Creative Writing Commons^™

"Casting Aside That Ficticious Self.": Deciphering Female Identity In The Awakening 2015, Anne L. Dicosimo

Master's Theses

Kate Chopin’s female protagonists have long since fascinated literary critics, raising serious questions concerning the influence of nineteenth-century female gender roles in her writing. Published in 1899, The Awakening demonstrates the changeability of the various representations of woman. In the nineteenth century, the subject of women may be divided into two categories: the True Woman and the New Woman. The former were expected to “cherish and maintain the four cardinal virtues of piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity” (Khoshnood et al.), while the latter sought to move away from hearth and home in order to focus on education, professions, and political …

"Carried Away": Love, Bly, And Secrecy In Henry James' The Turn Of The Screw 2015, Natalie G. El-Eid

Master's Theses

The function of the prologue in Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw is decidedly ambiguous, as the characters in the prologue, much like the uncle of the main text, are seemingly never seen again. For this reason, the purpose of this prologue is much debated.1 As Rolf Lundén states in his article “‘Not in any literal, vulgar way’: The Encoded Love Story of Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw,” “The openness of Henry James' The Turn of the Screw has invited more analytical attempts, and more critical controversy, than most literary texts” (30). Lundén summarizes four schools of …

Daisy And Frederick: An Exploration Of Innocence And Its Consequences In Henry James' Daisy Miller: A Study 2015, Mark Andrew Meyer Ii

Master's Theses

No abstract provided.

Yardbirds, Joshua A. Brewer

All NMU Master's Theses

Novel-length fictions, when at their best, deeply complicate themes, characters, events or situations using the form’s lengthy narrative arc. Yardbirds aims to employ the long narrative arc to engage a fictional west Arkansas mountain community, Ink, and the contemporary post-mill economy evoked. Yardbirds attempts to disorient the traditional notion of point-of-view to recognize the multifaceted power of the land. This work features a multi-racial, bilingual and multicultural community which confronts the longstanding black-white binary that has dominated literary depictions of the American South. This work aims to disrupt that notion—the South as monolith—by presenting bioregional communities as central to individuals’ …

What's "Really Real": David Foster Wallace And The Pursuit Of Sincerity In Infinite Jest, Henry Clayton

Honors Theses

Throughout his literary career, David Foster Wallace articulated the problems associated with the profusion of irony in contemporary society. In this thesis I assert that his novel Infinite Jest promotes a shift from the reliance on irony and subversion to a celebration of the principles of sincerity. The emphasis on sincerity makes Infinite Jest a landmark novel in the canon of American fiction, as Wallace employs postmodern formal techniques, such as irony, metafiction, fragmentation, and maximalism, in the interest of promoting traditional, non-ironic values of emotion, community, and spirituality. I draw from works of postmodern theory and criticism to bolster …

Me Without You, Michelle Bracken

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

ME WITHOUT YOU is an interlinked collection of short stories set in the blight of an urban housing project in San Bernardino, California. The stories follow the lives of three students in their year of fourth grade at a low performing school. Narrated from these points of view, the collection amplifies the voices of a community wrought with violence, poverty, and crime while also exploring how children brave the consequences of a world they cannot control.

Mesmerizing in its simplicity, and gripping in its detail, ME WITHOUT YOU intertwines themes of identity, family, loss, poverty, and longing for what is …

The Escape Artists, Daniel Gene Hernandez

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

My thesis, “The Escape Artists”, is a collection of short fiction that represents most of the work I did as a creative writing master’s student. The title is taken from my longest story, a narrative about a young man’s struggle to avoid violence in a federal prison. As a title, “The Escape Artists” also captures major themes in my other stories; characters often pursue emotional escapism or literally seek to evade predators in my fiction. As a writer, I often explore breakdowns in social order, so my stories tend to be set in turbulent, oppressive political climates or else inside …

Las Vegas Paperboy, Matthew O'Brien

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

I’m an author and journalist who has lived in Las Vegas since 1997. My first book, Beneath the Neon: Life and Death in the Tunnels of Las Vegas, chronicles my adventures in the city’s underground flood channels. My second book, My Week at the Blue Angel: And Other Stories from the Storm Drains, Strip Clubs, and Trailer Parks of Las Vegas, is a creative-nonfiction collection set in off-the-beaten-path Vegas. These two books grew out of my eight years as a writer and editor for Las Vegas CityLife alternative-weekly paper.

