Digital Commons Network^™

Springtide And Other Stories, Cora G. Saddler

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The ebb and flow of returning to and leaving the people you love and the people who love you, echoed through the voices of mothers, daughters, and wives, and lovers. Springtide and Other Stories bring together six fabulist stories that tinker with what it means to remember and forget over entire lifetimes and single moments. The generational gift of hearing the secrets of the sea, stored in tiny, shore-swept seashells, is broken. A secluded wood that stores the memories of its people in the soil and in the bark of the trees begins to burn. An ordinary couple with peculiar …

Winter's Threads., Andrew Wesley Messer

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

WINTER’S THREADS is a fiction novel set in a world of fantasy and wonder, largely inspired by the works of such auspicious and acclaimed writers as JRR Tolkien and Andrezj Sapkowski. The fantastical setting allows the reader to view a mystic world that deals with the humanity and beauty found in all things, utilizing pastoral imagery and humanistic language. The goals of this novel are to create an enticing world with magic and lore, as well as a compelling and relevant narrative that tackles themes of injustice, family, and duty. Challenging the racial essentialism that can often be present in …

Catfish Dinner & Other Malicious Morsels, Bonnie Klein

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Catfish Dinner & Other Malicious Morsels is a collection of short stories utilizing the combined elements of Fantasy, Southern, and Gothic Literature. The collection demonstrates the feasibility of combining the three different literary genres, each with its own strong identity and literary history, in a work that appeals to readers reaching the age of young adulthood. Named for the titular story, the collection features seven short stories of varying lengths depicting the cultural influence of food, community morals, storytelling, and nature in East Texas communities. Each story is told through third-person point of view of a different character. The stories …

Caelum, Alexandra Requena

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Caelum is a story about the hidden struggles of mental health told in an alternating chapter format that explores the journey of two characters: an angel, Tacenda, who seeks revenge on Mr. Mystical -an unloving God- and Dorian, a human, who is trying to find his place in life. The two

experience parallel situations where they explore their emotions and reactions to life while Mr. Mystical makes everything much more complicated. Tacenda, however, has other plans, and seeks Dorian for help defeating those who have turned against him, causing his demise. As the story progresses and alternates between Tacenda’s quest …

Hattie: A Twin Territories Matriarch, Madison P. Brown

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

“Hattie: A Twin Territories Matriarch” is a creative novel of vignettes in the vein of historical fiction set at the turn of the 20th century in Oklahoma/Indian Territory exploring the complexities of love and betrayal through generations of one Muscogee family as they battle the legal and personal implications of white-settler encroachment. With societal criticisms and Indigenous methodologies, this thesis aims to explore land ownership, resource allocation, and the complex governance of Oklahoma tribal reservations. The research of this novel focuses on primary documents from National Archive probate records, Dawes Commission enrollments, newspapers, and a familial collection of photographs, letters, …

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 …

The Genuine Alacrity Of Things, Evelyn Hampton

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

“The Genuine Alacrity of Things” is a short story collection. Themes include personal identity, the Anthropocene, grief, family, and relationships. The story collection is introduced by a critical introduction.

Part-Time., Anthony Mark Piedmonte

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is a creative writing project in prose covering the first 70 pages of a novel manuscript titled Part-time. Part-time will center around a 25-year-old medical school dropout starting a new job at a neighborhood golf clubhouse and gym. This coming-of-age narrative follows Danny as he struggles with his sexual identity, student debt, and job outlook after returning to the privileged community he grew up in. This sample will introduce the major characters, the clubhouse setting, and the forming relationship dynamics. By the end of these pages, readers will gain insight into how the part-time employees of the Longwood …

Rhetoric And Philosophy Of Communication In Jorge Luis Borges' Metaphysical Obsession With Time, Aurora M. Pinto

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This project begins with the assumption that through storytelling we humans make sense of the world around us. Language and communication are powerful in defining who we are and allowing individuals to “become a self” (Taylor The Language 318). Drawing from Schrag, I argue that rhetoric is inextricably linked to discourse but is also situated beyond its classical persuasive function. Rhetoric evokes a response from the other, based on reflection and deliberation. Since that other might be a reader of texts of fiction, there is a rhetorical connection to interpretation that situates literature as an exemplar of communicative engagement.

