Arts and Humanities Commons^™

"Exploring The Cuckoo's Nest:" A Study On American Fiction And Mental Health, Emily Smeds

Honors Projects

This is a study on American fiction and mental health. The project discusses the short stories "The Tell-Tale Heart" by Edgar Allan Poe, "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gillman, "Careful," and "Where I'm Calling From" by Raymond Carver, and the novels One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey, The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, and Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut. All of these works are discussed in how they relate to and portray the psychological disorders of schizophrenia, depression, substance abuse disorder, and posttraumatic stress disorder.

Woman Flytrap, Brianna Jo Hobson

Student Theses and Dissertations

Woman FlyTrap is a short story zine collection that explores the topic of sexual violence through the perpetrator and victim relationship with an explicit lens. Replete with cultural and entomological themes and motifs, Woman Flytrap seeks to remind survivors that we are not alone. In our bodies or in our lives. Neither in the world. There are over a million insects to every human, proving that there is strength in numbers. All five stories in the collection present different abstracts: revenge, transformation, justice, healing, body image, self-harm, mourning, etc. There is also a playlist and a section about the author. …

Timothy Bewes. Free Indirect: The Novel In A Postfictional Age. Columbia U.P., 2022., Emily Hall

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Timothy Bewes. Free Indirect: The Novel in a Postfictional Age. Columbia U.P., 2022. 315 pp.

Fictional Text And Reality Of The Possible, Shusheng Zhang

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

This article explores the issue of reference in fictional texts, that is, the relationship between fictional texts and reality. Paul Ricoeur thinks that the reference of poetic language is not cancelled, but only suspended. Through its semantic creativity, it possesses the ability to transform reality and to turn our personal environment into a habitable world. The interpretation of the concept "world /Welt" and "environment /Umwelt" by Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer shed light on the significance of fictional texts in reality, for they propose to us possible modes of existence in the ontological sense. In other words, fictional texts can …

The Meaning In The Music: Music And The Prose Of Chopin, Joyce, Baldwin And Egan, Colin Perry

Senior Theses

Kate Chopin, James Joyce, James Baldwin, and Jennifer Egan are collectively gifted in the art of prose, yet each author also experiments with music in their literary works. An analysis of Chopin's The Awakening, Joyce's "The Dead," Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues," and Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad reveals a trend of authors utilizing music to enrich their texts and convey major themes.

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 …

Ghosts Of Madmen: A Generational Tale, Kristen Leigh Olin

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

A family story depicting an immigrant family that must deal with the horrors of the past while delving through the psyche of the present. One woman's look into the deepest reaches of her American family and their generations of alcoholism and abuse and her resolution to the ghosts that haunt the family's women.

"The Politics Of Literature In Michel Foucault: Veridiction, Fiction And Desire", Azucena G. Blanco

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article is based on two hypotheses. The first is that in the later Foucault we would find a reformulation of the status that literature had occupied in his work and the development of a politics of literature (already developed in “Sujetos irregulares: ficción y política en el Sade de Michel Foucault”). The second considers that fiction and desire are inseparably joined, which leads me to analyse the logic of Sade as logic of desire in the lectures that Foucault gave on the author at the University of Buffalo (1970). A reading of both aspects together needs to be …

Review: A River Of Stars By Vanessa Hua, Olivia Lee

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

A review of Vanessa Hua's 2018 novel, A River of Stars.

"Becoming" David Foster Wallace: Media, Metafiction, And Miscommunication, Gordon Hugh Willis Iv

Senior Projects Spring 2018

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

The Delicatessen Kids, Raina Nicole Dziuk

Senior Projects Spring 2018

The Delicatessen Kids is a collection of short stories that follows 4 Ukrainian-American siblings as they grow up in 1960s Brooklyn, New York.

