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Creative Writing

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MSU Graduate Theses

Theses/Dissertations

Defamiliarization

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Yes, Baby: Essays, Amy Gault Jan 2023

Yes, Baby: Essays, Amy Gault

MSU Graduate Theses

This creative thesis includes thirteen flash nonfiction pieces and one fiction short story exploring emotions and experiences that have changed who I am today. These writings are personal experiences or are inspired by personal experience. These creative works interrogate deeply transformative events and situations, such as familial relationships, trauma, poverty, living in the Midwest, patriarchy, and the beauty in existing. In the thesis’s critical introduction, I examine how my flash nonfiction pieces employ Milan Kundera’s theory of the appeal of play and Charles Baxter’s concept defamiliarization. I analyze how the succinct form of the flash essay allows my nonfiction writing …


Life, Love, And Loss: Redefining The Trauma, Samantha Crystal Rae Barnette May 2021

Life, Love, And Loss: Redefining The Trauma, Samantha Crystal Rae Barnette

MSU Graduate Theses

This thesis begins with a critical introduction analyzing the use of defamiliarization and the Dostoevskian hero in literature as a catalyst for a change in perception for victims of trauma. I create a relationship between the theories of Viktor Shklovsky and Mikhail Bakhtin as applied to both my own and published works. Short stories from Carmen Maria Machado and Marly Swick and Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale help to situate my own writing within this theoretical approach. The basis of my hypothesis lies in the blurred effect that trauma can have on the individual, causing an automatic response to …


Brilliant Women: Prose And Poetry, Amelia Fisher May 2020

Brilliant Women: Prose And Poetry, Amelia Fisher

MSU Graduate Theses

This collection of creative writing explores themes and subjects relating to feminism, sexuality, performativity, societal woes, popular culture, and the different ways we communicate. The individual pieces often examine women’s empowerment and lack thereof. These stories, essays, and poems are introduced by a critical work situating the contents of the thesis within greater literary traditions, such as Viktor Shklovsky’s defamiliarization, which I claim can function on the structural level as well as the story level, and his theory of the Chronotope; time and place are significant threads I follow from one genre to the next to create a cohesive collection …