Digital Commons Network^™

Good Girls Don't, Tess Fresco

English Honors Theses

Set in the year 1980, "Good Girls Don't" is a bracing coming-of-age story about Cathy, a young woman in Los Angeles who dreams of escaping the city yet feels intimately bound to it. Los Angeles as a terrifyingly beautiful place, in this specific time, figures prominently in this novella; even as Cathy enjoys smoking pot with her best friend Heather, rolls her eyes at her boss at Jack In the Box, and moons over sexy surfer boys, the threat of a serial murderer targeting young women hangs over her mind. On a date one night with Jim, an older boy …

The Last Days Of Elder Mitchell, Jack Bylund

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Fall 2023 to Present

The Last Days of Elder Mitchell is a novella following the eponymous Latter-Day Saint missionary as he narrates the miracles performed by his colleague, Elder Gibson, as well as his personal grappling with his queer identity as he serves a high-demand religion that condemns people like him. The narrative explores the intersection of queerness and faith, the form of the novella, and the healing nature of autobiographical fiction.

The Bengali Oil-Eaters: A Speculative Approach To New Materialism And The Nonhuman In Contemporary Petrofiction, Jenna Wayland

Honors Projects

Despite oil’s heavy saturation within the context of contemporary global life, novelistic registrations of oil frontiers and extractive drilling in contemporary world literature remain proportionally barren with regards to oil’s political and geographical importance across the world-system. Petro-cultural production, transnational in scale and imposing in material basis, relegates oil to a paradoxical literary deferment. The general invisibility of petrofiction within the petro-sphere suggests that the materialist basis of petroleum and its fraught geopolitical history has culturally transformed oil into a repressed, peripheral, and hidden material that subsequently renders the oil-encounter unseen in contemporary literature. This creative synthesis of the oil-encounter …

The World Ends One Last Time, Winter Qiu

English Honors Theses

Two friends are reincarnated into alternate universes where they are destined to meet over and over again. Meanwhile, two otherworldly observers find themselves reflecting on their own bond with each other.

Norse Inspired Tales: Four Changes Of Fate, Pete Wille

University Honors Theses

Norse Inspired Tales: Four Changes of Fate is a collection of four original short stories meant to act as an introduction to a broader literary world where Norse myth meets late eighteen hundred's, San Francisco. The introduction gives background on my literary journey and explains some of the choices made within these stories. Each following story reveals the characters and the world they currently inhabit.

"A Narrative Is A Living Body”: Trans-Relations In Contemporary Transmasculine Fiction, Madison Rougier

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

This thesis explores how recent novels are able to expand representations of transgender experiences and promote identification with these characters and their experiences, even if the reader is not trans themself. It begins by delving into a brief history of transgender narrative and the problems associated with these narratives having been primarily in the form of memoir. It then examines how Rose Tremain’s Sacred Country, despite being one of the first instances of a fictional narrative focused on a transgender man, reflects similarly problematic narrative characteristics to those found in memoir. Proposing a concept of trans-relational reading, which promotes identifications …

The River Flowing, Bailey Storm

English Literature | Senior Theses

This piece is set in Kittery Point, ME, where my cousins lived, a place in which I spent many summers growing up. I define these summers as pinpoints in my youth that helped me discover the first touches of independence away from my home in Pennsylvania. All of the time I spent alone was prominent for what I remember of this time. I was incredibly shy and detached from my cousins' friends. Though I loved being a young teenager in Maine, I could never quite grasp the social life similar to Wyatt when he is back home in Kittery from …

Humanization Of The Refugee As The Modern Subject In Mohsin Hamid’S Exit West, Ani Gazazyan

English (MA) Theses

This thesis discusses the central concern of the global refugee crisis through the fictional novel Exit West by Mohsin Hamid. The novel tells the story of two protagonists who are portrayed as the modern subject that Hamid comes to humanize, which reflects on current society’s representation of the refugee as dehumanized or “the Other.” Hamid takes his readers on a journey that represents his characters as normal everyday humans that are forced into the process of refugeehood and displacement. Throughout this thesis, I discuss what makes the novel so unique in representing the modern-day refugee. In the first section titled …

Fascism In Sci-Fi: "Mobilizing Passions" In Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers, Alton C. Ayers

