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The Resurrection Of Nora O'Brien, Abigail Elizabeth Benson

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

There is a cave, hidden in the hills, that brings the dead back to life. Its power is the driving force behind the blood feud between the Walshes and the O’Briens that lasts for generations. Jeremiah Walsh, a young boy growing up just after the civil war, is entrusted with the location of the cave and its secrets. But when he kills to protect his family legacy, he is stricken with guilt and questions his loyalties. His story parallels Nora O’Brien’s, a teenage girl who moves to the Ozarks with her family after the death of her grandfather. As she …

Universe Of Things: A Human Presentation Of Food-For-Thought., Madeline Halpern

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

I present this statement under three loose categories: People, Objects and their Environment. I consider People as human, Objects as art objects, domestic objects, and food, and Environment as the shared space of the former groups. Food directs this statement as I present each concept and creative process as a metaphorical dish. Material exploration carried me from a direct practice of reorienting acrylic paint and questioning object functionality through personified sculptures into theoretical thesis work in which I use interpersonal relations and the idea of consumption to translate tactile, gustatory and olfactory sensations into digital film. In this meal I …

Promethia 2018-19

Promethia

No abstract provided.

Things That Happened, Christian Chase

Senior Theses

This creative writing thesis contains a collection of short stories by Christian Chase.

• A Whole Lot of Nothing
• Grand Artistic Vision
• Architecture
• Hanging Around
• Silent Life
• A Special Dread
• Snowbound

Decolonizing Playwriting Through Indigenous Ceremonial Performances, Jay B. Muskett

Theatre & Dance ETDs

This dissertation attempts to express the importance of storytelling within the Indigenous Theater framework. It does so by first analyzing the progression of the writer’s unique upbringing and analyzing the influences of story upon an indigenous identity. I will also attempt to describe the aesthetics of Native Theater along two lines of methodology which includes praxis described and developed by Hanay Geiogamah and Rolland Meinholtz. I will also explain how the script 1n2ian tries to follow those concepts of Native Theater to create a ceremonial performance that uses a blending of both methodologies.

Slotus, Alison F. Huntley, Michael F.X. Daley

Honors Thesis

When a paranoid, image-obsessed woman becomes Second Lady of the United States, she will protect herself and her family from the (often non-existent) eyes of the press no matter what - despite her three step-children’s protests.

Eulogy, Kim T. Allison

Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Particular to the three short stories in Eulogyis the importance of place, as they are set in the fictional location of Potter’s Island, which is based on my childhood sense of Florida.Contradictions, complications, and disappointments can be uniquely tied to a sense of place. My own parents and grandparents moved to Florida when I was three years old, but where they lived, how they lived and worked, and what dreams they pursued was only partially an immigrant’s story of wanting a better life.

The past has weight—a weight that must be dealt with, for real people, and for …

Mezze: A Short Story Collection-In-Progress, Leata Thomas

Master of Arts in Professional Writing Capstones

"Mezze" is a middle-eastern custom similar to "tea" in the United Kingdom or "happy hour" in the United States. A variety of little foods for snacking at the end of the day. My Capstone offers a variety of short stories for one's reading pleasure.What I like about fiction writing is the guilt free, guileless freedom to tell a little lie and then grow it into a really big one! My sole purpose as a fiction is to entertain. the reader may smile or chuckle. I certainly hope that one's heart will be lighter and that one will feel a bit …

The One, But Not The Only, Lauren Durham

Line by Line: A Journal of Beginning Student Writing

For this particular assignment, we had to reconstruct the main points that Plotinus, an ancient philosopher and educator, presents in his work titled the Enneads. In order to reorganize and retell his elaborate ideas appropriately, we had to come to understand the text in a way that would make our own interpretations easy to convey to audiences. In addition to reconstructing the Enneads, a comparison between a previously read creation story and Plotinus's ideas had to be made. After numerous in-class discussions, I established a logical order to present Plotinus's various cosmological entities. I felt that beginning with the …

“Flowing Along The Wall”: Anarcha-Feminist Bioethics And Resistance In Octavia E. Butler’S Dawn 2019., Theresa Mendez

Master's Theses

Science fiction (sf) texts conversant with the temporal play between past, present, and future push readers to imagine the extremes of human and environmental existence, interaction, and potential. Simultaneously, despite the sf genre’s tendency to traffic in extremes, these texts provoke readers to consider the ways in which these imagined worlds are grounded in history as well as in the contemporary social moment. As Donna Haraway has argued, “the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion” (306). This illusory boundary must continue to be traversed in order to consider how sf literatures, particularly those which imagine …

