Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Identität In Schwarz Und Weiß: Die Übersetzung Der Afro-Deutschen Identität In Den Werken Von May Ayim, Mia Ver Pault

Senior Theses and Projects

Many parts of our being are attached to how we identify and with whom we identify. Theoretically, how we identify is based largely on one’s own choices, but such freedom is not always the case. Unfortunately, identity is often imposed upon one by the surrounding racial and ethnic majority. Like many non-white people in a white environment, this was the case for the German poet and activist, May Ayim. May Ayim (1960-1996) was born to a white German mother and a black Ghanian father. Although Ayim spoke German, grew up in Germany, and was fully acculturated into German society, she …

Teleios, Sandra Edwards

All Graduate Reports and Creative Projects, Fall 2023 to Present

This thesis is a collection of poetry that mixes formal and free verse in order to convey the speaker’s spiritual journey in content as well as form. The work introduces a speaker who is deeply religious and who expresses her spirituality in the form of formal poetry such as sonnets as she adheres to certain principles of faith. The use of form in the thesis represents her adherence to those principles, while breaking form is symbolic of her breaking away from those principles. Through the work, the speaker experiences a shift from frustration with the world and its apparent obfuscation …

Visibility In The Redacted Space: What Censored Poetry Reveals About Guantanamo Bay Prison And The Individuals Trapped Inside, Chase Portaro

English Capstone Projects

This paper discusses what readers can understand about Guantanamo Bay and the larger setting of America's Islamophobic "War on Terror" through the poetry of individuals detained inside of Guantanamo Bay Military Prison. In 2002, Mark Falkoff, with the help of a team of lawyers, translators, and human rights advocates published a collection of twenty-two detainee-authored poems, titled Poems from Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak. This paper discusses the emerging neo-colonial subjectivity of America's War on Terror, as it analyzes the available writings of Guantanamo poets. The new language of subjectivity of victims of contemporary American empire is defined by suppression, as …

Paul Celan And The Processes Of Survival In Post-Shoah Jewish Writing, Ari Savage

Theses

The following is a study of the poetry of Paul Celan as a representation of psychological and social processes present in the written works of Shoah survivors. It begins with an analysis of the place of writing in Jewish culture, then identifies three primary processes which operate in sequence: alienation, individuation, and integration. By examining Paul Celan’s highly personal and autobiographical texts in the context of his life experience as a Shoah survivor it is possible to discern the social and psychological forces at work which compel survivors to express their traumas in written form, and to gain a better …

Conjuring The Moon, Ariella Berkowitz

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Conjuring The Moon wrestles with the question of why we as women still submit to norms created by men who can't possibly understand our reality. Why should we support ideologies that claim to represent us while actively working against us? Why should we conform to a system that positions us as inessential Other? The speaker of this book aspires to liberate herself from such burdens. Conjuring the Moon encapsulates one woman's search for the feminine divine within herself, her religion, and her environment; but as empowering as this search may be, it remains inextricably connected to her social and historical …

Honeysuckles & Irises: Effigies Of The Land, Ami` L. Hanna-Huff

English Creative Writing Theses

Here is a memoir of my paternal line through the lens of my Great-Grandmother and myself. A reclamation of the land I hail from and a connection to a history previously felt distant, this examination of race and gender explicitly focused on the African American Southern female experience; I try to make sense of the juxtaposing positions in our lives. The culture built from its creation through Tennessee personified. Here, I integrate history and theory with lyrics and prose to experience the eighty-one years of progress brought between our births and the lingering anxiety of slavery. My great-grandmother, Hazel Irene …

Finding Words For God: Poetic Foraging In Louise Glück's The Wild Iris, Rachel Cardall

Theses and Dissertations

The primary speaker of Louise Glück's The Wild Iris is a wanderer in her own garden. She relentlessly searches for God among her foxgloves and daisies, straining to hear God's voice. Two other speakers, God and the collective plants of the garden, offer their perspectives without acknowledgement by the human speaker. Many critics read these two other speakers as, in fact, narcissistic projections of the human speaker, a God and a world made in her own image. In this thesis, I clarify that the kind of narcissistic projection that occurs in The Wild Iris is actually productive for genuine spiritual …

A Million Little Griefs, Justine Hayes

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

A Million Little Griefs is a poetry collection that explores themes of time, place and identity through personal experiences and observations of a young mother living cross-culturally in Malawi, Africa. The book is divided into the three sections, Embrace, Ground, and Release (EGR,) which create a cyclical trajectory that serves as a guide for walking through transitions and new experiences.