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis responds to criticism of Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers (1959) as a “fascist” novel by further investigating the claim through a close reading of the novel that applies political theory scholarship on fascism. Chapters I and II introduce the novel along with its general reception and controversy. These chapters consider the accusations of “fascism” given to the novel while at the same time understanding that a clear, exact definition of “fascism” has long been grappled with by scholars since the rise of the regimes in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Chapters III and IV apply political theory to …

All Of This Will End, Sean Dolan

WWU Graduate School Collection

All of This Will End is a short story collection that pays tribute to the suburban gothic subgenre popularized by Shirley Jackson in the 1950’s. Also drawing influence from contemporary writers such as Kelly Link, Kate Folk, and Blake Butler, among others, the collection aims to deconstruct conceptions of normality – both in and outside of the American suburb – by planting subtle signs of strangeness across its ten stories. Although most of the work wouldn’t fall into traditional genre conventions, the collection borrows from both horror and science fiction, blurring the line between traditional realism and genre work. Much …

Payton's Final Master's Portfolio, Payton Boshears

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

Here is my final Master's Portfolio. I did not have specialization for the English program, so for the portfolio I chose four different projects that represent the variety of courses I have taken during my time here at BGSU.

Cultural Trauma Fiction: Political Violence, Rampage Violence, And Structural Violence In Contemporary American Literature, Courtney Mullis

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation identifies and proposes a new subgenre of American literature, Cultural Trauma Fiction, that has arisen since the late 20^th century in response to numerous large-scale traumatic events and their representation in the media. Cultural trauma occurs when a shocking, shared event fractures collective identity and initiates a discursive process to understand what took place, why it happened, and how the affected culture can heal. Cultural traumas differ from individual trauma because cultural traumas affect a culture, rather than an individual, and because they are mediated; many members of the culture experience the trauma of these events secondhand …

Fantasized Masculinity Performed In American War Narratives, Shea O'Scannlain

English Honors Theses

In this thesis I wanted to explore the ways that masculinity has been written in history through the genre of fiction. The first chapter discusses traumatized white masculinity in Kurt Vonnegut's novel SlaughterHouse Five and Oliver Stone's film Born On The Fourth of July. The second chapter deals with the female Black experience in response to the white patriarchy in Toni Morrison's novel Home and HBO's television series LoveCraft Country. And finally chapter 3 deals with mythologized masculinity redeemed through violence in Martin Scorsese's film Taxi Driver and Frank Miller's comic book series The Dark Knight Returns. …

The Laurels, Emma Mackinnon

English Honors Theses

A Russian ice hockey player, Nikita Morozov, enlists the help of a retired, American goaltender, Tate Beacon, to defect from Russia so that he can play for the NHL team, the Laurels. Nikita struggles against pressures from his team and government to remain in Russia, while Tate confronts a past he thought he had left behind for good.

Dry, Catherine Alexa Weiner

Senior Theses and Projects

No abstract provided.

This Was The World And I Was King: Land And Identity In Scottish Children's Literature Of The Golden Age, Rodney Fierce

Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on Scottish cultural identity and its erasure in nineteenth-century British children’s literature as successful Scottish authors became known as British authors, and British children’s literature was canonized as the genre’s first Golden Age. Specifically, it explores the ways that Catherine Sinclair, George MacDonald, R. M. Ballantyne, Robert Louis Stevenson, J. M. Barrie, and Helen Bannerman—six popular nineteenth-century Scottish authors—maintain a sense of Scottishness in their adventure fiction. By reading the texts in the historical context of the authors’ biographies, I demonstrate that the land in their works and the benevolent colonizers allowed to control it in some …

Verity, Olivia Sun

English Honors Theses

A divorced, despondent middle school science teacher joins a secret society and helps them get to the bottom of a Galapagos tortoise government conspiracy.

Amazing Stories: Science Fiction’S Inception In Interwar Pulp Magazines, Zachary Doe

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the creation of the science fiction genre through the pulp magazines of the 1920s. Hugo Gernsback, the creator of Amazing Stories is the first to title the budding genre as science fiction. Through his editorials, one can see a desire to create a wide community heavily involved in genre creation. By exploring these initial stories and editorials we can better understand how science fiction began as well as evolved into what it is today.