Posthuman And Alien Breeding: The Implications Of Cybersex In Octavia Butler’S Dawn 2019., Elizabeth Rutkowski

Master's Theses

Speculative science fiction affords new ways for authors to represent social problems of the modern day in an apocalyptic manner. Authors such as Octavia Butler use science fiction to analyze social injustices revolving around race, gender, and sexuality. Throughout her novel Dawn, Butler uses the posthuman to represent minority groups in the late twentieth century. The posthuman represents those who have moved from humanity towards a new opportunity that is mixed with the potential for struggle. 1 As demonstrated through Butler’s work posthumanism blurs the lines between binaries such as male / female, straight / gay, and consensual / nonconsensual …

Probably Nothing To Worry About, Jennifer Bravo

Dissertations

These are (allegedly) poems.

The Promethean, Volume 27, Blue Apocalypse, 2019, English Department, Concordia University-Portland

The Promethean

Like any other, this past year was full of many hard lessons that were difficult to swallow. It's easy to feel like the world is falling apart sometimes, or worse, that you're alone in the devastation. However, remember that when it feels like the end of the world, you will find sanctuary in your community, your loved ones, your passions, and in yourself.

It is my greatest hope that you also will find sanctuary throughout these pages, a collection of our voices coming together to create something beautiful.

This issue is dedicated to the College of Arts & Sciences. In …

Existentialmd.Com: Building Towards An Embodied Internet Aesthetic, Natasha Ochshorn

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

ExistentialMD.com is a website that aims to treat the body as an emotional and social subject in an online space that is purposefully bodied and fleshy. The website contrasts original creative nonfiction essays with a formal structure that alludes to the medical website WebMD. Mimicking WebMD’s symptom checker, which asks users to locate their discomfort with increasing specificity before suggesting conditions they might be suffering from, ExistentialMD uses a similar structure to yield results that are more exploratory than diagnostic, and which envision the body as a site of experience and emotionality. Form and content combine to create an …

1999 Aaa Jrpg Quality And How A 2019 Indie-Game Developer Can Meet It, Kailynn Haskell-Harbert

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

This paper is a delve into 1999 JRPG AAA video games and how small developers can make something of similar quality with contemporary technology. This is explored by using Final Fantasy VIII and Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete as a 1999 AAA standard, then comparing that standard to modern indie-games as well as my own experience in indie-game development. The ultimate goal of the paper is to prove that small indie-game studios can create 1999 AAA quality JRPGs with relatively minimal investment.

This To Which We've Come., Holly Tabor

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This collection of works explores the linkages between moments, the connective thread that accumulates over time to create for each of us a unique present. The title, “This to Which We’ve Come,” attempts to convey that each moment is a point of arrival colored by the smallest of temporal fibers, our most interior histories that stretch and bend and fold back onto themselves when the present forces us into action, or inaction. Through these characters and their stories, I attempt to examine that moment of arrival. A secondary thread explored in this collection is the idea that humans are still …

H.E.L.P : A Creative Exercise In Feminism And The Buddy Comedy., Bayne M. Lutz

College of Arts & Sciences Senior Theses

This screenplay attempts to reconcile the author's confusion on how to best enact social progress by examining and satirizing several competing feminist movements. Set in an off-kilter Los Angeles, the comedy tracks Alivia, a recent PhD grad who cannot leverage her education toward finding a job. In desperation, she joins a radical organization called the H.E.L.P. (Heroines for the Elimination of Loathsome Professors), which encourages her to take matters into her own hands.

Inverting tropes from buddy comedies, cop-shows, ghost stories, and Bond movies, the screenplay grapples with how women are meant to break the glass ceiling and it may …

Literal Dope, Frank Johnson

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Literal Dope draws from the rich literary traditions of hip-hop and the broader umbrella of Black American art traditions. It seems to me that perhaps the best way to honor the language which raised me, taught me, and literally saved my life is to explore it, praise it, weaponize it when necessary, and deploy it as a tool for Black liberation. The work’s theory is deeply informed by bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Lucille Clifton, and a number of Black feminist artists. The world needs Black folks—especially Black men—who know love; who know how to love each other and know they …

