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Articles 1 - 28 of 28
Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
An Unnamed God., Luke Cash Mansfield
An Unnamed God., Luke Cash Mansfield
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This creative thesis is the story of a man returning home at the behest of a friend who is undergoing great difficulties in her life. While Docent Americana ostensibly travels home to help his friend, he is also trying to cope with challenges in his own life. He suffers from bipolar disorder and although he is receiving treatment for it the stresses of the experience trigger a manic episode that threatens his personal stability and his relationships with those around him. An Unnamed God is set in western Kentucky, affording a glimpse at the slow decay of rural communities as …
Dinosaur Nat'l, Joe Lennon
Dinosaur Nat'l, Joe Lennon
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This is a collection of tyranno-lyrical poems which force voice onto various absences and absurdities encountered in the project of constructing or deconstructing an American identity. The collection uses as a unifying conceit the personification of the four letters which have been replaced by the apostrophe in the abbreviation “NAT’L.” Iona appears as a speaking character in many of the poems, pulling an “I” character into conversation with her. Iona and I’s conversations rely on and mangle the poetic language commonly used to identify the nation and what does or doesn’t belong to it—especially the language of folk songs and …
Lightning Flowers, Nickalus Rupert
Lightning Flowers, Nickalus Rupert
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Lightning Flowers traces the psychological collapse of Waylan Dranger, an East Texas construction worker / folk artist. Waylan suffers from hallucinatory encounters with Reeve, his missing brother. Reeve often blames Waylan for his disappearance and implied death. Waylan also worries that Sam, his live-in girlfriend, will leave him before he can resolve his own increasingly erratic behavior. Largely, Lightning Flowers is preoccupied with the consequences of nostalgic thinking. Among others, the novel grapples with the following questions: What defines contemporary notions of "brotherhood"? To what extent does one's survival necessitate self-delusion? How do social stigmas inform our experience of mental …
Road Stories, Louis Mindar
Road Stories, Louis Mindar
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Road Stories is a collection of three novellas that explore the pull, allure, sanctuary, serendipity, and adventure of life on the open road. The novellas examine how for some, the road holds the promise of a new day, an improved life, a better opportunity, or a deeper love; while for others, it is nothing more than an assortment of jumbled blue lines on a map. In Tierra del Fuego, a man takes to the road to figure out how to deal with the grief and sense of betrayal he feels following the death of his wife. Lake of the Falls …
Friday Is A Planet: Stories, Allison Pinkerton
Friday Is A Planet: Stories, Allison Pinkerton
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Friday is a Planet: Stories is a collection of short fiction that explores the ways loss can alter family bonds. Characters in these stories have lost daughters, sisters, mothers, and friends. Some characters go to extreme lengths to return to their loved ones—one woman hallucinates, another time travels. Others deal with the loss in more conventional ways, through support groups and the emotional outlet of community theatre. What ties these stories together is a sense of post-loss confusion and mystery. The characters are unsure how to move forward, or if they should try. The men and women in these stories …
According To The Gospel Of Haunted Women, Judith Roney
According To The Gospel Of Haunted Women, Judith Roney
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
According to the Gospel of Haunted Women is a collection of seventy-five poems divided into four sections. The voices speaking within, are, indeed haunted by varying definitions. They bespeak complex, troubled emotions such as guilt, shame, and anxiety, yet work towards expressions of courage. The dead and the living are cajoled and accused, while others are provided a format through which they may be heard long after their mouths have closed. The poems are arranged in four sections. Section I, “We Begin,” consists of memoir pieces from the poet's early life. Section II, “We Speak,” is a dedicated space for …
Romantic Ideals In Contemporary Folk Music, Brett Schwartz
Romantic Ideals In Contemporary Folk Music, Brett Schwartz
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This thesis examines contemporary folk music from no earlier than 2006, specifically music of the bands The Decemberists, Fleet Foxes, and Bon Iver. Providing a close reading of select songs, I prove that modern music is seeing a revival in the Romantic Era and Transcendentalist ideals and philosophy. The works and philosophy of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), William Wordsworth (1770-1850), John Keats (1795-1821), as well as Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), among others and their critics are all considered for points of comparison to the modern lyrics. The reason for this revival is considered in the conclusion …
