Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Fascism In Sci-Fi: "Mobilizing Passions" In Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers, Alton C. Ayers

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis responds to criticism of Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers (1959) as a “fascist” novel by further investigating the claim through a close reading of the novel that applies political theory scholarship on fascism. Chapters I and II introduce the novel along with its general reception and controversy. These chapters consider the accusations of “fascism” given to the novel while at the same time understanding that a clear, exact definition of “fascism” has long been grappled with by scholars since the rise of the regimes in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Chapters III and IV apply political theory to …

Cultural Trauma Fiction: Political Violence, Rampage Violence, And Structural Violence In Contemporary American Literature, Courtney Mullis

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation identifies and proposes a new subgenre of American literature, Cultural Trauma Fiction, that has arisen since the late 20^th century in response to numerous large-scale traumatic events and their representation in the media. Cultural trauma occurs when a shocking, shared event fractures collective identity and initiates a discursive process to understand what took place, why it happened, and how the affected culture can heal. Cultural traumas differ from individual trauma because cultural traumas affect a culture, rather than an individual, and because they are mediated; many members of the culture experience the trauma of these events secondhand …

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.

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 Sting In The Green City, Nicole Tsakoumagos

ETD Archive

In an irradiated, alternate earth, where a mysterious supernatural phenomenon caused a near-apocalypse, the human race is back on it’s feet. Four major cities dominate the landscape: New Sparta, The Mel, The Nocturn and Oz. In the first installment of “The Sting” series, explore the emerald, Greene Mob run metropolis, Oz. Gun-slinging, Ex-mercenary Kyra `The Sting’ Lee is living quietly in the outer part of the city with her dog, Doogie. The only family she has are the Castellanoses, a Greek four-part ensemble that own Kyra’s favorite greasy spoon diner. Maria Castellanos is Kyra’s best friend and her seemingly unobtainable …

A Reflection On A Dhc Senior Project: "Silvie Danger", Breann Watterson

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

This is a reflection about an Honors College Research Project. The project was a work of historical fiction concerning the coming-of-age of a young woman in mid-nineteenth-century New England.

The Montagnards, Jarred J. Marlatt

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Splitting The Avocado: Short Fiction On Themes Of Power, Gender, And The Hope Of Change, Abigail Mcbride

Honors Projects and Presentations: Undergraduate

Being a woman who writes about life then, whatever that might mean, is what this project is about, because in that way this male seeing of the world is not silenced but rather transformed by the other side of a conversation that has always been one-sided. I read that and thought, wow, I’m doing something political, something revolutionary, something that’s part of a bigger legacy of women completely revolutionizing traditional discourse!But as I look over the stories I’ve written, I find something very different. I find something intensely personal, even private, in my own relation to gender. I thought I …

Approaches To The Land, Joseph Linscott

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Approaches to the Land is a collection of interrelated stories centered on a small Maine mill town. These stories have several recurrent narrators who are in many phases of moving – some come while others leave, etc. These stories have an immense interest in the identification of loss and hope, and this in turn plays heavily on the identities of the characters embodying the stories. As a whole, these stories capture the only way this author knew how to document his hometown.

Master Buddha & The Jolly Golly Fun Time Gang., Todd Edward Evans

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is the first two chapters of a novel. The novel parodies the capitalist and consumerist United States of the 21st Century in the tradition of Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, and Donald Barthelme.

Lost Women, Recently Found, Maya Moverman

Senior Projects Spring 2016

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

Vergilian Allusions In The Novels Of Willa Cather, Nathaniel Wagner

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

This work aims to explore the nature of Vergilian allusion in the novels of Willa Cather - how the author implicated classical language in her own texts as well as the purpose and efficacy of such allusions. By surveying traces of Vergilian passages and rhetorical techniques such as ecphrasis and anacolouthon across three of the writer's major novels, My Antonia, The Professor's House and Shadows on the Rock, this study reveals an important and persistent aspect of Cather's artistic program. The author intentionally and regularly uses Vergilian language and figures to lend a sense of grandeur to the small, individual …

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 …

Infinite Islands: The Seatrees, Colin Christian Alan Mort

Doctoral Dissertations

Infinite Islands: The Seatrees investigates on the subject of infinity as it relates to storytelling and the novel. The critical introduction lays out the relation between reality, fantasy, the imagination and the history of the novel as a source of inspiration for the fictional portion of the dissertation. It considers the similarities between canonical literary novels and fantasy genre novels. Through this consideration, aspects of reality and fantasy in the novel are considered in both theoretical and primary texts. In the fictional portion, an unnamed narrator is retelling the story of his life from beginning to end. Although he works …

Mossy Bottom Golf And Hunt Club, Andrew Joseph Albertson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This is the story of Greg Goforth and Rick Hale, the owner and director of golf, respectively, of the Mossy Bottom Golf and Hunt Club. Greg and Rick work together through many comic mishaps in attempt to bring the 2015 U.S. Open to Mossy Bottom, Mississippi.