Forget Me Not & Other Stories, Zach Wilson

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

My thesis manuscript Forget Me Not & Other Stories is composed of several short stories and the first section of a novel. The first drafts of these stories were written during my first and second years in the program while my primary focus this semester has been the novel. I believe this thesis reflects my growth as both a writer and critical reader of fiction as a result of my time here. Much of the work included here began as assignments for a creative class, including an imitation of Marilyn Robinson’s’ Gilead written for Professor Doug Unger’s Forms of Fiction. …

Empire And Other Stories From The Black Rock, Alex Zenz

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This thesis is a collection of stories submitted as required by the University of Nevada, Las Vegas for completion of the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing. These short pieces of fiction are narrated by women from a small town on the edge of the Black Rock Desert in the northern part of the state of Nevada as they engage with outsiders passing through, interact with the harsh expanses of wilderness surrounding their home, and contend with the changing economic landscape of the area.

One Night At The Ash Box, Katherine Vieck

A Midwestern Review: A Magazine of the Arts and Issues at DePauw University

No abstract provided.

Child Protection, Caroline Deluca

Gandy Dancer Archives

No abstract provided.

Last Prayer To Mack Wolford, Lara Elmayan

Gandy Dancer Archives

No abstract provided.

The Natural Mother Of The Child, Krys Belc

All NMU Master's Theses

The Natural Mother of the Child is a memoir-in-essays about Belc’s experiences as a transmasculine birth parent. These essays use text and images to explore parenting on the margins of both motherhood and fatherhood. They also examine the ways in which legal and identity documents are limiting in their ability to describe gender and family. Topics explored include pregnancy, birth, lactation, masculinity, top surgery, medical transition, the meaning of biological relationships between parents and children, and microaggressions against transgender people.

Breaking Free From The Snake Strangling America, Kate Marjorie Shapiro

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Breaking Free from the Snake Strangling America is a novel about the narratives of violence. It tells the story of Audrey Bishop and her investigation into her brother’s death at a mass shooting.

In the months following the shooting Audrey is confronted with various explanations of violence from her estranged parents, journalists, and televised sensationalism. She is at a loss for how to settle her own grief when the truth is stretched in every direction.

When Audrey is mysteriously sent Matthew’s journals, she is confronted with a new narrative, she sets off on a journey to find out the real …

The Ruins Of Doves, Mariah Tahera Yusofzei

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The Ruins of Doves is a collection of 40 poems that attempts to access the conversational space for the poet’s encounters with her environment, and correspondingly, with the divine. Keeping with this sentiment, each poem embodies a little song or prayer, where the poem itself acts as a gateway in attempting to understand the divine. Amid the quietness in the space of the poem is where the poet explores her relationship with the divine. An understanding of community, domestic love, and intimacy share a point of arrival where many of the poems begin. Each poem is an accumulation and a …

The Blackbird Blood, Danielle Birnell

Theses and Dissertations

The Blackbird Blood is a novella length piece of young adult fiction. The piece not only includes themes dealing with coming of age such as love, complexities of relationships, and identity, but also touches on issues dealing with race and privilege. This coming of age novella explores these themes through the lens of teen characters navigating life on a military base in a country destroyed by war.

Same Air: Human Relationships In Playwriting, Nicole Cardenas

Theses and Dissertations

The culmination of the creative work and its introduction focus on human relationships, friendships, and the interactions and dynamics of individuals with traumatic experiences. The one act play explores how a secret can strain a group of friends, causing them to create their own realities to cope with the betrayal and guilt cultivated throughout time.

To reach my conclusions, I drew inspiration from various works, playwrights, and the words of other writers. My work is meant to showcase how fragile and resilient friendships are when faced with misunderstanding and lies.

A Citrus Wildfire, Mark Anthony Lopez

Theses and Dissertations

An American Dream forged by greed. A family caught in the middle of a race war. A young boy trying to learn how to be a man. A Citrus Wildfire is a fiction novella that tells the story of a Mexican family struggling to survive in the Rio Grande Valley after their only source of income burns down, and the lengths they must go to in order to get the life they were promised.

A small preface from the author proceeds the work. This novella is inspired by many different authors and educators, as well as the Rio Grande Valley …

First Set, Alfonso Zapata

Master's Theses

First Set is a collection of poetry by Alfonso Zapata, with poems contained therein from as long ago as 2015. This thesis and project examines art, especially music, and its effects on memory and emotion. The world that these poems explicate is charged with passion and drive, spurred on by the continuous exposure to art in its characters both fictional and autobiographical. The goal of these writings is not just to portray how people can be affected by art, but to give art its own agency. In the poetry’s efforts to demystify the subject of art, art becomes its own …