Secrets On Morgan Hill: A Story Of An Unlikely Friendship Amid An Apartheid South, Camille Kleidysz-Ferreira

Master of Arts in American Studies Capstones

Introduction

The Burden of History and Fiction

“How much of the burden of history can fiction bear?” – Margaret Walker

Comprehensive historical research can often become the inspiration for art. The greatest pieces of historical fiction, are a result of years of historic scholarship before the creation of a compelling historical narrative or fiction piece. Through my two-year ethnographic study and collection of oral histories of the black community, surrounding the historic Bethel A.M.E. church in Acworth, Georgia, I was told a story about a friendship between two little girls who remained friends until the end of their lives. What …

Old World Readings Of A New World Novel: European Perspectives On John Updike's Terrorist, Laurence Mazzeno, Sue Norton

Articles

Given the diverse and polarized reaction by reviewers and scholars in the decade immediately following its publication, John Updike’s 2006 novel, Terrorist, is likely to become a textbook case for reception studies. In reception studies, differences in space (in Updike’s case, globally) and time play an important role in shaping a reader’s reaction to a text.1 Within months of its publication, Terrorist generated hundreds of reviews in dozens of countries around the globe; scholarly articles began appearing less than a year later. Most notable is not simply the sheer number of publications devoted wholly or in part to this novel, …

Harry Potter And Hamilton From The Stage To The Page, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner

Faculty Publications

In this article originally published in Public Books, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner offers commentary on the two best-selling plays on record, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child and Hamilton. Specifically, Pollack-Pelzner examines how the Anglo-American world’s favorite orphans play at home, adopted, as it were, from the stage to the page.

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, …

Immigration, Irony, And Vision In Jhumpa Lahiri's The Interpreter Of Maladies, Brian Yothers

Brian Yothers

No abstract provided.

: : Poof : :, Caleb Nelson

Graduate Masters Theses

Storytellers have an interdependent relationship with their narratives. If you have ever told a lie, you understand. Stories take on a life of their own, as you consider the potential ramifications of each contingent piece. Definite sets of things happen as results of specific other things. If you throw an ax at me, only a few things can immediately happen, and our relationship will be forever changed. Events evolve. When we create or discover a narrative, we live by its logic. Upon consideration, a moment compels a series of moments modulated by a voice, a single perspective, a personal narrative, …

The Escape Artists, Daniel Gene Hernandez

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

My thesis, “The Escape Artists”, is a collection of short fiction that represents most of the work I did as a creative writing master’s student. The title is taken from my longest story, a narrative about a young man’s struggle to avoid violence in a federal prison. As a title, “The Escape Artists” also captures major themes in my other stories; characters often pursue emotional escapism or literally seek to evade predators in my fiction. As a writer, I often explore breakdowns in social order, so my stories tend to be set in turbulent, oppressive political climates or else inside …

Las Vegas Paperboy, Matthew O'Brien

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

I’m an author and journalist who has lived in Las Vegas since 1997. My first book, Beneath the Neon: Life and Death in the Tunnels of Las Vegas, chronicles my adventures in the city’s underground flood channels. My second book, My Week at the Blue Angel: And Other Stories from the Storm Drains, Strip Clubs, and Trailer Parks of Las Vegas, is a creative-nonfiction collection set in off-the-beaten-path Vegas. These two books grew out of my eight years as a writer and editor for Las Vegas CityLife alternative-weekly paper.

I enrolled in UNLV’s MFA creative-writing program in the fall of …

In The Flesh: Fiction As An "Incarnational Art", Marissa Thornberry

Honors Theses

My goal in this paper is to support O’Connor’s claim that fiction is “incarnational” by providing additional evidence and addressing implications that she doesn’t. I am professing that fiction-writing is indeed “incarnational,” in even more ways than O’Connor directly expresses. If this thesis holds true, then it is difficult for Christians to rightly make light of the art of story-writing. Contempt for creative writers is tempered in our time more by a trend toward tolerance than by public or personal conviction of the human need for storytellers. Even in an environment where making money and tending to physical needs and …

Thomas Savage’S Queer Country, O. Alan Weltzien

Western Writers Online

Novelist Thomas Savage (1915–2003) grew up in the lonely world of the northern Rockies during the twentieth century’s first half and in eight of his thirteen novels continually re‑inhabited it as a scene of gender protest. He left Montana, his native state, at twenty‑two, only periodically visiting after that and returning only once after the 1960s. His daughter said he “hated Montana” and wanted to get as physically far away from it as possible, but that’s not the whole story. In those eight novels Savage critiques the limited roles available to men and women in the high landscapes between his …

