Nonfiction Commons^™

Daughterly Narratives In Search Of Voice: Fadwa Tuqan, Latifa Al-Zayyat, And Samar Attar, Rania Bedeir

Theses and Dissertations

A myriad of pressures and struggles affect Arab women as they are coming of age due to the familial and societal constructs they face. As daughters, they yearn for a voice amidst a plethora of generational boundaries, transmissions, and ideals. The intricacy of the psychological and interconnected structural factors is augmented by their gender in societies that are motivated, and often governed by, the implications of gender roles. While multiple layers of influence such as familial and sociocultural institutions affect how consciousness is formed, generational transmission, through the maternal figure, is paramount. Daughters, therefore, cannot narrate their personal stories without …

Personas, Issue 1, 2023, Jonathan Maiullo

Personas: Multilingual Creative Writing Journal

This multilingual creative writing journal from the College of the Redwoods is intended to advance the conversation of multilingualism. Primarily because there is a great deal to be communicated on the subject which has gone under-considered or consigned to the realm of graded writing. Hopefully, in reading this journal, you will find something communicated to you that shifts your understanding and inspires you to (re)examine your perception of culture and language. We hope that you’ll then write something on the subject to share with us for the next issue which will continue to advance this conversation. -Editor, Jonathan Maiullo

A Review Of Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons From Marine Mammals, Nadia G. Dresscher-Lambertus

Feminist Pedagogy

No abstract provided.

Surrender No. 40, Ken Wilson

The Goose

In June 2016, I made an improvised pilgrimage on foot through the Haldimand Tract in southwestern Ontario, the territory deeded to the Haudensaunee in 1784 and mostly stolen back by settlers since then. I grew up in Brantford, a city in the Haldimand Tract, ignorant of the history of the area. When I learned about that history, I decided to walk through the Tract as a way of understanding, physically, the scale of the land theft that had occurred, a theft that, as a settler, I had benefitted from. “Surrender No. 40” is an account of that pilgrimage.

Broken, Madison N. Crinklaw

Toyon: Multilingual Literary Magazine

It has appeared nowhere else.

Making Then Meaning, Ben Denzer

Masters Theses

This is an artist talk contained within a book. It is 816 pages and 49 minutes long. Closed captions run across the spreads. A video of this talk can be watched on bendenzer.com/making-then-meaning

At RISD, I’ve been prompted to expand the scope and tools of my practice and to reflect on questions of meaning in my work.

I spend my days making things, but I’ve never really had good answers to questions of why I make the things I make, or what their meaning is. I don’t think there are simple answers to these questions.

I think meaning comes from …

How To Grow Blurry: Poems, Nathaniel Metz

Canterbury Scholars

In this collection of poems, Nathan D. Metz explores the distance between the word for a thing and the touch or feeling of a thing. Using a variety of forms both established and innovative, as well as free verse and ekphrastic response, these poems are a celebration of art, color, and the sounds of words. After the collection is a series of poems translated both from the original Japanese and Haitian Creole.

Becoming George Lucas: From Avant-Garde, Auteur, Independent Artist To Studio Executive, Ryan Thompson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Because of the unprecedented popularity of Star Wars, George Lucas, the creator of the multi-media franchise, is one of the most well-known filmmakers in history. What makes Lucas’s relationship with Star Wars unique is that because the franchise has continually been exploited rather than left as a single unchanging, static text, its artistic value, along with Lucas’s legacy, is in constant flux and is often misunderstood. In other words, depending on Star Wars’s position in the public zeitgeist at a given time, Lucas is either revered, detested, or considered incompetent as a filmmaker. While there is no denying …

Babel, Daniel Horowitz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis is a series of three memoiristic essays around the vortex of identity. The first is an exploration of how childhood overmedication split the continuity of the author’s self-conception. The second traces the slipperiness of Jewish and Queer identifications detailing their synthesis in the klezmer revival in New York City in late 1980s and early 90s. The third is a polyphonic narration of the recovery of a lost klezmer’s life story in the face of the silence of time and slaughter.

Haunted Homelands: Mary Hunter Austin's Search For Belonging In California's Central Valley, Aimee M. Maddalena

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

From childhood, Mary Hunter Austin resisted the social conformity expected of a young girl in 1850’s Carlinville, Illinois. Instead, causing her mother to “shed tears of vexation,” she was outspoken, opinionated, and read the “wrong” books, which, according to her mother, “was what made you queer so that people didn’t like you.” Young Mary had a rich inner life and was drawn in a spiritual, mystical way to the minutiae of the natural world. Also, she questioned the strict social structure that caused her mother to be outcast as a widow, while, at the same time, young women were beginning …

The Personal And The Planetal: Essaying The Ecological, Eric Dean Wilson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“The Personal and the Planetal: Essaying the Ecological” investigates contemporary American personal essays in an environmental mode in order to illuminate the boundaries between “self” and “planet.” It does so with an eye toward ecological devastation—namely, the violent effects of global warming—because I sense that thinking about the essay can help us better understand the ethical problems of climate change. Part of our climate crisis is a failure to recognize the boundaries of the personal and what I call the “planetal” (in an attempt to defamiliarize it from the more common “planetary”). Using a method that I call “the ecological …

Santa Clara Review, Vol. 110, No. 2, Santa Clara University

Santa Clara Review

No abstract provided.

Re-Membering The Living Earth: A Year In Rural Sri Lanka, Samuel C. King

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

The following thesis tells the story of my year in rural Sri Lanka. After college, I traveled from suburban New York to the highlands of the island country with the hopes of writing an ethnography on agrarian Buddhism. I soon realized, however, that I was not just embarking on an academic project, but an inner journey to explore ways of being that had been lost in the modern culture I had known. My narrative recounts how immersion in a rice cultivating village deepened my sense for what it means to live in reciprocity with the more-than-human world—a world of plants, …

Minnesota Fishing Regulations, Karissa Wehri

Floodwall Magazine

Winner of the 2023 Gladys Boen Scholarship

Histrionicus Histrionicus Histrionicus: Common Wild Ducks And Storytelling Animals, Kira Symington

Floodwall Magazine

No abstract provided.

Slice Of Life, Melanie Schindler

Floodwall Magazine

No abstract provided.

I Do Not Understand Time., Jaden Rose

Floodwall Magazine

Runner-up for the 2023 Gladys Boen Scholarship

The Birds, Jaden Rose

Floodwall Magazine

Runner-up for the 2023 Gladys Boen Scholarship

Stars, Jaden Rose

Floodwall Magazine

Runner-up for the 2023 Gladys Boen Scholarship

Song(S) Of Myself, Aubrey Roemmich

Floodwall Magazine

No abstract provided.