Digital Commons Network^™

One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten. Eleven. Twelve. Thirteen. Fourteen. Fifteen. Sixteen. Seventeen. Eighteen. Twenty. Twenty-One. Twenty-One. Twenty-Three. Twenty-Four. Twenty-Five. Twenty-Six., Liza Lacroix

Theses and Dissertations

"One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten. Eleven. Twelve. Thirteen. Fourteen. Fifteen. Sixteen. Seventeen. Eighteen. Twenty. Twenty-one. Twenty-one. Twenty-three.Twenty-four. Twenty-five. Twenty-six." is a biographical fiction of violence toward the protagonist. Comprised of writing, audio, documentation and intervention. This text is the first iteration, and the thesis work is the second iteration of the same.

Contact Sheet, Jiwoong Jang

Theses and Dissertations

Jiwoong’s thesis paper is a field guide to how he navigates his curiosity with photography, sound, sculpture, ceramic, and installation. Connecting fragments through narrative vignettes, he underscores how chance, walking, light, time, and uncertainty inform his art.

Finished, Shayla Frandsen

Theses and Dissertations

Sixteen-year-old Tiny Sinclair begins her first year at Charity Ambrose Finishing School in 1953 already feeling like an outcast: her mother, a glamorous movie star, is dead, and her father is imprisoned under suspicion of being a Communist. All her classmates seem to have it so easy: beautiful Betty is an elegant and popular socialite, while Diane, the richest girl in school, is dangerous and mysterious (and, for some reason, hell-bent on ruining Tiny's life). When a classmate is found dead and Tiny becomes the number one suspect, the situation seems to go from bad to worse. Determined to clear …

Gyno-Gerontological Discourse And The Dearth Of Old Women Narrators In British Fiction 1790-1860, Lavender Elisabeth Earnest

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the remarkable dearth of old woman narrators in British fiction between 1790 and 1860, both documenting their under-representation and explaining it as, in part, a product of a wave of medical discourse disparaging the physical and mental vitality of post-menopausal women. Regarding methodology, I perform a random sample upon a corpus of first-person novels published in the period and categorize each according to the gender and age of the narrator. This analysis exhibits, unsurprisingly, that most narrators in the dataset are either in the first half of their life, male, or both. Old women represent only a …

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 …

Where The Animals Sleep At Night, Meghan Reed

Theses and Dissertations

When the world is full of so much fear and worry, pain and tragedy, we need new ways to work through our own personal loss; we need new ways to heal. It is my opinion that stories are meant to heal, to make us feel and take us to a better place. Stories offer understanding, a good laugh, a way to move forward, they thrill us, make us cry, show us love, or scare us into momentary elation. My creative thesis will be a collection of short fiction that employs elements of literary realism and magical realism to explore the …

Department Of Longing, Anthony Gabriel Coffman

Theses and Dissertations

Many have chosen to divide the world of fiction into literary and genre. I do not believe these have to be mutually exclusive. Writers such as Shirley Jackson, Stephen King, and Benjamin Percy note the importance of literary devices while simultaneously creating plots that elicit emotional responses from readers. It is my goal to accomplish the same, and bridge the gap between literary and genre fiction in my collection of short stories by using symbolism and imagery to create a sense of the foreboding.

The Little Devil, Stefan Peña

Theses and Dissertations

The Little Devil is a series of moments in the life of a character named Boy. The story follows a loose plot that jumps around different time periods and states of mind of the protagonist in an imaginary town that has elements of both a small midwestern town and a semi-arid desert.

Mr. Crow, a local entrepreneur, and Irene who owns the local diner are both heavily involved in the lives of other citizens and use secrets as a form of currency. However, Mr. Crow uses his knowledge for personal reasons while Irene simply wants to know truth.

Although it …

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.