A Public Duty: Medicine And Commerce In Nineteenth-Century American Literature And Culture, Heather E. Chacon

Theses and Dissertations--English

Using recent criticism on speculation and disability in addition to archival materials, “A Public Duty: Medicine and Commerce in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture” demonstrates that reform-minded nineteenth-century authors drew upon the representational power of public health to express excitement and anxiety about the United States’ emerging economic and political prominence. Breaking with a critical tradition holding that the professionalization of medicine and authorship served primarily to support and define an ascending middle class, I argue that the authors such as Robert Montgomery Bird, Fanny Fern, George Washington Cable, and Pauline Hopkins fuse the rhetoric of economic policy and public …

Ten Klicks South Of Whiskey : A Play In Three Acts, Ryan Jeffrey Smithson

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Ten Klicks South of Whiskey is a stage performance in three acts, consisting mostly of monologues from soldiers of various backgrounds. It follows the trials of 4th platoon, Delta Troop, 463rd Cavalry Squadron, a fictional unit that achieves a near-mythic reputation of heroism and invulnerability in Iraq. As the monologues begin to reveal, however, not every tale about the 463rd can be substantiated. The audience is first challenged to search for truth and then to understand that truth is not the ultimate--or even the desired--goal of war stories.

Straight Record And The Paper Trail: From Depression Reporters To Foreign Correspondents, Magdalena Bogacka-Rode

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Straight Record and the Paper Trail: From Depression Reporters to Foreign Correspondents engages with Martha Gellhorn's The Face of War (1959), Virginia Cowles' Looking for Trouble (1941) and Josephine Herbst's The Starched Blue Sky of Spain and Other Memoirs (1991) as documentaries of struggle. Documentary as a mode of writing and image making reveals dissonance, contradictions and varied perspectives which undermine the official historical record. The three writers, I argue, by republishing their Spanish Civil War (SCW) journalism in book form intended to set their record straight. This was motivated by their commitment to the 1930s struggle and the need …

Still Circling The Sun, Stefan Rafael Delagarza

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This work is a collection of traditional and experimental short stories that explore dynamic human relationships in a variety of settings: a bunker, a beach, and a family home, to name a few. Each character is on a journey to find deeper meaning in his or her life, and oftentimes, this means finding a path to forgiveness.

Introduction To History, Memory, And The Making Of Character In Roth’S Fiction, Victoria Aarons, Gustavo Sánchez-Canales

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

When Ana Becomes The Protagonist: Eating Disorder Narratives, The Pursuit Of Thinness And Social Resistance On The Internet, Nadezh Mulholland

Cultural Studies Capstone Papers

There is media concern that books about eating disorders are harmful to young readers. However, there is little research on how readers interpret the content of novels and memoirs featuring characters with eating disorders. This project considers the thinspiration images used as motivation to lose weight on so-called pro-ana and pro-mia social networks for people with eating disorders, and draws parallels between thinspiration and images used on the covers of eating disorder books. This paper uses a Gramscian lens to dismantle media claims by analyzing the interactions between members of eating disorder social networks, showing that website users tum to …

Dead Dad Project, Adrian Mcbride

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

A creative work of fiction centered around two friends. The work takes place during their senior year of high school, and investigates how their friendship is changed during the course of that year.

Modern(Izing) Burial In Interwar American Literature, Victoria Marie Bryan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation aims to study literary representations of interwar American deathways as reflections of modernity. The study of burial in United States history tends to focus on mid- to late-nineteenth century movements that distance the dead from the living. This dissertation argues that these practices left Americans ill-equipped to process the influx of death from the conflict areas of World War I, keen to allow the further development of the funeral industry during the interwar period, and anxious about the certain rise in death tolls that would result from World War II. Interwar literature, therefore, exhibits a difficulty in meaning-making …

Setting As Character, Tracy A. Townsend

The Short Story

This lesson uses Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “Young Goodman Brown” to explore tone and characterization in short fiction. It requires students to demonstrate an understanding of the role character plays in fiction and to use specific textual evidence to support a claim. The lesson can be completed in a single class period of fifty to seventy minutes and is suitable for grades 9-12.