This …

Select Life/Delete/New Page, Jeremy D. Scherer

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The novella Select Life/Delete/New Page" by Jeremy Scherer follows the story of Nopok, a young man who works in a computer lab while pursuing a political science degree. Lacking any direction in his academic or professional lives, Nopok suffers at home, where his parents use him and his brother Sammy as proxies to act out their obvious dysfunction. Nopok's only escape is his online life, where he finds meaning as a user on the gaming website Gamefaqs, where he provides people with gaming advice and fits into an odd, but endearing community of artists and gamers. When Nopok's mother threatens …

The Sick Ones., Christian Loriel Lucas

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis consists of a collection of linked short stories, connected at the intersections of medicine, public health, race, gender, and socioeconomics. The Sick Ones was completed during a time of social unrest and the emergence of the Covid-19 virus. Inspired by medicine’s history of exploiting sick, poor, and racialized bodies, The Sick Ones explores the treatment of illness and societal woes in a near-speculative future. Each story is plot-driven, but complimented by a protagonist who keeps the narrative grounded, as they attempt to survive unprecedented circumstances. Some of the protagonists are complicit in their own medical exploitations, while others …

If You Can Believe It, Mary Elizabeth Cartwright

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

If You Can Believe Itis a novel of three female perspectives. Marla Morrow, Judith Pleasant, and Kassandra Henry are three women on the path of self-discovery in various ways. Set in a fictional town of Erusa, Kansas, this text explores both religious beliefs, the definition of motherhood, and what it means to love.If You Can Believe Itis fictional work that explores the craft of magical realism mixed with biblical origins. For example, Marla Morrow experiences a virgin pregnancy. Marla, Judith, and Kassandra experience both the real and the unexplainable, which in turn leads the three characters towards different paths yet …

My Haunted Home: A Collection Of Short Stories, Victoria E. Hood

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

“My Haunted Home” is a collection of short stories that explores the way in which hauntings and memory find themselves implanted in the everyday lives of those who live without people in their families. These stories work through grief in the form of haunting and explore how hauntings can be embodied through people and places. These stories work to bend genre tropes of horror and surrealist fiction in hopes to find a merging of haunting and memory. The narrators of these stories are ever changing, although there is overlap in voice throughout some of these stories. Part two of “My …

Using Natural Language Processing To Categorize Fictional Literature In An Unsupervised Manner, Dalton J. Crutchfield

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

When following a plot in a story, categorization is something that humans do without even thinking; whether this is simple classification like “This is science fiction” or more complex trope recognition like recognizing a Chekhov's gun or a rags to riches storyline, humans group stories with other similar stories. Research has been done to categorize basic plots and acknowledge common story tropes on the literary side, however, there is not a formula or set way to determine these plots in a story line automatically. This paper explores multiple natural language processing techniques in an attempt to automatically compare and cluster …

The Rose Who Grew From Concrete: A Black Female Administrator's Perspective Of The Public School Experience For Black Girls Who Attend A Predominantly White Middle School In Southeast Georgia, Latashia S. Thomas

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study explores the educational experiences of Black girls who attended a predominantly White school in Southeast Georgia from the perspective of a Black female administrator. Using Critical Race Theory (e.g. Bell, 1987, 1992, 1995; Delgado & Stefancic, 2001; Solorzano & Yosso, 2001) and Black Feminist Thought (e.g. Hill Collins, 2000; hooks, 1984/2000) as theoretical frameworks and memoir (Angelou, 1969/2009; Hurston, 1996) and fiction (Bell, 1992; Morrison, 1970/1993) as methodology, I explore ways in which Black girls are oppressed when they attend majority White public schools.