Archaeological Representation In Speculative Fiction: The Image Of The Archaeologist In Star Wars, Karissa A. Annis

Theses and Dissertations

The public presentation of archaeology in various media, especially fictional representations in print, film, TV, and video games, is a complex and slippery subject that has been an issue since the field’s inception. This thesis compares analyses of popular representations of archaeology in conventional media such as feature films to new examples of such representations that have not yet been studied. The focus of the analysis is how archaeology and archaeologists are represented in the Star Wars franchise in products that were published or released on or after 2014. These texts and images are analyzed through the multiple lenses of …

Taste Of Grief & Other Unconventional Love Stories, Madison Brown

Theses and Dissertations

In her book The Hidden Machinery: Essays on Writing, Margot Livesey uses the phrase "the hidden machinery" to refer to two different aspects of novel making: on the one hand, how certain elements of the text characters, plot, imagery work together to make an overarching argument; on the other hand, how the secret, psychic of life of the author, and the larger events of his or her time and place, shape the argument (29). To me, the interconnected craft elements of fiction remains an ongoing enigma. I will delve into the hidden machinery of two authors with whom my own …

Orphans, Ryan Burden

Theses and Dissertations

This novel explores the ways in which our concepts of children and family shape our larger perceptions of reality, and vice-versa. It tells the story of a family in rural, upstate New York, using three different perspectives: Grace (the head of household), Eve (her foster child), and Bo, a recent addition to the family. Eve has lived with Grace since childhood, while Bo was taken in after attempting to escape from a rehabilitation camp for boys. Over the course of two days, the children try to manage their own internal conflicts, while Grace does her best to help them. The …

Cult Of The Day Moon, Markham Sigler

Theses and Dissertations

This book is a collection of short stories and miniatures. A variety of themes and styles are employed. Themes include environmentalism, the family, late capitalism, and alienation. Styles include surrealism, neorealism, hysterical fiction, and science fiction, as well as speculative fiction.

There Fly The Crows, Daniel R. Adler

Theses and Dissertations

Where there is a corpse, there fly the crows. —Netherlandish Proverb

Cloaca Palace, Connor Marie Stankard

Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, I trace the compulsive fear of holes, known as trypophobia, from an uncontrollable obsession to a pleasurable preoccupation. The body’s physical porousness makes us receptive to our surroundings, allowing external matter in and destabilizing the boundaries of self and other. Matter invades us, encoding itself into our DNA and transforming humans into chimeric creatures.

Through paintings and multi-media installations, I encourage viewers to reflect on their own bodies as a series of holes, vulnerable receptors to the world. I use the figure of a woman to personify a human hole which has been infected by the outside, …

It Must Have Been Your Eyes, Christian Vasquez

Theses and Dissertations

This fiction book entails the story of a Mexican orphan girl, Mariana, who is propelled on to a journey to the U.S. along with her mysterious ability to see the future in people’s eyes. Her plight lands her on a shelter for unaccompanied immigrant children in Texas where she is forced to confront her fears and grow. In this surreal story that is based on true events, our times are reflected and even our future

Dreams: The Emissary Of Characterization, Ross Alan Rodgers

Theses and Dissertations

Dreams hold a particular interest in the minds of literary authors across recorded history. Long looked at as messages of prophecy or visions from the gods, it was not until the 20th century that dreams began to be studied for their psychological impact on the human brain. With an analysis of dream interpretation, the usage of dreams throughout creative fiction give writers the ability to craft characters with a deeper sense of characterization that cannot be otherwise achieved through normal means. With this important tool in hand, this creative thesis uses dreams as a method of characterization while analyzing how …

Shift: A Brujo Story, Mark A. Martinez

Theses and Dissertations

In the distant future, a viral agent that transforms people into monsters has overrun the world. Metropolis domains now dominate the United States, using large walls to keep the dangers from entering inside. But safety is not always a guarantee. A man named Nathan uses his ability as a shape-shifting folkloric creature to make a living as a mercenary for hire in the city he lives in.

Nathan also struggles with his inner turmoil of attempting to live in a society that does not accept him while trying to deal with his past trauma that drives his life. But when …

An Open Bag, Matilde Benmayor

Theses and Dissertations

What do we take with us? How much space should we leave in the bag for what we might find? This paper is a journey from under the rug and onto the pavement. Sowing spiderweb maps I try to make a new city my own.

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 …

Run From Cover, Vanessa Wells Beeson

Theses and Dissertations

In Mystery and Manners, Flannery O’Connor says this about the use of violence, “With the serious writer, violence is never an end in itself. It is the extreme situation that best reveals what we are essentially” (113). As a fiction writer, one of the questions I struggle with is the justifiability of an overtly violent landscape. In my critical introduction, I will explore how the writers Christopher Coake, Monica Drake, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Benjamin Percy leverage violence through the symbolism of architectural and natural structures—e.g. buildings and caves—in order to reveal something essential about their characters and the larger …

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 …

The Revolution Of Plastic, Marine Brun-Franzetti

Theses and Dissertations

The Revolution Of Plastic is a fiction film about the overconsumption of plastic in our everyday lives. Leo, a ten year-old girl who loves dolphins, rebels against her father Mister Risso, the Manager of Detergents at Willy Supermarket.