What The Unburied Said, Katharine Rees

English Undergraduate Honors Theses

"What the Unburied Said" is a short collection of documentary poetry written during the waning years of the COVID-19 pandemic. In conversation with T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, it seeks to exalt the beauty of humans who help each other live within an often-tragic, always-fascinating world.

Doc/U/Ment: Affinities In 20th And 21st-Century Documental Poetics, Katherine Payne

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation presents, analyzes, and builds on the existing literary genealogy of documental poetry. In 2020 Michael Leong proposed the term documental poetry to describe the turn toward source materials in 21^st-century North American poetry, seen in longform research-based poems that explicitly incorporate documentation and seek to intervene in cultural memory. Using Ludwig Wittgenstein’s concept of family resemblance, I argue that there are clear affinities between 21^st-century poets and their 20^th-century literary forerunners, also that an expansion of the scope of documental poetics is needed. The three nodes of connection I examine are works …

Voices Against An Era: Alternative Voices, Cultural Heroics, And The Impact Of He Yong And Zhang Chu On Chinese Rock Music, Peter J. Moncur

Masters Theses

The music of He Yong and Zhang Chu, two of the Three Heroes of Magic Stone, has played an integral part in the development of Chinese rock. Often relegated to footnotes in the music’s history, this thesis aims to prove their cultural and musical significance during the late-eighties and early-nineties of China’s Reform and Opening period. The term “voices against an era” was chosen to define He Yong and Zhang Chu’s role as rock musicians with alternative voices during this historical period, with an investigation of the term’s role in creating an alternate dialogue. To do this, I first define …

Communion Anthropoid, Joshua Stanek

Dissertations and Theses

In National Lampoon's Vegas Vacation, a man of good will offers all he has to a dear brother-in-law--recognizing the snakes he keeps as toys, the camper, the stones, dirt, and arid shrubbery are likewise dear to him. They go out to the desert at night and dig shallow holes, seemingly at random. Their imprecision is surprisingly fruitful. Imagine the constellation they made for the stars. In Communion Anthropoid, I am digging shallow holes in the dark with a mind to unearth what I believe I have lost. The dearness, I suppose. These poems vary in form from eight …

Appropriated Voices: William Blake’S “The Little Black Boy” And British Antislavery Poetry, Brett J. Mattson

All NMU Master's Theses

British antislavery poetry in the late 1700s is well characterized by the first stanza of William Blake’s poem “The Little Black Boy” when his black speaker says “o! my soul is white; … But I am black as if bereav’d of light” (2-4). These statements that seem to exclude each other exemplify the discussions and arguments that antislavery poets had been publishing and would continue to deliberate after “The Little Black Boy” was printed in 1789. Other poets, while appropriating the voices of enslaved people or Africans, as Blake does in “The Little Black Boy,” often emphasize differences between their …

New Commandments, Jacob Sussman

Masters Theses

I reach into the earth, pull out mud-encrusted objects, and recombine them to define new meanings. With every object transposed, the past breaks down; new potentials form. “New Commandments” recombines historical symbolism through an intuitive building, destroying, and merging to reimagine or re-establish meaning.

The work critiques rites of passage, masculinity, and stereotypes by deconstructing how histories, ideologies, and preconceptions form.