Survival Of The Fictiveness: The Novel’S Anxieties Over Existence, Purpose, And Believability, Jesse Mank

English Theses

The novel is a problematic literary genre, for few agree on precisely how or why it rose to prominence, nor have there ever been any strict structural parameters established. Terry Eagleton calls it an “anti-genre” that “cannibalizes other literary modes and mixes the bits and pieces promiscuously together” (1). And yet, perhaps because of its inability to be completely defined, the novel best represents modern thought and sensibility. The narrative form speaks to our embrace of individualism while its commodification seems so natural, perhaps even democratic, to a capitalist economy. A historical look at the novel’s inception reveals that the …

On Our Way Out: And Other Stories, Benjamin Champlin Wright Morris

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

On Our Way Out and other stories is a collection of short fiction banded together with themes of the darkened strange, the missing and the moving, and a sense of place. The characters in these stories try to claw their way to newfound identities, whether it's through a financial transaction, saving a life, or putting a body in the ground. An action with a result is what's needed in these characters' lives. Though, often, the results are not intended. Despite the oddity inherent in these stories and characters, there is something familiar about their plight as ordinary people, something in …

Mother Of Three Drowns Children And Other Stories, Laura L. Stubbins

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

A collection of short stories depicting fictional characters facing what is absent from their lives.

Frank And Gala, Heather M. Mcgrail

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Through the gossip and rumors in a small town in Minnesota, the townspeople discuss and react to the Levison family's claimed perfection.

Wisteria And Other Stories, Michael Clayton

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

We are forever shaped by the worlds we live in. The following stories are musings on the importance of time and place and on the conflicts that arise for characters who are born into and who live with or rail against those forces. The stories are set in and around Laurel County, Georgia over a period of decades. They look at the people who are made there and the lessons they learn or fail to learn as they work to make their way there.

Welcome To Boomland, Cebrun Abe Gaustad

Doctoral Dissertations

Abe Gaustad's first collection of stories, Welcome to Boomland, explores the lives of disparate characters longing for some escape. Whether a paraplegic blues aficionado or a boy who finds a strange object in the woods, they are each searching for a way out of their stagnation. Yet each character is trapped by their own unique circumstance: some of them by their mistakes, some by ruthless dictators, some by the very notion of death. As they search for their freedom, they find out new things about themselves and manage to wage quiet rebellions against those that would control them. In the …

Six City: A Novel, Leah Bailly

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Six City is a 93 000 word voice-driven novel that traverses six countries as it follows its protagonist, a woman known only as S---, after she is reported missing by her family. A lingerie-shop owner and politician's wife, S--- reinvents her identity from Barcelona to Morocco, through Mauritania, Senegal and Mali, and eventually into Sierra Leone. S--- is hotly pursued by a devoted "Following," but when search efforts descend south into sub-Saharan Africa, the Following discovers that S--- has been found dead in the outskirts of Freetown. The result: a massive chase across multiple continents, tracing the steps of a …

Claiming Agency: Edith Wharton's Public And Private Spaces In "The House Of Mirth", Lauren Del Polito

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

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A Critical Appraisal Of The Fiction Of Jessamyn West, Ada Rutledge

English Language and Literature ETDs

This study of the fiction of Jessamyn West consists of an examination of a representative number of her published short stories and examines three books, The Friendly Persuasion, A Mirror for the Sky, and The Witch Diggers.

Character Types Of The Southwest As Delineated In New Mexico Fiction And Presented In Such Order As To Show The Development Of This State, Bonnidell Sisson Roberts

English Language and Literature ETDs

To present to the reader the development of New Mexico as portrayed in its widely varied character types, and to show its Empire Builders through the mirror of fiction is the goal in which this thesis has in view.

A secondary purpose will be accomplished if, by means of the excerpts presented, interest in reading the books in their entirety shall lead to a broader knowledge of the growing bibliography of Southwestern fiction.

A Study Of The Cluster Novel As A Development In Contemporary Fiction, Mary Salber

University of the Pacific Theses and Dissertations

By 1929 and 1930 the popularity and the increasing use of the cluster form caught the attention of most careful readers of fiction. Its original adaptations, its unique technique, its clever appropriation of the best in the novel and in the short story forms, its use by leading novelists, its suggested similarity to age-old literary methods, and it's very apparent possibilities - all these make it a subject worthy of some detailed study.

It shall be the aim in this discussion to search out the very early traces of fictional forms similar to the cluster type, to attempt to account …