades.

Sixth Form, Adrienne Barton

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

The ten stories in this short story collection explore the liminal spaces created by certain physical spaces as well as times in the characters’ lives. The stories are largely related to a school environment, and the relationships and experiences that are unique to the players living and moving within that context. How much are the relationships and actions of the characters influenced by the setting. What weight do institutional forces and tradition carry in the characters’ lives, and how do they exploit it for their own will or conform?

Crossroads And Crow Feathers, Travis E. Bowman

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

This thesis uses the short story form to examine the influence of myth, magick, and the supernatural on the interstitial areas of the United States. The power of words as a force for change figures prominently in these stories. This thesis looks at the monstrous as it moves in the darkness and in the minds of humans, but also at the tremendous depths of compassion and courage we find in ourselves when faced with monstrous situations.

The First Rule Of Improv, John M. Gilder

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

The First Rule of Improv is a collection of fictional short stories concerned with loss, life’s unfairness, the weight of the past, and how people succeed or fail in coping. Each story explores these notions through its characters, who vary wildly in terms of both dramatic severity and success in the face of adversity, with the first rule of improv—to accept and build—being suggested by the author as the healthiest manner of approach, if not necessarily the easiest.

Writing A Speculative Fiction Novel, Ashlyn Victoria

Honors Projects

This Honors Project is a speculative fiction novel, and its setting includes topics like artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and sustainability. Though it's not yet complete (which was expected), I was able to write forty-four pages (the equivalent of more than one-hundred pages using the standard 12-pt, double-spaced Times New Roman font) over the duration of the project. A synopsis is attached, but the manuscript remains unpublished; revealing it could reduce the novel's chances of publication in the future.

Eulogy, Kim T. Allison

Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Particular to the three short stories in Eulogyis the importance of place, as they are set in the fictional location of Potter’s Island, which is based on my childhood sense of Florida.Contradictions, complications, and disappointments can be uniquely tied to a sense of place. My own parents and grandparents moved to Florida when I was three years old, but where they lived, how they lived and worked, and what dreams they pursued was only partially an immigrant’s story of wanting a better life.

The past has weight—a weight that must be dealt with, for real people, and for …

The Transformation Of Women's Roles In Fashion In Eighteenth-Century France: Femininity, Fashion, And Frivolity In Fiction, Christine M. Carter

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“The crime of luxury is that it makes us judge a man not according to what he is, but according to what surrounds him.”[1]

There is a significant existing body of scholarship surrounding the establishment of France as the European epicenter for fashion and taste beginning in the seventeenth century and reaching its apogee during the eighteenth century. The eighteenth century was a period of extensive growth for France in terms of textile production, and an increase in particular professions. These were key factors in perpetuating economic growth. Women in particular were affected by these changes. Not only were …

This To Which We've Come., Holly Tabor

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This collection of works explores the linkages between moments, the connective thread that accumulates over time to create for each of us a unique present. The title, “This to Which We’ve Come,” attempts to convey that each moment is a point of arrival colored by the smallest of temporal fibers, our most interior histories that stretch and bend and fold back onto themselves when the present forces us into action, or inaction. Through these characters and their stories, I attempt to examine that moment of arrival. A secondary thread explored in this collection is the idea that humans are still …

A Citrus Wildfire, Mark Anthony Lopez

Theses and Dissertations

An American Dream forged by greed. A family caught in the middle of a race war. A young boy trying to learn how to be a man. A Citrus Wildfire is a fiction novella that tells the story of a Mexican family struggling to survive in the Rio Grande Valley after their only source of income burns down, and the lengths they must go to in order to get the life they were promised.

A small preface from the author proceeds the work. This novella is inspired by many different authors and educators, as well as the Rio Grande Valley …

Vermilion-Stained Offerings, Pooja Desai

Fiction MFA Theses

This thesis is a collection of short stories.

What The Water Brought Me: A Composite Of Two Short Stories And A Novel Portion, Shannon Strawhun

Theses

This thesis is a collection of two short stories and three chapters from my novel, Shore Walkers. The short stories, “Lights Against Your Back” and “Thunder and Dust” are a part of a larger collection I have been working on. Each story is based on a different being or place from Gulliver’s Travels. Though the stories can be read separately, there are characters and settings which eventually link all the works in the collection. The stories follow characters in different places and time in the United States. “Thunder and Dust” centers around the dismantling of the Hearst Castle in the …

Sprout, Morgan Coyner

Fiction MFA Theses

Sprout is a novel that bridges the traditional storytelling of Young Adult literature with the sophistication of language seen in literary fiction. It follows a young woman in the year following her suicide attempt as she grapples with how to continue moving forward when she's still not sure if she wants to live.

Representing The Angakkuq: Exploring Inuit Mythology Through Fiction, Abigail Studebaker

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Projects

This project is both a creative and critical foray into Inuit mythology. The Critical Preface unpacks how magical realism, young adult literature, and multicultural literature shaped the writing of the project, which is the first five chapters of a novel-in-progress titled Angakkuq. Angakkuq tells the story of a teenage girl, Alasi, of Inuit and American heritage living in the U.S. who begins experiencing strange, seemingly magical phenomena. As her story unfolds, she finds herself at the intersection of the past and the present, struggling to formulate her own identity while more and more is revealed about her father’s childhood growing …

Sugartown, Emma Moore

English Theses & Dissertations

Ren Baggarly, the seventeen year old foster daughter of a local minister and his wife, goes missing the day of her boyfriend’s high school graduation. Sugartown is an examination of a small, strange, sometimes spiteful Southern town and its demons. It is told through the eyes of the three women who are inadvertently charged with piecing together the story Ren left behind.

Black River, William Ramon Daugherty

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

None

Hedgehogs, Oscar Antonio Moreno Huizar

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

An anxious college freshman who befriends a party-loving junior girl and both hatch a plan to escape from the border to California, trying to save a mutual friend and escape their dark pasts.

Ghosts Of Madmen: A Generational Tale, Kristen Leigh Olin

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

A family story depicting an immigrant family that must deal with the horrors of the past while delving through the psyche of the present. One woman's look into the deepest reaches of her American family and their generations of alcoholism and abuse and her resolution to the ghosts that haunt the family's women.

‘Bloodwood’ And ‘Liminal Spaces, Timeless Places: Abjection, Liminality And Landscape In Australian Gothic Fiction’, Karleah Olson

Theses : Honours

This creative honours project comprises a work of fiction titled ‘Bloodwood’ and an accompanying exegetical essay, exploring the concept of liminal space within the Australian landscape. It investigates the anxieties and consequences of past trauma that linger within the landscape of modern Australia, exploring themes such as time, connection to nature, trauma and grief. Using Julia Kristeva’s abjection theory, particularly her ideas on liminal space, this work addresses the contentious issue of postcolonial theory within the field of literary studies, as well as the concept of grief as a liminal process. These ideas are explored through the storylines of three …

Unbecoming : A Collection Of Short Fiction, Angélica Luisa Valentín Schubert

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This collection contains nine short stories addressing various concepts and issues relating to contemporary femininity in the United States.

A Regional Guide To Living, Megan M. Brien

Senior Projects Spring 2019

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

A Hermit's Tale, Richard W. Ayers

Senior Projects Spring 2019

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

The Bitter Wake, Nicholas Carl Langen

Senior Projects Spring 2019

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.