As a queer person raised in-between Judaism and Christianity, social preconceptions and religious expectations festered my formation. Our choice is taken away at this moment of conception. To take back autonomy, I reimagine historical, and religious symbolism and transmute …

Making Time: Gentle Invitations For Radical Slowness, Lian Fumerton-Liu

Masters Theses

Year after year, we place more value on efficiency and productivity; underestimating smaller gestures of craft, care and wonder. This emphasis directly affects the tools and structures that determine how, and what, we make.

Making time is a practice that counters the urgency of now by unearthing approaches to break down, reimagine, and remake existing systems. Through personal reflection and experimental collaboration, it acts as a series of ever-evolving invitations—openings and pauses for others to begin to radically invert expectations; to wander; to grow artifacts; to write letters to the birds; to multiply oceans; to extend connections; to plant proposals; …

Form Follows Feeling Follows Form, Harshal Duddalwar

Masters Theses

In this thesis, I explore ways of expression at the intersection of form, feeling, and storytelling; through my lived experiences. I emphasize the act of documentation, encouraging introspection and reflection as a means of creating a body of personal work. I also talk about developing my visual vocabulary and language to express these narratives, along with strategies and plans for making personal work outwardly visible.

A Poetically Embodied Out-Of-Body Experience, Natalie Sunseri

Honors Theses

The choreographic project Euphoric Dysphoria emerged as a response to the choreographer’s gender dysphoria and personal observations about the way that feminine-presenting people are perceived and approached in dance spaces, particularly in comparison to masculine-presenting people. The dance originated as a choreographic exploration of extreme femininity and masculinity, and it evolved into a manifestation of performative gender and experiential gender. The choreographer was guided by her poem “Uneven Envy” when developing movement and building relationships among the dancers. She considered the contributions of Judith Butler, a scholar who writes about gender manifesting in the body due to socialization, and Laura …

Mourning In Eco-Poetics & Cellar As Linguistic Category, Gwen Moon

University Honors Theses

These poems are informed by ecopoetics as defined by Forest Gander: "If natural processes are already altered by and responsive to human observation, how does poetry register the complex interdependency that draws us into a dialogue with the world?" Because the backdrop of our lives is changing with increasing signs of eco-collapse, our bodies are constantly sensing fear and loss. These poems merge the personal with the global in an attempt at a corporeal language that conveys meaning as a felt sense over a cerebral relationship. To quote William Wenthe, "…there is something physical, corporeal about our experience of syntactic …

Execution By Alien (A Collection Of Poetry), Sara Emma Kahane

Honors Theses

The following is a collection of poems narratively depicting the childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and death of a woman and her memories. I will analyze the poetry in meaning and form as well.

Goddess Of., Megan Childs

Student Research Submissions

My chapbook, “goddess of.”, is a compilation of poems that channel the larger-than-life personalities of the Ancient Greek gods and goddesses. I completed this project over the course of a semester in my ENGL470 course, Seminar in Creative Writing: Poetry. Professor Bylenok, who sponsored this project, was instrumental in the development of my poetry into a fully-fledged collection. My chapbook explores disillusionment, love, loneliness, and fear. At its core, it’s about having to live with yourself – even if it’s embarrassing, ugly, or painful. It’s a chance to feel as powerful as the gods themselves, or as pathetic as their …

Gardening Lessons, Auden Eagerton

Poetry MFA Theses

A poetry collection centered on the poet's childhood trauma and reclamation of body and gender identity through transition.

Ingredients For An Invisibility Cloak Or A Blindfold, Laine Knowles

Theses/Capstones/Creative Projects

An artist book is an art object that expressly utilizes the linear, time-based form of a book in a way that will best serve the artist’s intentions. The contents of this 16 page book are an expansion of the ideas and themes in my BFA thesis show. This will include original writing, drawings, watercolor paintings, prints, and collaged elements that will inform each other artistically. The title of this art book refers to the circumstances and ideas that inform my sense of self-perception, and how I relate to others.

