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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

Transfer And The Commodification Of Practice., Kenneth Andrew Smith Dec 2014

Transfer And The Commodification Of Practice., Kenneth Andrew Smith

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation engages in a close reading of the research in composition on transfer, a concept that refers to how the practices learned in one situation influence what a person can do in a future situation. In the studies that have appeared over the last two decades, the results have indicated that not much transfers between writing courses and future contexts, whether they be disciplinary courses or professional workplaces. Yet, despite the increasing prominence of transfer research, little time has been spent discussing the uses and limitations of the concept. To better understand its growing popularity among researchers, I examine …


Prankster Questionaire., Matthew Landan 1972- Dec 2014

Prankster Questionaire., Matthew Landan 1972-

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The creative thesis that I have written is a memoir. It is not complete in its detail or ambition but instead focuses on themes and topics of self-transformation, reinvention and the unintentional consequences of several nervous breakdowns and experiments with psychedelic substances. This thesis is just a beginning for a longer more drawn out memoir that will explore the themes above but also discuss family, one’s sense of self worth in the world and how patterns between fathers and sons repeat themselves. I hope to eventually publish this work in a commercial setting.


Growing Up Village, Malemute, Carlee Kauffman Jan 2014

Growing Up Village, Malemute, Carlee Kauffman

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Growing Up Village is a collection of essays about life in an Alaskan Native village. Ranging in time from early childhood to late twenties, the stories examine how home and place influence the narrator's identity, what the narrator learns from the people around her, and how events, both minor and major, can impact and change a life. Ultimately, this collection of essays explores themes of home, family, culture, loss, courage, and community.


In Double Exile: A Memoir, Deborah Beckwin Jan 2014

In Double Exile: A Memoir, Deborah Beckwin

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In Double Exile: A Memoir examines the life of a family of Ghanaian immigrants and their journeys of acculturation, and the impact of the father's spiraling mental health issues on his family. Through the eyes of their daughter, this thesis briefly explores their lives on the right side of the Atlantic, as medical professionals, and then focuses on the life of their daughter born in America on the left side of the Atlantic. As novelist Georges Simenon has said, "I am at home everywhere, and nowhere. I am never a stranger and I never quite belong." This memoir explores this …


Issho Ni, Jeneca Broom Jan 2014

Issho Ni, Jeneca Broom

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Issho Ni is a novel that focuses on four multifarious teenagers growing up in the Deep South.


A Look To Burst The Brightest Neon Hearts: Attempts, Eric Fershtman Jan 2014

A Look To Burst The Brightest Neon Hearts: Attempts, Eric Fershtman

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A Look to Burst the Brightest Neon Hearts is an inquiry, via constellation of stories diffuse in structure and subject matter, into the various (and really weird) phenomena comprising contemporary American existence. Cumulatively, the stories seek to: (1) kick up, like bottom feeders searching biogenous sediment, an underlying value system, and (2) explore how language both breastfeeds and like, weans this value system-e.g., what dark matter is it that tethers bromances to reality TV? Quantum mechanics to pop music? How can a country be responsible for both the world's highest incarceration rates, and OKCupid? These stories also explore various American …


Land Of Flowers, Michael Morrison Jan 2014

Land Of Flowers, Michael Morrison

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Land of Flowers is a collection of short fiction presenting a Florida that stands in counterpoint to the image the state holds in the national consciousness-an image of a backward region rife with rednecks, retirees, racists, and religious kooks. In contrast, these stories feature the natives, the tourists, the immigrants, and also the transplants who are drawn to this "paradise" with hopes of finding warmth, escape, and a new life that so often fails to materialize. Many of the inhabitants of these stories are mired in a state of introspection. In the title piece, an early Spanish explorer contemplates his …


Stories I Told Myself: A Memoir, Brian Crimmins Jan 2014

Stories I Told Myself: A Memoir, Brian Crimmins

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Stories I Told Myself: A Memoir explores the experience of growing up gay in the 1980s. It is one boy's journey toward self-acceptance set against the conservative backdrop of a rural community on California's central coast. The story illuminates the hunger for a life different than the one being lived, and the ever-present sense of being different exacerbated by bullying and unrequited love. It is a narrative of evolving identity, and includes cultural insights and societal context of the time period. The author poses a fundamental question, "How did I make it out of the 80's alive?" and he explores …


Woman Of Dust: An Exodus, Lacey Schultz Jan 2014

Woman Of Dust: An Exodus, Lacey Schultz

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Woman of Dust: An Exodus is a collection of themed non-fiction experiences and stories with themes, characters, and ideas that coincide deliberately and verge on the cohesiveness of memoir. The overarching themes of this collection are womanhood and coming of age. The stories examine the ways in which childhood crushes, current relationships, parenting, religion, and pets influence the growth of a child into an adult, in this case, a girl into a woman. They take individual moments, conversations, conventions, and thoughts and explore how they shaped the woman who now writes them. Stories range in content from how the standards …


These Romantic Dreams In Our Heads, Sean Ironman Jan 2014

These Romantic Dreams In Our Heads, Sean Ironman

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

These Romantic Dreams in Our Heads is a collection of linked essays that study how key relationships in the narrator's life intersect. The essays attempt to show the complicated nature of relationships and how multiple lives are affected by one's decisions. Taking place over two years, the relationships in focus involve the narrator's parents, his girlfriend, and his dog. The essays deal with themes of manhood, parenthood, gender roles, religion, and memory. The characters deal with discovering their limitations and searching for a balance between responsibility for others and responsibility for their own lives.