Six meanings emerged from this inquiry: (1) Writing my memoir has allowed me to …

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 …

Charlotte Brontë'S Spiritual Vision, Andrew James Weiler

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, I explore the Victorian poet and novelist Charlotte Brontë’s remarkable understanding of scripture and powers of analysis. As a daughter of the notable reverend Patrick Brontë, Brontë’s dissenting feminist views of the Bible are particularly significant. Although Brontë demonstrated a lifelong belief in God, and in the individual’s right to develop and maintain a direct relationship to God, personal tragedies in her life shaped the ways in which she interpreted scripture and informed her ideas regarding the spiritual realm. As the number of personal tragedies increase, Brontë’s spiritual vision, which migrates from one novel to the next, …

A Fiction Of Fragmented Falsehoods: Curriculum Of Unwanted Roads Traveled, Katherine Wyatt

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This is an inquiry centered on lived ‘otherness’ in different social experiences. Fiction and illustrations are both creative outlets that provide opportunities of curriculum growth by offering the viewer realistic portrayals dealing with truth and factors that make us fundamentally human. “Fiction elicits an interpretation of the world by being itself a worldlike object for interpretation” (Dillard, 1988, p. 155). This study uses fiction and illustrations as vehicles of communication to provide an awareness regarding social issues in everyday lived experiences, exposing the reader to the social, cultural and historical realities persistently impeding the shared constructs of human experiences. Structuring …

The Backs Of Leaves, Shelby L. Colburn

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is a novella that explores themes of emotional abuse, grief, toxic masculinity, sexuality, and gay violence. The author deploys a frame narrative that encompasses short stories that are tied by a narrator in the novella. The narrator’s stories create a continuity between “real,” realistic, and surrealist fictions. These explorations of fiction create a conversation between the frame narrator’s “real” life and that of her stories. As the novella’s plot progresses, the frame narrator’s sanity deteriorates, which allows her to become increasingly grotesque. The grotesque situates how macabre the frame plot is, creating a connective tissue between the “real” …

Trinity Part One : Food Of The Gods., Thomas Edward Olges

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A novel of supernatural horror, Trinity begins in the wake of a catastrophe. A young woman, divinely pregnant, has lost both her life and her son in the process of delivery. Three people dear to her—her fiancé, her brother, and a close friend—have found themselves irreparably altered by the experience. Their bodies changed and reality warping around them, the three set off across the country in an attempt to prevent other incursions of the miraculous into our reality. This thesis includes the novel’s introductory scene and its first principle section, “Food of the Gods.”

Short Stories., Karley Miller

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My creative thesis consists of a number of short stories. Each individual story stands alone, though all pieces in the project are doubtless connected by setting and syntax. Perhaps due to my own lack of imagination the stories take place, at least to some extent, in a small town. Though this may not be made explicit in every story, it can be deduced. Small town life, and particularly small town folk, are of interest to me; they are also what I know best. For example, Tom of “Neighbors” is a man living in a small town. The old man next …

Don't Go Unless You Mean It : A Novel With Critical Afterword : Heteronormative Masculine Performance In Contemporary Fictions Of The Rural American South., Nathan N. Gower

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation consists of a full-length novel for an adult audience as well as a substantial critical afterword to elucidate and complicate germane thematic concerns of the creative artifact. The novel, leaning on the rich traditions and many genre conventions of fictions of the American south, tells the story of an unlikely underground coal miner in Blue Banks, a fictional southern town set in the caverns and rolling hills of the western Kentucky coal fields. The narrative follows its fish-out-of-water protagonist, Cody Culver, a fledgling academic who thought he had escaped his fate as a third-generation coal miner when he …