Sunset View, Danielle Armstrong
Sunset View, Danielle Armstrong
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Sunset View is a linked collection of short fiction that explores the dynamics of dysfunctional families. Characters in this collection have been affected by the neglect, absence, or death of their family members and friends. They search for recognition and love as they try to find their place in life. Some turn to animals or fleeting relationships to fill this void. Others attempt suicide or simply disappear. The characters are in denial, unsure how to deal with grief, and often make decisions that alienate them from the friends and family they do have. Set in northeast Tennessee and named after …
Black Skies And Gray Matter, Jacquelyn Bennett
Black Skies And Gray Matter, Jacquelyn Bennett
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Black Skies and Gray Matter is a collection of stories thematically centered on characters that are lonely or lost in the world. These stories explore the characters' personalities through their interactions with others (strangers, family, friends, and spouses) and the difficulties they face being misunderstood. Their journeys are ones of trying to find happiness and their place in society (or rejecting it). As they face alienation, they must endure the trials of everyday life (some more extreme than others) and, at the same time, search for kindred spirits, a sense of belonging. Some stay true to themselves while others conform …
What We Hide, Ashley Bowcott
What We Hide, Ashley Bowcott
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
What We Hide is a collection of memoir essays that explores the themes of mystery and deception in personal relationships, specifically within familial and romantic ones. Though the essays in the collection explore the decades from early in the narrator's childhood through her move to Florida for graduate school, the narrator's keen discernment of the world around her and her curiosity for what experiences shape a person's character remain constant. Many essays explore the extent of her father's alcoholism and the consequences of it, as well as the narrator's obsession over the possible sources of his addictions. Other essays examine …
Ascending Mango Hill, Lorri Camueiras
Ascending Mango Hill, Lorri Camueiras
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Ascending Mango Hill is a collection of work that represents me. The intention is to connect with readers by depicting protagonists who are unable to fit in, a theme most readers can relate to. Many times the protagonist must find the courage to confront a situation rather than remain quiet. The collection is separated into two sections: The Essays and The Short Stories. The essays detail my own experiences at being an outsider while exploring the topics of family and personal growth. In the stories, characters must overcome unresolved childhood issues, recognize unhealthy relationships, and decide when to set off …
Lonely Monsters, Patricia Davis
Lonely Monsters, Patricia Davis
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Lonely Monsters is a full-length feature screenplay that explores the ways in which a classic damsel narrative may be reconsidered. It offers ideas on how death and girlhood may find symmetry. The characters within Lonely Monsters deal with loss, identity of the self versus the world's ideas on self-identity, place, gender, and class. Utilizing the elements of a fairy tale, the narrative seeks to complicate the roles of gender in a cautionary tale. Set in the fictional Florida town of Puerto Palmera, an economic divide between the Estates and the Glades makes for a ripe, troublesome environment for a foul …
Two Tongues, Lana Ghannam
Two Tongues, Lana Ghannam
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
"Two Tongues" is a collection of poems that explores the societal norms that mixes American and Middle Eastern cultures. The use of sensory language empowers the speaker of these poems to break the barrier between both cultures and mold them into one significant place—the individual. Within these poems lie the exploration of identity—both religiously and culturally—through the speaker's family upbringing and her social settings, as well as the use of spoken language. This collection attempts to convey the struggles of a bicultural background through use of pure metaphor and sound play where language—Arabic and English—is an essential element to the …
Instant Conductors, Mary Petralia
Instant Conductors, Mary Petralia
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Instant Conductors is a collection of poems meant to engage the reader in conversation about the imperfect nature of the world in relation to the imperfect nature of readerly experience. Walt Whitman wrote, “I have instant conductors all over me whether I pass or stop / they seize every object and lead it harmlessly through me.” And so the things on these pages are intent on transmitting what one experiences in the minutiae of memory and routine: the sounds that surround a blackwater tidepool, what one imagines happens behind the closed doors of the friendly neighbors, or what's heard in …
