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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 …


Auto-Exploited: Narrative Explorations Of The Commodification Of Time, Grace C. Willis Ms. Jan 2023

Auto-Exploited: Narrative Explorations Of The Commodification Of Time, Grace C. Willis Ms.

MSU Graduate Theses

This thesis is an exploration of the phenomenon of the auto-exploitation of the modern individual through and in conjunction with the commodification of time. It explores the eruption of gig-work in recent decades in the United States, and the ways in which the modern individual is both consumer and product, buying and selling her own constructions of identity in order to gain time, fiscal currency and a sense of socioeconomic worth from herself and others. Using theoretical frameworks of Karl Marx, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Catherine Rottenberg and Byung-Chul Han, I explore the ways in which the modern individual is …


Queering Job: Inverted Liberation In Boy Erased And Other Conversion Trauma Narratives, Harrison Beau Palen Jan 2022

Queering Job: Inverted Liberation In Boy Erased And Other Conversion Trauma Narratives, Harrison Beau Palen

MSU Graduate Theses

This thesis explores conversion trauma narratives with the goal of transforming—inverting The Book of Job’s holy resolution to instead entail queer liberation apart from Evangelicalism. Analyzing Conley’s bestselling memoir, Boy Erased, I discuss Conley’s suffering and how his liberation is not found by means of repressing or converting his attraction to the same gender. I also analyze Emily Danforth’s novel, The Miseducation of Cameron Post to highlight how fictional accounts of queer liberation from conversion therapy help to increase awareness of the harms of conversion therapy. Throughout my thesis, I incorporate my own story of queer suffering, survival, and …


Fragmented Worlds, Fractured Families - Narrative Levels In Graphic Memoir, Henry Wilson Essman May 2021

Fragmented Worlds, Fractured Families - Narrative Levels In Graphic Memoir, Henry Wilson Essman

MSU Graduate Theses

This collection of creative writing explores the dynamics of parent-child relationships, as well as the way time can cause these roles to shift and reverse, bringing into question who has the right to tell another’s story. The individual pieces are both in the mediums of prose and graphic narrative, often focused on themes of family and trying to reconcile fractured perspectives. These works are introduced through an essay demonstrating how graphic narratives are uniquely situated to show narrative levels, and how narrative levels are key to showing the shifts in parent-child relationships and the way perspectives can differ while still …


Skin: Stories, Poems, And Essays, Amanda G. Hadlock May 2020

Skin: Stories, Poems, And Essays, Amanda G. Hadlock

MSU Graduate Theses

This thesis begins with a critical introduction which analyzes the use of objective correlative and varying points of view in creative writing in order to generate dialogue on cultural issues. I relate theories from Edward T. Hall, T.S. Eliot, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Lubomír Doležel to my own writing. Additionally, I situate my own multi-genre writing with work of contemporaries such as Maggie Nelson and Claudia Rankine. My hypothesis is that writers can use an objective correlative (Eliot) from the top of the cultural iceberg (Hall) as an entry point to representing deeper, more fraught cultural issues. Additionally, by experimenting with …


I Was A Teenage Misanthrope: Essays, Lane E. Pybas Dec 2019

I Was A Teenage Misanthrope: Essays, Lane E. Pybas

MSU Graduate Theses

The essays in this collection each explore to some extent my experience of mental illness, specifically clinical depression and generalized anxiety disorder. In writing these essays, I wanted to experiment with different methods of representing the self as it undergoes an experience of mental illness. In the essay “I Was a Teenage Misanthrope,” for example, I portray myself in a somewhat humorous way, highlighting my antisocial behaviors for comic effect, in order to depict a period of my life that might otherwise have been too difficult to write about. In “Quiet Midwestern Bitch,” an essay about anxiety, I represent multiple …


Narratives Of Loss, Carla R. Stine May 2018

Narratives Of Loss, Carla R. Stine

MSU Graduate Theses

My research revolves around impermanence, loss, and the grief that accompanies loss. My thesis work consists of digital collages interlaced with short stories, an interactive digital media piece, traditionally-made collages, a picture book, art objects, and an assortment of other supporting work. My ultimate aim is to employ both traditional techniques and digital skills to create visual narratives that supply glimpses into my personal history of loss and that speak to life’s brevity.


Learning To Fish And Learning My Place: Joy And Power Struggles In Alaska Seasonal Work, Mary E. Chiles May 2018

Learning To Fish And Learning My Place: Joy And Power Struggles In Alaska Seasonal Work, Mary E. Chiles

MSU Graduate Theses

This collection of essays describes the experience of working remote lodges in Alaska. These examine power dynamics among owners, guests, and employees, particularly in situations of sexual harassment. It explores punishments for bringing these cases to light in seasonal, tenuous positions. The collection also includes instances of stark wilderness, including interactions with bears and fish. These moments of beauty found in isolated surroundings contrast with the dangers of remote living.