Four Junes, Sara Brown

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Four Junes is a poetry collection of elegies and pastoral elegies that aims to discuss and explore the interconnectedness of the body within the frame of health and illness to the landscape of long-term and short-term dwelling and ideas of home. Through fractured frames of home oppositional in landscape and environment, the collection discusses how the body functions and exists in health and unhealth and explores the reactions and processing of half-deaths involved in cancer, and specifically, stem cell transplants as treatment for terminal illnesses. More specifically, the cancerous body and healthy body are contrasted to one another and considered …

The Birds That Embrace Both Illusions: An Intersemiotic Translation Of All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace By Richard Brautigan, Veronika Yadukha

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

This essay analyzes the influence of various worldviews on Richard Brautigan's poetry, which form his particular language. A combination of Zen Buddhism, Japanese aesthetics, American poetic tradition, and echoes of the philosophy of absurdism are some of the core themes that serve as mechanisms for Brautigan's poems.

For each chapter of the book All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, I make an intersemiotic translation transposing Brautigan's poems into ceramic tea bowls. By combining different art forms and translating from an abstract symbolic art – poetry – to a form of applied art that is much more physically …

Desert Body, Lauren Mckinnon

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This thesis is a collection of poems examining certain paradoxes of my body. As a survivor of sexual violence, my body relives trauma which makes it feel uninhabitable. I compare my experiences with the Southern Utah desert. The physical beauty, destruction and inhabitability of the desert teaches me to accept my body as both beautiful and full of grief. The poems move chronologically through my life, beginning with an abusive relationship at the age of sixteen, a move to Moab at nineteen, and becoming a mother at twenty-five. Ultimately, with the desert as my guide, I learn to accept my …

Irreverent Womanhood: The Healing Of Intergenerational And Cultural Trauma In The Chicanx And Latinx Sonic Poetry Of Amalia Ortiz And Melissa Lozada-Oliva, Yasmine A. Gomez

Theses and Dissertations

The connections between nontraditional forms of literature and spiritual activism lie within the resistive practices of Chicanx Feminism. This thesis argues that cultural healing and social change is dependent upon the recognition of trauma as a step towards enacting social justice. Additionally, this thesis focuses on the figure of Coyolxauhqui and indigenous motherhood to reveal procedures for change. Through the theory of trauma, this thesis examines the nontraditional Chicanx/Latinx poetry of Amalia Ortiz’s sonic rock opera, Cancíon, Cannibal, Cabaret, & Other Songs and Melissa Lozada-Oliva’s novel in verse, Dreaming of You.

My investigation into the breaking of gendered …

Gleanlings, Natalie Stein

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

The following poems were written in sentences formed by spilling milk onto objects of ritual significance. In the epic tradition of crumbs. Surfaces offered their chamberlets with the insistence of a larynx. In the shapes of: My Father, The Dead And Their Voices. There was milk, marionette drudgery, implacable lambs. Mice feature greatly– on toast, making bags. Mouse cream. Fragments of lost texts that were divined. A lullabye. These poems inhabit the formal and rhetorical devices of woolgathering, a loculus, and marginalia.

At Least Eight Poems, Stone Mcdonald

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

This reflective essay displays the super thematic theme that's clearly present on this project. It is at least eight poems, and you cannot dispute that claim. This project clearly was made to satisfy those college requirements, but I will admit that its theme is merely the theme of Stone. It is a sample of my perception, a slippery path that directs readers into my creative process and brisk way of thinking. If you ever get confused about what you’re reading, just remember, it all falls under the theme of stone; the rock without surface, clearly with depth. It’s a theme …

There Could Be Light Here, Audrey Bowers

Graduate Thesis Collection

Poems about healing and hurting. The journey begins with a 14-year-old who is struggling with suicidal thoughts and ends with a 25-year-old learning how to live with bipolar 1 disorder. The poems focus on finding light in the darkness, one poem at a time.

Naturally: Memory In Verse, Heather L. Drouse

English Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis is a collection of free verse poetry that I have written that share a common theme of nature and family. This is a creative work that explores my personal memories and the feelings associated with them with the intention to spread joy and cause readers to reflect upon similar experiences they might have had as children. It consists of four major sections -- mother, father, love, and bridges -- and 18 poems, with "love" having 7 minor sections.