A Rhetoric Of Fields: Orientationalist And Enactive Essays For Writing Studies, Daniel Louis Singer
A Rhetoric Of Fields: Orientationalist And Enactive Essays For Writing Studies, Daniel Louis Singer
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Beginning primarily in the late 1980s, the phrase “Writing Studies” has increasingly come to be used as a synonym for “Composition and Rhetoric.” Analyzing the orientational and disorientational significance of assuming both synonymy and distinction between the two, I argue for a methodological enactment of Writing Studies as a distinct but deeply entailed field and consider a range of conceptual, practical, political, disciplinary, institutional, curricular, and identity issues at stake in doing so. As the possibility of a Writing Studies that is non-identical to Composition has not yet been widely taken up, the potential of Writing Studies as a distinct …
Notes On Distance Dialing, Liam Baranauskas
Notes On Distance Dialing, Liam Baranauskas
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
My mom thought watching professional wrestling would turn me gay, so I saw the WWF mostly at my dad’s house, on his twelve-inch black and white television with aluminum foil for an antenna. Every other week I got two hours of gyrating pretty boys, unexamined racism, heavy breathing, and the occasional obese man whose blubbery folds could endure endless punishment until he ended his match by sitting on his opponent. There was a Jewish accountant wrestler who would berate the crowd for cheating on their taxes. There was “Kamala the Ugandan Giant.” There was a clown. The greytoned pixels on …
Is This Fire, Gregory Sherl
Is This Fire, Gregory Sherl
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Is This Fire is a collection of poems dealing with the themes of faith and loss. In one section, "The Third Testament," parts of the Bible have been reimagined. There are poems about Joan of Arc, as well as poems that touch on miscarriages, as well as the Columbine massacre. There are, of course, also love poems.
Seawall, Kieran Lyons
Seawall, Kieran Lyons
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Seawall consists of two self-contained selections of fiction from a larger project. Seawall follows a young man named Million Horizon from the moment he arrives in Galveston, Texas, in September of 1900 along with the historical hurricane that would come to be known as the Great Storm of Galveston. This thesis is narrated in a close third-person focused on Million. Although much of the setting and some of the characters are based on historical fact, this thesis often diverges significantly from historical truth and includes fantastical elements. In the first section, Million is conscripted into a largely black crew whose …
Hard Luck Baby, Tanya Lipscomb
Hard Luck Baby, Tanya Lipscomb
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Hard Luck Baby is a collection that elucidates the life of a southern, black mother as she grapples with her culture, family, love and the complex reality of black life in America. Hannah, is a woman who was born in the bubbling 40s, raised in the racial 60s and raptured in the drug-infested 80s. It is through these decades that the rough edges of America are exposed. She discusses her life experiences in a manner that allows readers to touch, as much as empathy will allow, the feelings that contour the deepest areas of her barrel. She shares her first …
I Eat Shit Food And Am Not Worthy: Negotiating The Queer Weight Of "White Trash" Embodiment In Dorothy Allison's Corpus, Rebecca Albright
I Eat Shit Food And Am Not Worthy: Negotiating The Queer Weight Of "White Trash" Embodiment In Dorothy Allison's Corpus, Rebecca Albright
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This thesis argues that Dorothy Allison’s work—and specifically the women who hate me (1983), Trash (1988), and Skin: Talking about Sex, Class, and Literature (1994)—explores the unexpected alliances and radical difference and desire produced by interactions between fatness, queerness, and “white trashiness” on the terrain of late-twentieth-century representational and lived southern culture, and specifically how queer and “white trash” embodiments are both legible in terms of fatness, much in the way that gravy thickens in Allison’s writing to envelop and signify simultaneously lack and excess, shame and ecstasy, disgust and desire, and difference and community. Indeed, it is in the …
The Pen Is A Thing The Hand Already, Andrew Montgomery Freiman
The Pen Is A Thing The Hand Already, Andrew Montgomery Freiman
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
The Pen is a Thing The Hand Already is a lyric epic set in the classroom of an American MFA program. The student’s voices as well as the teacher’s all act interchangeably to expand and complicate the reader’s understanding of self. This is a poem.