Wild And Domestic: Short Stories, Sara E. Dupree

Theses and Dissertations

Wild and Domestic is a collection of short stories set in rural northwestern Minnesota that center around themes of parenting, family, and the desire for stability and security. This desire for domestic harmony often comes into conflict with the characters’ strong desire for personal freedom, self-expression, sexual gratification, and a deeper connection to the natural world—desires that are linked to the concept of wild. The collection also invites readers to reflect on its animal characters. In many of the stories, animal characters, both wild and domestic, play a role in setting up the crisis or climax of the story by …

The Posers: Instinctual Simulation Across Time, Kathryn Mccarthy

Theses and Dissertations

The Posers is a video about the occlusion of the self in history and in love. This paper explores methods of laminating historical moments with contemporary experience to explore the passage of time and the ongoing marginalization of women.

Superhero V Bystander Effect: Effects Of Fictional And Non-Fictional Media Priming On Situational Altruism, Nermine Mourad Aboulez

Theses and Dissertations

Media priming is one of the most deeply-rooted and wide span theories in media studies. Previous research deploying this theory usually compared the effects of pro-social and anti-social media priming, while this study opted to compare the effects of pro-social fictional and non-fictional media content. Furthermore, the researcher attempts to examine the effects of media priming on situational altruism, as well as, measure the difference between exposure to fictional and non-fictional videos of heroic acts, when it comes to priming an actual helping behavior. An experiment was conducted using a staged manipulation of a sexual harassment situation, as a high …

Queer Horizons: Queer Assemblages And ( Re ) Visioning The"Coming-Out"Trauma Narrative In Fiction, A Critical Introduction, Eric Jason Pitman

Theses and Dissertations

The experience of many queer subjects in "coming-out" often results in a great deal of continued adversity over the course of their lifetimes, in spite of what popular, exceptionalized narratives such as the "It Gets Better" campaign might suggest. "Coming out" often entails a great deal of trauma, thus making the need to continue "coming out" a source from which anguish continues to emanate and affect queer bodies. Unfortunately, there are few fictional texts dealing specifically with "coming-out" trauma narratives. Queer subjects who continue to endure trauma through the act of "coming out" often discover that the written worlds of …

Lexical Trends In Young Adult Literature: A Corpus-Based Approach, Kyra Mckinzie Nelson

Theses and Dissertations

Young Adult (YA) literature is widely read and published, yet few linguistic studies have researched it. With an increasing push to include YA texts in the classroom, it becomes necessary to thoroughly research the linguistic nature of the register. A 1-million-word corpus of YA fiction and non-fiction texts was created. Children's and adult fiction corpora were taken from a subset of the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) database. The study noted differences in use of modals and pronouns among children's, YA, and adult registers. Previous research has suggested that children's literature focus more on spatial relations, while adult literature …

We Heard Our Voices With The Hyenas And Other Stories: The Community Of Strangers, Rebekah Washburn Olson

Theses and Dissertations

Community is often defined by the familial or residential relationships we have, such as family, neighbors or coworkers. But there is another vital and often unobserved community among strangers. These relationships are often haphazard, temporary relationships formed in a moment of necessity—customers trapped in a convenience store by a storm, orphaned runaway teenagers who band together for safety on the streets, miners trapped in the rubble of a collapsed mine, etc. These communities are spontaneous and often undefined, but have the potential to reveal more about our insecurities, reflexes, and emotional capacities than almost any other relationship. For many, they …

Creating The Self: Women Artists In Twentieth-Century Fiction, Bethany Dailey Tisdale

Theses and Dissertations

In novels of artistic development (or künstlerromane) by women in the early twentieth-century, becoming an artist is intimately tied to becoming recognized as an individual. It would appear that an era of rapid change and expanding opportunities for women would result in affirmative narratives of women’s artistry, but studying texts by Edith Wharton, Anzia Yezierska, Zelda Fitzgerald, and Dawn Powell shows that stringent gender roles can still keep women from realizing artist success.

In Wharton’s The House of Mirth, Lily Bart ruins her prospects on the marriage market by striving for freedom and aesthetic pleasure. Those desires cannot be reconciled …