We Are The Asteroid, Sloane Davis Jan 2014

We Are The Asteroid, Sloane Davis

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

We Are the Asteroid is a collection of personal essays concerned with the power of erasure and manipulation of chronology that comes with writing. It both acknowledges and participates in the fact that nonfiction writers become unstuck in time, whether they want to or not, traveling between ages, rearranging the order of events into the stories they tell. The collection centers on a few traumatic events in the narrator's life, and it explores the ways in which she deals with those events through her writing. The writer utilizes various structural techniques, such as the segmented form, to play with the …


Last Kind Word, Dianne Richardson Jan 2014

Last Kind Word, Dianne Richardson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Last Kind Word is a novel that explores the ways people seek control and power in the face of the unknowable. Set in the fictional town of Thorpe, South Carolina, the story follows four main characters-Donna Neese, Melissa Burnside, Anthony Washington, and Jill McManus-struggling in the aftermath of biracial teenager Micah Burnside's disappearance. They search for a replacement for the lost connection to Micah and for a sense of control at a time when their lives seem to lack it, when other forces, be they people or circumstances or spirits, hold power over them. In the midst of this, the …


Stranger Species, Devin Latham Jan 2014

Stranger Species, Devin Latham

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Stranger Species is a collection of interconnected personal and lyrical essays that illustrate and dissect the biological and psychological forces that drive humans to act. While essays in the collection prove the narrator's need to believe that we are animals first and human beings second and that sex and persistence to survive are proof of our animalism, essays simultaneously counter-argue that humans-our emotions, weaknesses, and consciousness-are unique to our species, separating us from the animal world. Throughout the collection, fear resonates that we do not control our desires and ultimately our lives, that biology and our deep seeded psychological inadequacies …


What You Leave Behind: A Collection Of Travel Essays, Madison Bernath Jan 2014

What You Leave Behind: A Collection Of Travel Essays, Madison Bernath

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

What You Leave Behind is a collection of essays framed by the theme of travel. The essays seek to understand the changeability and the consistency of the self when exposed to new cultures and new environments. They also explore what travel tells us about varying world perspectives, and how much of those varying world perspectives people can hope to understand. Lastly, these true-life stories and ruminations explore how travel shapes relationships: familial, romantic, and platonic. At its core, this thesis strives to reveal how traveling can inform the way people understand themselves, the world around them, and the relationships they …


Press Anywhere: Stories, Brendon Barnes Jan 2014

Press Anywhere: Stories, Brendon Barnes

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Press Anywhere is a collection of short stories that depicts the various inadequacies of the third millennium male. Each story concerns a man, a boy, or a family on the cusp of change. These characters, burdened by their family tragedies, try to shake off their histories and renew themselves. But, in one way or another, home always finds them. Set in a shared universe, some characters appear in multiple stories, including one boy who dreams of an unlikely superhero to save him from an abusive sibling, and a man determined to outlive a family curse.


Calamity Of The White Picket, Gabrielle Nagengast Jan 2014

Calamity Of The White Picket, Gabrielle Nagengast

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Calamity of the White Picket is a collection of essays that portray how perfection-whether a perfect image, perfect relationship, perfect friendship, or perfect family-becomes withered down, destroyed, and turned into something else. They explore how the idealized image of a family surrounded by a cute white picket fence is dismantled and rearranged through theft, addiction, and a disintegrated family. The essays explore drug addictions, childhood nostalgia, the relationship between heritage and property, innocence, and a stolen best friend. The collection is a train ride of family problems, broken friendships, lying and stealing, and hidden secrets about love and sex. Through …


Martin Cenquizqui, Christina Guillen Jan 2014

Martin Cenquizqui, Christina Guillen

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The historical novel, Cortes Cenquizqui, set in sixteenth century Mexico and Spain, follows the conflicted lives and minds of several characters through an age of freshly crossing culture, language, and power. The narrator, Maria de Quesada of high ranking Spanish and Mexica parents, resents the white world for condemning her work as a female healer or curandera. Yet she acknowledges that she is ill-equipped to leave Mexico City to live in the outlying Indigenous villages. Maria recalls the tale of her three brothers who were caught in a web of pride and prejudices. Her interjections throughout shed light on questions …


The Prologue Past, Raymond Mckee Jan 2014

The Prologue Past, Raymond Mckee

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Prologue Past is a collection of four essays and one novella which explore the past in different fashions. Memory, and the ability to reflect and find meaning in our experiences, is an important cornerstone of engaging the past. Memories are a true anomaly of how our inner-consciousness operates. With each day, the past facilitates a special part of our memory bank which we seldom have any control of. While the abilities of people to recall times, events, places, and experiences differ largely in capacity, we all undoubtedly share universal traits in the manner in which we hold onto our …


Tree Also Barbed Wire, Joseph Michael Zendarski Jan 2014

Tree Also Barbed Wire, Joseph Michael Zendarski

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This manuscript contains poems.