Lucy Negro, Redux, Caroline Randall Williams
Lucy Negro, Redux, Caroline Randall Williams
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Lucy Negro, Redux is a collection of poetry that uses the lens of Shakespeare's "Dark Lady" sonnets to explore the way questions about and desire for the black female body have evolved over time, from Elizabethan England to the Jim Crow South to the present day. Research for the collection began with the discovery in early 2012 of a connection between the historical Elizabethan figure Black Luce--a notorious brothel owner--and William Shakespeare, by Professor Duncan Salkeld of the University of Chichester. A grant from the University of Mississippi yielded an opportunity for on-site research with Dr. Salkeld in order to …
The Dead Rise The Dead And Walk Among The Living: An Examination Of The Haunting South, Queerness, And Grotesqueries In Truman Capote's "Other Voices, Other Rooms" And "Local Color", Jordan Alexis Savage
The Dead Rise The Dead And Walk Among The Living: An Examination Of The Haunting South, Queerness, And Grotesqueries In Truman Capote's "Other Voices, Other Rooms" And "Local Color", Jordan Alexis Savage
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This project is conceptualized through a multitude of intersecting and overlapping theories that work together to allow an examination of circulations and intersections of queerness, grotesqueries, and the haunting South. Throughout this reading of Truman Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms and Local Color I want to think through the ways in which images and moments in the text can be queer and grotesque while also lending themselves to the images and eruptions that make up the haunting South. My reading of grotesqueries and the haunting South purposefully moves away from the Southern Gothic, rooting itself instead in a space that …
Craig Santos Perez: Poetry As Strategy Against Military Occupation In Guåhan (Guam), Robert John Briggs
Craig Santos Perez: Poetry As Strategy Against Military Occupation In Guåhan (Guam), Robert John Briggs
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This thesis is interested in hearing the voices seldom heard. It looks at the poetry of Craig Santos Perez, a native Chamorro from Guam, in an attempt to begin puzzling out the idea of transformation in Guam and the military's complicity in the process. While erasure seems to be trending and emerging as a term that would, on the surface, adequately bring attention to the loss of culture, land, and language in Guam, it has the tendency to overshadow and ignore the varying degrees that Guam has changed in the presence of military rule. Other forms of transformation include, but …
Thisness, Henry Wise
Thisness, Henry Wise
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This is a series of poems which explore the unnamed American narrator’s search for identity while living in Taiwan. In these poems, he considers the political situation of Taiwan. This work is meant to contemplate the continuousness of life, the futility of love, the complications of language, the power of the world’s elements, and the essence of what exactly life is all about.
Up And Down, Guibing Qin
Up And Down, Guibing Qin
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
In 1953, one day before the Korean Armistice Agreement, two Chinese young peasants decide to join the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army. Wu Xiu-quan is hesitant because he is the only son and he has a young child bride of seven years waiting to marry him. Wu Xiu-bang, his cousin, convinces him that joining the army would bring honor to his family. The cousins hiked over night to get to the enlist office by the Yangtze River, only to be told that the Korean War has ended. They were sent home. Wu Xiu-quan’s father captured him and gives him a good …
Composing A Literary Adoption Memoir And Self Through Creative Nonfiction Memoir Writing, Jamie K. Nagy
Composing A Literary Adoption Memoir And Self Through Creative Nonfiction Memoir Writing, Jamie K. Nagy
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Adoption writings span across various forms, such as fiction, non-fiction, essays, poetry, theatre, and scholarly fields of study. While many of these adoption writings speak to the complexities of adoption, the general public still tends to see adoption “such a beautiful thing” to do—as the best plan for the child, a noble act, a selfless decision, and a solution to a long-standing social issue. This thesis explores the “literary adoption memoir”—artful writings about real life happenings; my contribution to this genre addresses the complexities of the closed adoption era, transnational/transracial adoption, and parenting an adoptee as an adult adoptee. For …
The Delicate Art Of Being: Psychological Responses To Environmental Damage In American Fiction Of The 1970s, Andrew Timothy Thomas
The Delicate Art Of Being: Psychological Responses To Environmental Damage In American Fiction Of The 1970s, Andrew Timothy Thomas
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This Master’s thesis looks at three works of American literature from the 1970s—James Dickey’s Deliverance (1970), Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree (1979), and Leslie MarSilko’s Ceremony (1977)—with two primary research questions in mind: How do these novels act as responses to the politicization and globalization of the American environmental movement? and How do these novels depict psychological responses to ongoing environmental damage and destruction? This study is particularly interested in depictions of abjected environments inhabited by socially abjected people. Through investigations of ecohorror, ecotrauma, and ecomelancholy as manifested in aesthetic representations of abjected environments, I read these three environmentally aware texts as …