Miracle, Gabrielle Sullivan

Honors College Theses

This original, speculative fiction novella follows Miracle Beckett, a young woman raised on a dying, climate-change ravaged Earth in an isolated religious cult. While she eventually escapes, she finds herself trapped in another deathtrap, abandoned by her crewmates on a spaceship that is rapidly running out of air. Struggling to reconcile her past with her present and her imminent death, Mira cannot avoid remembering everything she has tried to leave behind.

Engaging with sexual identity, religious trauma, and the difficulty found in reconciling the complexities of a left-behind existence, Miracle highlights the power of memory, friendship, and knowledge in guiding …

Madwomen And Mad Women: An Analysis Of The Use Of Female Insanity And Anger In Narrative Fiction, From Vilification To Validation., Lindsay Haralu

College of Arts & Sciences Senior Honors Theses

This project examines the use of female insanity and anger in narrative fiction, as demonstrated by the character of the madwoman. Madness is a concept that has long been gendered female throughout Western history, in medicine, language, religion, and culture. Socially and culturally constructed madness can be used to determine the boundaries of society, the norms and values from which “madness” deviates, while the character of the madwoman can be used to demonstrate how women have challenged these boundaries and how the roles of women and definitions of femininity have changed over time. This study analyzes the madwoman trope from …

Blood-Ties And Misfortune, Justin Frasier

English Honors Theses

A story about a boy who faces familial and mental health struggles.

Ecofeminism In J.R.R. Tolkien’S The Lord Of The Rings, Stephanie Kroneiss

Multidisciplinary Studies Theses

Ecofeminist fiction merges the principles of ecological and feminist fiction, not only linking the oppression of women and the natural world by patriarchal cultures, but furthering the notion that the future survival of the planet and of humanity can only be accomplished through remedying the inequitable and oppressive treatment of both. Although not all ecofeminist fiction directly advocates for this philosophy, the most effective tales are those which ultimately culminate in establishing within the reader an undeniable connection between humans and the natural world, as well as an understanding of the need for balance between the feminine and masculine aspects …

Billion-Dollar Bride: Book 1—Godric's Academy For Young Ladies, Kaylin N. Stickley

MSU Graduate Theses

This thesis contains the first five chapters of a young adult romance novel featuring a young woman named Theadosia Lee. The plot is heavily influenced by Cinderella, and the biblical braiding technique is heavily influenced by that of Kiera Cass and C. S. Lewis. The piece was inspired by my desire to create more young adult romance novels that contain the biblical values that are sorely lacking in most modern young adult literature. I seek to write a love story that is based on mutual respect, a strong foundation of friendship, and an intentional decision to avoid sexual activities …

Gods Among Men, Christian Burgos

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Abstract Gods Among Men is a creative text that functions critically to dissect the genre of superhero fiction and bring forth critiques of our culture of worshipping celebrities and political figures. I cite Woody Evans’ work in my critical introduction as being central to my project. Evans puts forth the idea that superheroes are inherently conservative because they are reactive agents that do not proactively change anything. They instead maintain the status quo. Villains, on the other hand, try to effect change for a different end, one they deem better for society. Through the use of characters, this text demonstrates …

The Music Of Character Development And Point Of View, Rebecca Padgett

English Creative Writing Theses

For my thesis, I have written a novel and (accompanying analysis essay) that examines Nashville’s country music scene from Broadway to Music Row. Through the use of a third person narrator and multiple points of view, I delve into the lives of Broadway musicians, songwriters and touring artists.

Primrose And Other Stories, Demetra Koras

Graduate Thesis Collection

Primrose and Other Stories is a short story collection that explores themes of family, loss, and legacy.

“How Difficult Not To Go Making ‘Reality’ This And That”: Virginia Woolf’S Record Of Representation, Julia E. Eifert

Senior Projects Spring 2020

Virginia Woolf writes in her journal in March 1929 that:

[...]Life is very solid, or very shifting? I am haunted by the two contradictions. This has gone on for ever: will last forever; goes down to the bottom of the world- this moment I stand on. Also it is transitory, flying, diaphanous. I shall pass like a cloud on the waves. Perhaps it may be that though we change; one flying after another, so quick so quick, yet we are somehow successive and continuous- we human beings; and show the light through.

Woolf obsessively journaled her anxieties concerning the linearity …

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. …

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.