Digital Commons Network^™

Strangers And Intimates: A Collection Of Short Stories, Kathy Marie West

Theses and Dissertations

This creative thesis includes five short stories that explore paradoxical ways in which people can feel alone, even if they are together. Although a combination of isolation and intimacy can occur in any human relationship, the stories in this collection spend much of their time with family circles in particular, considering the way that our closest, most permanent relationships can simultaneously prove the most intimate and the most isolating. The critical introduction that precedes the collection examines each story individually, discussing strategies and subject matter in terms of the collection's guiding concept. The introduction discusses the binary of intimacy and …

'I Just Wanted You To Know': War Testifies Through The Camera, Seyda Aylin Gurses

Open Access Dissertations

This work is a textual analysis of selected documentary films whose common theme is the inevitable discrepancy between the realities of the Vietnam and the 2003 Iraq War from the perspectives of the veterans and soldiers, and the assumed reality that is constructed in the media. It is at this point that the inextricable link between documentary cinema and reality proved fundamental to the developing discourse of the entire study ahead. Since the manner in which the world is both transformed and depicted strongly depends upon the tools available to the director, the technological innovations and the emergence of portable …

Of All That Is Seen And Unseen, Jordan Adelle Doherty

Theses and Dissertations

Of All That Is Seen and Unseen explores the concept the Southern literary identity and how that tradition is fading from modern literature while engaging in a dialogue with Flannery O’Connor, William Faulkner, and Eudora Welty. However, it proposes that contemporary writers can recover Southern literary identity through three identifying elements of southern literature: family, land, and religion. The chapters focus on the tragic death of a beautiful, young girl and are told from different narrative perspectives. The genre is Southern Gothic and follows the Faulknerian model of creating a fictional place in Mississippi. The chapters are interrelated and feature …

Companionship Through Standard Question And Answer Routines, Ryan Saxon Davidson

Dissertations

Companionship through Standard Question and Answer Routines is a collection of short stories and short shorts dealing with the nature of human relationships and the ways in which people get to know each other.

Limitless And Free, David Nicholas

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Every mission through time and space to save Jim Morrison's life failed. He always died, no matter what. Always at four-ten AM, on Saturday, July the third, nineteen-seventy-one. Each of Jim's many deaths—in Paris or L.A.; bearded or shaved; drunk or sober—reminded me of my father, at home in the year two-thousand-and-six, in a hospital bed at St. Luke's, who, like Jim in nineteen-seventy-one, had death written all over him.

Fulfillment, Stacey Brown

All Theses

The story of a woman writer's struggle to create a delusional, lovelorn character while maintaining her own sanity.

Room, Vallie Lynn Watson

Dissertations

Room is a short novel written at The University of Southern Mississippi. It is accompanied by a critical preface.

A Critic In Her Own Right: Taking Virginia Woolf's Literary Criticism Seriously, Yvonne Nicole Richter

English Theses

Considered mostly ancillary to her fiction, Virginia Woolf’s prolific career in literary criticism has rarely been studied in its entirety and in its own right. This study situates her in the common critical practices of her day and crystallizes basic tenets and a critical theory of sorts from her critical journalism published 1904–1928: the author argues that Woolf does not advocate a policing role for the critic, but rather that critics foster art in collaboration with readers and writers. Finally, this work discusses Woolf’s appeal to writers to invest all their energy in improving their skills in character portrayal to …

The Natural Order Of Things: Stories, Gene Albamonte

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Natural Order of Things is a collection of unrelated short stories that focuses on the love, despair, happiness and sorrow prevalent in relationships. Another common thread is how the lack of communication between family, friends and lovers can create burdens that, in some cases, are simply too heavy to lift. Some of the stories have a humorous voice while dealing with those burdens. Many others deal with the complexities of those emotions in a more somber tone. These fictional stories are completely unrelated to each other, and yet they all aim to shine a light on life's conflicts--and on …

The Whole Headlight-Colored Night, Matthew Bryan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This collection of short fiction probes the lives of characters trying to make their home in the flat, unchanging landscape of the small towns that make up central Florida. The largely static environment reflects the rigid patterns of behavior and domesticity the characters find themselves so easily falling into. Seemingly ordinary items-a shotgun, a t-shirt, a paper bag-and the small moments that make up everyday life are imbued with significance as men and women painfully aware of their own ordinariness struggle to hold onto those fragile instances of connection, happiness, or even their own self-constructed sense of identity. The struggle …

Cuban Jam Sessions In Miniature: A Novel In Tracks, Diego Rincon

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This is the collection of a novel, Cuban Jam Sessions in Miniature: A Novel in Tracks, and an embedded short story, "Shred Me Like the Cheese You Use to Make Buñuelos." The novel tells the story of Palomino Mondragón, a Colombian mercenary who has arrived in New York after losing his leg to a mortar in Korea. Reclusive, obsessive and passionate, Palomino has reinvented himself as a mambo musician and has fallen in love with Etiwanda, a dancer at the nightclub in which he plays—but he cannot bring himself to declare his love to her. His life changes when he …

Crashing Against The Wood, Jessica Ryan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this collection of short stories, the characters struggle to recover equilibrium in their lives that have been turned upside down. They struggle against one another, against change, and against the loss of loved ones. No matter what bonds hold the characters together, the underlying tension of change and reaction permeates their relationships and threatens what they know to be true. A theme of discontent runs in these stories. Something beneath the surface is not right, and the characters struggle to climb out of the mess their lives have become. Some of them have been stifled, like the narrator in …

Middle Ground: A Novella And Collection Of Short Stories, Laurie Uttich

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This collection of fiction - a novella and a collection of short stories - focuses on the commonality of the human condition. While we create separations for ourselves by focusing on distinctions such as, religion, class, gender, and race, we are, I believe, spiritual beings sharing a human experience. My work tends to explore these distinctions and our motivations for embracing them. In the novella, Middle Ground, two sisters in alternating narrative voices share the story of their parents' struggles with separation, sobriety and cancer. Their voices, as distinct as their perspectives, explore the landscape of a family, the borders …

Of Spanish Cows, Wild Boars, Unpredictable Weather, And Other Oddities, Lydia Sanchez

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this collection of connected stories, the inhabitants of the imaginary Mediterranean village of Marcenac struggle with daily situations that often take allures of a farce, simply because they occur in Marcenac. The stories explore the influence southern France's Roussillon region has on people, the way the proximity of the Spanish border and the Mediterranean shapes the inhabitants of Marcenac's daily lives, and the influence of the climate. Often, the Tramontane, the region's predominant wind, becomes a character. While some of the stories are told from a collective point of view, others reveal the inner thoughts of children and adults, …

En Los Ojos, El Vacío, Camilo Castillo-Rojas

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

En los ojos, el vacío is a fiction novel.

Is the story of two men, Antonio Valbuena and Leandro Cubillos, who make a journey to their old town, localized at the countryside. There they have to collect the remains of one corpse, Antonio's son, who was murdered by an illegal armed group.

Angelic Demons: Witchcraft And Sorcery In Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, Melanie Bussiere

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

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