Digital Commons Network^™

Constructing Reality: Finding Realism And Finding Jessica, Amy J. Vallotton

Masters Theses

Movies are very influential. They provide enjoyable entertainment and affect the viewer's brain and how it processes the scenes, characters, and plot. Because these processes are often the direct result of the script, the screenwriter needs to understand the effect the camera shots, lighting, pacing, and other techniques have on cognition. The narrative is the script's backbone and a movie's primary source of influence. Movies' effects on the viewer will be discussed through current research and different techniques and narrative examples, as seen in well-known movies and original screenplay. Because movies are so influential, the screenwriter will understand how to …

Dissociation, Chaimae Oualid

be Still

"Dissociation," is a reflection of the world's struggle against the COVID-19 pandemic, and how it has affected us all in ways we never could have imagined.

Through this painting, I wanted to capture the gradual, yet drastic change in emotions, lifestyles, and perception of reality that we experienced during this time. The crowd of people depicted in the painting represents the collective struggle we faced, all facing towards the unknown and moving towards it. The different facial expressions convey the range of emotions we felt during this time, from fear and worry to resilience and hope.

For me, the pandemic …

Enlightenment, Chaimae Oualid

be Still

In my painting titled "Enlightenment", I aim to capture the journey towards self-awareness and self-growth, which is often chaotic and filled with struggles.

The painting portrays the internal turmoil that we experience during this journey through a spectrum of colors. Each color represents a different phase of the journey, and the chaos and struggle are evident in the mixture of colors. However, as the journey progresses, the colors gradually shift towards a serene blue and blue hues, representing the final phase of enlightenment. This transformation is depicted in a pair of eyes that reflect a sense of clarity and understanding. …

Breaking The Fourth Wall, Esther Elizabeth Karram

Masters Theses

This creative, non-fiction thesis is written in memoir form and analyzes how a person perceives reality, how that perception is broken, and how a person copes with the limitations of a new reality. In examining my life, I came to realize that many of my performative tendencies stemmed from a desire to be loved and the belief that love was contingent upon perfection. What follows is my struggle to try to maintain that perfection, the failure to do so, and the slow acceptance of being an imperfect person in an imperfect world.

Still Bridges, Anna Barry

Theses and Dissertations

This memoir-in-essays tells the story of four generations of a family living in one place, Pittsburgh, as they navigate the rise, peak, collapse, and disappearance of the steel industry. In terms of the manuscript’s “situation,” the family must navigate the complex economic, ethnic, environmental, and social struggles that are inherit when living in a place for over one hundred years. The manuscript argues that family and place are so intimately connected that the two entities cannot be separated. Pittsburgh becomes part of the narrator’s family, a kind of gene that is embedded in all of its residents, and the family …

Put Into Place, Heather C. Carey

Theses & Honors Papers

The blending of illusion and reality is the most prominent theme in the thesis. A mirror is the introductory metaphor for m perception of self and God; it reflects reality, bur does not capture internal conflict. As a character in the work, I internalize others' truths to create my persona; my narrative stance reflects my disconnected, dispassionate view of reality. The cold, stark church building serves as the metaphor for church members' treatment of my family under the guise of religious authority. Elementary school classmates' actions blend with those of men in my dating life to affect this persona and …

B.S., Michael P. Redmond

LSU Master's Theses

This is a novel about a hack of a novelist who guides a fraud of a novelist around an allegorical version of the United States of America. It tests the limits of its readers’ patience with irony and metafiction. Themes that are explored, mocked, and then explored again include belief, identity, reality, geography, the intersections of the aforementioned, and the comical futility of such exploration. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

Time Theory In The Short Fiction Of Jorge Luis Borges: The Language Of "Reality", Lyn Lamkin

Graduate Theses

Time boundaries delimit mankind's concerns while subtly affecting the perspective men have on all ontological questions. However, Jorge Luis Borges' short fiction develops an a-temporal perspective that denies the distinctions of a past, present, and future, obscuring traditional human conceptions of time and reality. He repetitively uses cycles and labyrinths as spatial metaphors for time to emphasize man's Inability to escape the maze of existence and to define a final reality that he can order. Borges' fiction suggests that only by trying to understand what exists beyond our universe in an unknowable. Infinite time continuum can human reality be ordered …