Creative Writing Commons^™

Transit, Christopher Janke

Masters Theses

This written thesis, transit, accompanies an exhibition by the same name and serves to contextualize the exhibit. The written portion begins with an inquiry into the nature of the contextualization itself, questioning the nature of the relationship between the written thesis, the exhibit, and the University which explicitly requires and connects the two, especially the ways that the written word as granted authority through an institution of higher education might undermine the exhibit’s intent to provoke thought into other forms of knowledge and other avenues of legitimacy than those presented by this institution.

The thesis discusses the philosophic question sometimes …

Double/Cross: Erasure In Theory And Poetry, John Nyman

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation investigates the implications of overt textual erasure on literary and philosophical meaning, especially with reference to the poststructuralist phenomenological tradition culminating in the work of Jacques Derrida. Responding both to the emergence of “erasure poetry” as a recognizable genre of experimental literature and to the relative paucity of serious scholarship on Derrida’s “writing under erasure,” I focus on twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary and philosophical works in which visible evidence of erasure is an intended component of the finished (i.e., printed and disseminated) document. Erasure, I argue, performs a complex doubling or double/crossing of meaning according to two asymmetrically …

Introducing Godzilla To Marianne Moore's Octopus Of Ice At The Intersection Of Global Warming, Environmental Philosophy, And Poetry, David Seter

Dissertations, Masters Theses, Capstones, and Culminating Projects

This paper explores the question: how can a poet write an ecologically aware poem about global warming? Global warming impacts everything on earth, most visibly the glaciers melting away before our eyes. Adopting Aldo Leopold’s environmental philosophy of thinking like a mountain, the poet may describe the impact of global warming upon the mountain, glacier, flora and fauna, that form an interconnected web of life. A poem that thinks like a mountain already exists: Marianne Moore’s “An Octopus” (published in 1924), which takes its title from the system of glaciers (or octopus of ice) on Mt. Rainier. For a contemporary …

Experience Bobo Experience, Sara Smith

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

Experience Bobo Experience -by Sara Marie Smith (Artist Statements and Images of work)

Spring 2018-CSUMB Undergraduate Capstone Project/ Visual Public Arts Department

My Senior Capstone is about using inspirational wisdom from acknowledged sources to address the quandaries of our human experiences. I have chosen a cognitive clown, named Bobo, to investigate Henry David Thoreau, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Watts. Bobo, my character, goes on a journey of learning. Bobo is a line drawing, rendered in marker, with a circular head, two dot eyes, three puffs of hair with a clown smile and clown clothing. Experience Bobo Experience speaks to …

Now You See Me: A Black Feminist Autoethnographic Poetic Polemic Of Radical Reflexivity And Critical Arts-Based Inquiry, Myntha Anthym

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is an autoethnographic poetic illness narrative based on the author's year-long ordeal with unrelenting undertreated chronic pain. The project is grounded in the epistemological tradition of Black Feminist Thought and presented in alignment with the emergent methodological paradigm of critical arts-based inquiry. The purpose of the project is for the author to develop and articulate a radical reflexive praxis within the paradigm of critical arts-based inquiry while demonstrating the value of lived experience as a source of knowledge and poetry as a method of inquiry in revealing subjugated truths about the experiences of marginalized people. The dissertation lives …

Good Game, Greyory Blake

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis and its corresponding art installation, Lessons from Ziggy, attempts to deconstruct the variables prevalent within several complex systems, analyze their transformations, and propose a methodology for reasserting the soap box within the display pedestal. In this text, there are several key and specific examples of the transformation of various signifiers (i.e. media-bred fear’s transformation into a political tactic of surveillance, contemporary freneticism’s transformation into complacency, and community’s transformation into nationalism as a state weapon). In this essay, all of these concepts are contextualized within the exponential growth of new technologies. That is to say, all of these semiotic …

The Second Language: An Argument For The Superlative Authenticity Of Poetry Through The Complex Personal Relationships It Develops With Its Audiences By Way Of Truth In Metaphor, C Mandler

Senior Projects Spring 2018

Abstract: In this paper, I will argue that poetry allows for a kind of expression that is not found within other uses of language. This is because the poetic form is able to better lend itself to larger notions of not only truth, but also authenticity, which it achieves through the building of complex emotional engagements between a work of poetry and its audience. When discussing the authenticity of poetry, one’s personal connection to the work by way of metaphor is more truthful than the so-called literal truth one comes to when one reads something exactly as it is written—meaning …

Laminated Paint, Travis R. Austin

Theses and Dissertations

Though we may not perceive it, we are surrounded by material-in-flux. Inert materials degrade and the events that comprise our natural and social environments causally thread into a duration that unifies us in our incomprehension. Sounds reveal ever-present vibrations of the landscape: expressions of the flexuous ground on which we stand.

Work/Death, Of Each In Their Own, Micah H. Weber

Theses and Dissertations

Writings in support of my visual thesis, including some background, and bibliographic information: Oregon/Death/Animation/Vocation and the artist as an agent of potential.