I enrolled in UNLV’s MFA creative-writing program in the fall of …

Green Berets And Gay Deceivers: The New Left, The Vietnam Draft And American Masculinity, Anna L. Zuschlag

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

When masculinity is predicated on violence and military service is a man’s civic duty, then draft resistance becomes a doubly radical act. Men who refuse to take up arms for their nation threaten, at least potentially, both its political and gender order. This dissertation explores American masculinity during and after the Vietnam War, by analyzing cultural representations of, and responses to, the U.S. Selective Service System. At a time when mainstream Hollywood would not touch the Vietnam War, a generation of independent filmmakers, artists and agitators produced a number of remarkable films and documents dealing with the war, the draft …

In The Flesh: Fiction As An "Incarnational Art", Marissa Thornberry

Honors Theses

My goal in this paper is to support O’Connor’s claim that fiction is “incarnational” by providing additional evidence and addressing implications that she doesn’t. I am professing that fiction-writing is indeed “incarnational,” in even more ways than O’Connor directly expresses. If this thesis holds true, then it is difficult for Christians to rightly make light of the art of story-writing. Contempt for creative writers is tempered in our time more by a trend toward tolerance than by public or personal conviction of the human need for storytellers. Even in an environment where making money and tending to physical needs and …

Scribblescholar Was Here: Confessional Notes Of A Vandal Academic, Clay Shields

Theses and Dissertations--English

As a (former) vandal-punk in the academy, I often fear succumbing to Ivory Tower Stockholm syndrome. The identities I perform, vandal-punk and scholar, ideologically clash to the point that they often feel irreconcilable. By codemeshing the high-low discourses associated with these adopted cultures, I attempt to disrupt any hierarchal privileging of either, instead searching for a way to live with and harness both.

The Lyric And The Lathe: Dreams Of Perfect Poetic Efficiency, 1800-1917, Steven A. Nathaniel

Masters Theses

This study examines patterns of efficiency in the poetry and theory of William Wordsworth, Hilda Doolittle, and other figures from the Modernist and Romantic periods. I begin by defining perfect efficiency as occurring when energy transforms, without loss, inside a closed energy system, and I offer perpetual motion machines as hypothetical examples of this impossible state. I then demonstrate the process of efficiency in William Wordsworth's poetry, which begins with circumlocutory poetic cycles but contracts into terse repetitions. Since technical efficiency is calculated by the formula output/input, poetry's subjectivity makes poetic efficiency difficult to measure. However, I suggest that repetitions …

"I Looked Here; I Looked There; Nowhere Could I See My Love." The Problem Of "Presence" In The Black Riders And Other Lines, Nat Gustafson-Sundell

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

Although the poems of The Black Riders and other lines, by Stephen Crane, have often been treated as if they are simple--easy to interpret and easy to categorize--these poems actually support a multiplicity of interpretations. The multiplicity of interpretations available in the poems informs the possibility of tracing a variety of interrelationships through the poetry. While a few previous scholars have treated the poems as if they are interrelated, the interrelationship of the poetry has not been explicitly and substantially addressed as a feature of the poetry. The poems, in fact, support a combinatorial complexity only previously hinted at in …

Speed And Resolution In The Age Of Technological Reproducibility, Shawn Taylor

Theses and Dissertations

The rate of acceleration of the biologic and synthetic world has for a while now, been in the process of exponentially speeding up, maxing out servers and landfills, merging with each other, destroying each other. The last prehistoric relics on Earth are absorbing the same oxygen, carbon dioxide and electronic waves in our biosphere as us. A degraded .jpeg enlarged to full screen on a Samsung 4K UHD HU8550 Series Smart TV - 85” Class (84.5” diag.). Within this composite ecology, the ancient limestone of the grand canyon competes with the iMax movie of itself, the production of Mac pros, …