Arts and Humanities Commons^™

N'Awlins Po Boy, Warren J. Graffeo

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Abstract

N’Awlins Po Boy draws heavily on the author’s memories and recollections of growing up in the New Orleans of the 1940s and 1950s, but it is a work of fiction. Although the settings and scenes are rendered as accurately as memory allows, the circumstances, situations and people are entirely fictional. During the immediate post-WWII decade, the city went through a rapid series of changes, some calm and nearly unnoticed, others turbulent and upsetting to the natural order that had prevailed for more than two centuries. This is an account of those changes as they might have been seen through …

“Breakfast Shots” And Other Stories: Collected Fiction Of Joseph D. Haske, Joseph D. Haske

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

The following thesis for the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing consists of two parts. The first part contains five excerpts from a short story cycle, tentatively entitled Breakfast Shots. The second part includes experimentation with the short story form, including the noir-influenced Bloqueo and two minimalist stories derived from this piece. Several stories included in this thesis have been published in journals such as Boulevard, Fiction International, and Dark Sky. The rest are currently under consideration for various journals and anthologies.

The Dutch Smuggler's Story [Abstract Only], Devin Murphy

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The Dutch Smuggler’s Story, is a novel about Jacob Jonker, a Sea Captain, whose secret, early life comes to light in the wake of his arrest for human trafficking. Jacob grew up in a fishing family in Holland, and was conscripted into the German Navy as a teenager in 1943. Due to his seafaring ability, he was used as a test dummy for a new Nazi weapon, a one person midget submarine. When Jacob has success as a midget sub operator, he is bestowed The Knight’s Cross by the Germans as a propaganda ploy to lore more Dutch youth …

Gérard Bessette (1920-2005): A Monstre Sacré In French Canadian Literature, Steven Urquhart

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This article examines Gérard Bessette’s relative marginalization in French Canadian literature by means of rereading his first novel, La Bagarre (1958) in terms of its monstrous aesthetic and its rapport with subsequent novels, notably Le Semestre (1979). Bessette’s first novel allows us not only to understand the deviant nature of his aesthetic and its evolution, but also how it relates to his individualistic and transgressive position with the French Canadian literary institution in which he embodies a monstre sacré, an author and a character of sorts, who is at once revered and cursed.

Creation And (Re)Presentation Of Historical Discourse In Isle Of Passion By Laura Restrepo, Daniela Melis

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Published in Colombia in 1989, but neglected until the author’s later distinction, Laura Restrepo’s first novel, Isle of Passion, focuses on historical facts, as well as on the issues that arise when the impact of events is articulated in official discourse. This study—drawing from Walter Mignolo’s idea of decolonial theory—explores how Restrepo’s attempt to rewrite history following “an-other logic, an-other language, an-other thinking” contributes to the decolonization of knowledge, being, community interests, and cultural heritage. The novel’s plot centers on a minor event in international history: the territorial dispute over the island of Clipperton, which was encountered by an …

Disciples Of Vu, Leif Carl Behmer

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

This project is in the design of high-fantasy sword and sorcery, wherein the concepts of mana and magic are employed as expressions of virtue to highlight contemporary issues of cultural identity and belonging. This project is also an experiment to attract a readership of non-traditional fantasy readers into the genre by creating, rather than assuming, a fantastic world context using immersive rhetorical techniques.

This project in of itself is not so much a re-invention of the traditional adventure quest as it is an exploration of its post-Tolkien form (the attraction of mythology and folklore, the narrative use of prophecy), and …

Signifying Ruins: The Wreck And Rebirth Of Modernity, Language, And Representation, Audrey Farley

Theses and Dissertations

This study explores formal and thematic representations of ruins in twentieth century literary texts, including James Joyce’s Ulysses, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, and Adrienne Rich’s “Diving into the Wreck.” Analyzing these texts and concepts of ruins in the theoretical work of Jacques Derrida, Walter Benjamin, and Julia Kristeva, I argue that ruins underscore the arbitrariness—and, thus, the fragility—of symbolic systems of signification. Ruins, by virtue of their fragmentation, invite nostalgic projections of totality only to betray totality as an illusion. Thus, the imagination of wholeness that the ruin incites allows—only to disallow—meaning. Modernity and …

Up Too Late: A Novel Excerpt, Peter Bayless

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Tyler Sexton is a male in his mid-twenties whose life seems to have ground to a halt before it truly began. Despite the opportunities afforded him by a successful college education and an upper-middle-class family background, Tyler's life since the death of his father from heart disease has become one dominated by malaise, living alone and working a dead-end job as a grocery store customer-service manager, clinging to the family members he has left. Now, with his mother suffering from a debilitating fight with cancer and his sisters either starting their own families or withdrawing even further into episodes of …

Film Review: Gulliver's Travels, Karen Gevirtz

Department of English Publications

No abstract provided.

Poor Old Horse: Tragicomedy And The Good Soldier, Matthew Christian

Senior Projects Spring 2011

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

Al Cuerpo Lo Que Pida, Lucia Sanchez-Llorente

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Al cuerpo lo que pida, is a novel that addresses the old topic of disloyalty in contemporary Mexico City society. It narrates in first person the inner-conflict of the protagonist, Mercedes Santamaria, who tries to lead a double life. On one hand she is in love with her husband, Fernando, and on the other hand, she is incapable of stopping her impulses with other men, which puts her marriage in jeopardy. She turns to her late grandmother, as an alter ego, for advice.

Bolshevik For Capitalism: Ayn Rand & Soviet Socialist Realism, Peter Jebsen

CMC Senior Theses

Since the late 1950s, Russian-American novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand has been “the ultimate gateway drug to life on the right.” Her philosophy – “Objectivism” – combined militant atheism, libertarian natural rights, and a philosophical commitment to what she called “the virtue of selfishness,” and earned her the admiration of such luminaries as Alan Greenspan: a remarkable achievement for an immigrant woman who learned to speak English in her late 20s. What is less-often observed is that Rand’s work, especially her mature novels The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957), bear a close stylistic resemblance to the Soviet Socialist Realist …

And Then It Clicked, Tanya Marie Robertson

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

And Then It Clicked is a crime fiction novel about an African-American female detective from Louisville, Kentucky who accepts a case centered on the issue of domestic violence. It tells the story of an abused woman murdered in her home. Her husband, initially suspected of the crime, has an air-tight alibi and the family asks Adrienne, the detective, to find out who killed her and why. Adrienne has had past experiences with domestic violence and the new case causes her trauma to resurface.

Film Review: Gulliver's Travels, Karen Gevirtz

Karen Bloom Gevirtz

No abstract provided.