Ties That Bind, Sarah Louise Slack

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Ties that Bind is a collection of short stories that explores the lives of women. From physical danger that Rickie and her friends face in "The River's Children," to Maureen's emotional distress as she realizes she's losing her memory in "The Visit," from Mattie's work ethic as she tries to take her mother's responsibilities in "Keeping the Light," to Justine's struggle with unexpected pregnancy in "Here There Be Dragons," from Rae's confusion at her roommate's attitude in "The Tree that Holds the World," to Anya's temptation to suicide in "An Artist's eye," the first six stories stand alone and address …

Drowning Above Water, Ellen Jean Dunn

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Drowning above Water is a historical novel set in the early 1970s in rural East Tennessee. Against the backdrop of the Little Tennessee River valley, Drowning above Water follows the story of Tesla “Tess” Bent and her family as they struggle to overcome the changes that are sweeping down upon them while keeping their family and veterinary clinic afloat. Tess’ journey takes her from her younger brother’s death to dealing with her mother’s depression and the impending dam which threatens their home, to ultimately coming into her own. Inspired by the work of James Herriot and by family history, Drowning …

Reconstructing The War In Iraq: Post-9/11 American War Fiction In Dialogue With Official-Media Discourse, Ashley Kunsa

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This project examines American-authored Iraq War fiction within the context of public discourse. Given that modern, industrialized warfare is as much created by and through official-media discourse as represented by it, fictional accounts of Iraq exist not outside or separate from this discourse but rather in a dynamic, continually evolving relationship with it. The three texts explored in this study—Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Half Time Walk (2012), David Abrams’ Fobbit (2012), and Phil Klay’s Redeployment (2014)—thus do more than merely represent the war experience: operating always in conversation with how the war has been constructed, the novels and stories …

"The Sudden Thrill Of That Change": Framing George Eliot's Social Vision, Cyrus Seaberry Frost

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Although scholarly commentary of the last decade has engaged more intensively than ever with the content of George Eliot's ideas concerning nineteenth-century British culture, the devices and techniques Eliot employs in the transmission of those ideas remain less explored. Consequently, room exists for a study as attentive to the formal characteristics of Eliot's messages as recent scholars have been to the content of those messages. This dissertation seeks to elucidate the ways in which specific formal techniques that characterize Eliot's fictional work evince her engagement with the thinking of social theorists, particularly Ludwig Feuerbach. The project contends that Eliot internalizes …

Approaches To The Land, Joseph Linscott

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Approaches to the Land is a collection of interrelated stories centered on a small Maine mill town. These stories have several recurrent narrators who are in many phases of moving – some come while others leave, etc. These stories have an immense interest in the identification of loss and hope, and this in turn plays heavily on the identities of the characters embodying the stories. As a whole, these stories capture the only way this author knew how to document his hometown.

The Lightbringer: A Novel, Brett L. Butler

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Lightbringer is about a collision of two worlds: the world of a contemporary South Florida town and the magical world of Zariel, bringing with it the universal threat of the Terra. Childhood friends, Breck and Tom, are thrown into the middle of an ancient conflict between the Terra—a collection of alien races that have been transformed by darkness—and the forces of good. After an encounter with a magical pool of golden water, the boys must learn to use their new abilities to protect against the growing Terranox army. In the midst of their struggle, however, a mysterious companion—the Lightbringer, …

Master Buddha & The Jolly Golly Fun Time Gang., Todd Edward Evans

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is the first two chapters of a novel. The novel parodies the capitalist and consumerist United States of the 21st Century in the tradition of Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, and Donald Barthelme.

This Sleep Of Reason., Brit Thompson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This creative thesis encompasses two features: 1) a critical component that contextualizes and supports the second component, 2) a short Southern Gothic novella. Critical analyses of Flannery O’Connor’s fiction and discourse about the genre illustrate where inspiration was drawn, and how the project’s creative component contributes to this genre. The project explores anxieties of displacement, isolation, and a stuck-in-the-past-temporality, as shown through the vessel of characters’ houses. The novella is decentralized in form and point-of-view—fragmentary excerpts of technological communications are utilized to illustrate how the protagonist’s problems are literally always on hand. The project argues that because the south remains …