Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Glossary I : Graduate Thesis, Eli Backer

Masters Theses

Situated across various contexts and spaces– studio, domestic, gallery– Eli Backer’s work explores open collaboration with machines, often producing multiples to reflect on, obfuscate, and to futilely hold the space and shape of loss. In this text, she surveys radio stations, music, writing, and art that has formed and driven her practice and sets a framework for the limited continuation of this document.

The Boys With The Spare Keys, Katelyn Elizabeth Grisham

MSU Graduate Theses

As human beings, we are constantly losing something: our keys, our wallets, our credits cards, or the mate to our favorite pair of socks. But what if you lose something that cannot be replaced, something that will impact your life in a permanent way? This collection looks at what it means to lose something life-altering; our sense of self, our friendships, our planned futures, our grasp on reality. Some things cannot be replaced. From trust fund kids to a dad preparing a Christmas tree for his daughter, this collection will explore the idea of what we can (or cannot) afford …

Dee: A Feature Length Drama, Laura Angelyn Mccarter

Master of Arts in Professional Writing Capstones

“DEE” is a feature length drama about a young addict who pursues a career in music in an attempt to keep her brother’s memory alive after his untimely death tears her family apart. The story explores how the characters deal with drug abuse, loss, broken families, toxic relationships, and pursuing one’s dreams. The film will feature original indie rock music for several of the characters who write and perform their own songs. It’s A Star is Born meets Beautiful Boy.

Watching And Working Through: Navigating Non-Being In Television Storytelling, Tiara Lalita Sukhan

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation explores various examples of the concept of symbolic non-being within television drama. It seeks to investigate the ways and degrees to which television storytelling can represent and perform the psychoanalytic process of “working through.” The medium of television provides a unique framework for investigation as television does not just illustrate (represent) working through as something a fictional character experiences, but it also performs it structurally, through the incorporation of three medium-specific features: duration, immersion and repetition. Television represents working through on a mass scale – imagining a collective audience by addressing big political, personal and/or institutional issues that …

I'M Never Fine, Joseph S. Lezza

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

ABSTRACT

Title of Thesis: I'm Never Fine

Joseph S. Lezza, Master of Fine Arts, 2019

Thesis Directed by: Nelson Cardenas, Ph. D.

The University of Texas at El Paso, Department of Creative Writing

During the course of my father's fifteen-month battle with pancreatic cancer, and in its oceanic aftermath, I became both intimately and uncomfortably familiar with the phrase "I'm fine." It developed into a practical and efficient tool for bringing about a quick shift in subject whenever my family situation came under question by a well-meaning friend, trepidatious relative and even during an unexpectedly emotional phone call with my …

The Revolt Against Mourning: Woolf, Joyce, Faulkner, And Beyond, Andrew Leo Beutel

Theses and Dissertations--English

The Revolt against Mourning calls into question the widespread critical alignment of literary modernism with Freudian melancholia. Focusing instead on “mourning,” through close readings of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, James Joyce’s Ulysses, and William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, I demonstrate how their depictions of this notion overturn both its traditional and contemporary understandings. Whereas Freud conceives mourning as a psychic labor that the subject slowly and painfully carries out, Woolf, Joyce, and Faulkner convey it as a destabilizing, subversive, and transformative force to which the subject is radically passive. For Freud, mourning is a matter …

Soot & Shadow, Christa Crawford

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Soot & Shadow is a creative nonfiction-based collection of poetry that focuses on the themes of freedom and loss. The manuscript delves into the lives of immigrant women, specifically those affected by the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire and those who came to America as the brides of American servicemen following WWII. Based on eyewitness testimony, the poetry attempts to capture the essence of the events, the devastating tragedy, love, loss, and the freedom these women sought as they discovered Truth through adversity. The poetry itself explores various poetic genres while attempting to push against the confines of the page. …