Digital Commons Network^™

Olive In An Oak Grove: A Novel, Haley Quinton

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

Olive Delaney has not seen her dysfunctional family in seven years, but now she has to return to her childhood home in Louisiana because her father is dying. She is reunited with her simultaneously strict-but-absent parents, her twin brother, Hugo, with whom she was once close but has now grown apart, and her childhood best friend and possible lost love, Owen. Olive must learn how to be part of her family again while also dealing with the problems and family secrets of the past. The novella shuttles back and forth in time--every other chapter contains an event from Olive’s childhood …

The Preservation Of Identity: A Narrative Examination Of National Parks In Kentucky, Abigail Ponder

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

National parks are symbols of national identity. They tell the history of places—personal legacies and natural phenomena. My Capstone Experience/Thesis (CE/T) project for the Honors College at WKU features two stories that fuse fiction and non-fiction conventions to share the experiences of national parks in Kentucky. Currently, the National Park Service is celebrating its centennial anniversary at parks across the nation. First established in 1916 by President Woodrow Wilson, the national parks have become symbols of the quintessential American experience: serving as memorials to nature, to history, and to culture. As such, these stories that take place at Mammoth Cave …

What Keeps Me Going, Marco Ramirez

First-Gen Voices: Creative and Critical Narratives on the First-Generation College Experience

Marco Ramirez has made it halfway through his college career. It hasn’t been the easiest for him, but something has helped him to keep pushing forward. As he reflects on his life, Ramirez is reminded what that something is: his love for his family and his passion for theme parks.

Butterflies, Adinah Bolden

First-Gen Voices: Creative and Critical Narratives on the First-Generation College Experience

Adinah Bolden is a Los Angeles-based graduate of Loyola Marymount University. She is a pop culture and history loving cynic who has overcome adversity in many matters to work toward leading a fulfilling and exciting post-graduate life. Like many young adults, Bolden has struggled with labels, identity, and personal growth, which she addresses in this narrative. On this First To Go Abroad trip to the Dominican Republic, she deeply identified with the symbol of the butterfly, which represents an opposition to political tyranny, racial imperialism, and national injustice.

Tangled Roots, Bittersweet Exposure, Chase Clow

The Goose

Accompanied by tree portraits, this personal narrative reflects upon the intersecting histories between the indigenous peoples of Marin County (north of San Francisco, CA) and the author, who is Euro-American, while contemplating the changing relationship to their shared woodland, the effects of colonization, and possibilities for healing.

Human Computer Interaction And Data Visualization, Olivia Hsieh

Pop Culture Intersections

In 2013, SINTEF cited that 90% of the world’s data had been created over the past two years.1 With the onset of Big Data, the ability to analyze data at a rate directly proportional to its collection becomes quite near impossible, albeit nonetheless important. In “Play With Data – An Exploration of Play Analytics and Its Effect on Player Experiences,” Ben Medler explains its pertinence: “Data can be given a different context through relating it to other data. A relation informs someone of how data can be correlated or combined with other data.”

Humberto: The Fire Next Time, John David Fournie

Theses

“The Fire Next Time” is the opening section of a novel, Humberto, that tells the story of a group of people working at a biomedical engineering firm in St. Louis. The section follows Charles, a well-respected employee and leader whose marriage is slowly disintegrating. In the first chapter, a larger-than-life employee, the Priest, joins the company. He befriends Charles while working closely with him. The Priest, however, begins an affair with Charles’ wife, Linda. Charles is put in a difficult position: how should he work with a man he both hates and admires? As Charles struggles with this dilemma, a …

Visual Detail And Its Effects On Character Attachment In Video Games, Carl Sommer

Open Access Theses

The video game industry has been experiencing a trend toward independent game developers making their own games, as well as large companies opening smaller divisions to work on smaller games. This can be looked at from a purely financial perspective, given that smaller games will inevitably consume a smaller budget; however, there is also good reason to believe there can be substantial creative benefits to companies indulging in this trend. This research is concerned with the effect that visual detail can have on a players emotional attachment to characters in video games-otherwise known as character attachment. While intuition may often …

The Skinny House, Leo August Jilk

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The title of my thesis is The Skinny House, a phrase which might indicate: 1) The body of a human or other animal, 2) A coffin or grave, and 3) A residence in Mamaroneck, New York built of recycled materials (e.g. railroad ties and a chicken coop) by an African-American carpenter named Nathan T. Seely in 1932. Seely and his brother ran a business that thrived for several years prior to the Great Depression, catering specifically to Southern blacks moving north. While only a few pages of my thesis are directly concerned with the Mamaroneck residence and its social implications, …

The Inversion Layer: Essays, Benjamin W. Kinney

All NMU Master's Theses

This essay collection examines the ways in which places with rich histories exist through time. Five sites are examined, four of them in the Upper Peninsula and one of them in the Lower Peninsula of Michigan. The sites in “The Best Souvenir” and “The Cloud Chamber” are official museums, the site in “Comfort in Buying Things” is an active mall, the site in “The Inversion Layer” is a tourist destination, and the site in “A Beautiful Piece of Nowhere” has no official memorial. All of these essays incorporate research but are grounded mostly in the author’s experiences at his visits …

Paranormal Orgy, Cameron M. Contois

All NMU Master's Theses

Paranormal Orgy is a novel length work that explores a world full of the paranormal— demons and vampires and aliens— and how some very real, very flawed characters get by in the face of these monsters. Many different points of view are utilized in this work, beginning with the point of view of a 15-year-old girl who may or may not be possessed. Haunted by the prospect of growing up, this girl attempts to live and love in the world of the strange. Other point of views explored include that of an addict, an estranged daughter, a strict grandmother, and …

Ghost, Moving, Andrea Wuorenmaa

All NMU Master's Theses

This collection of creative nonfiction essays weaves a journey through local history, genealogy, physical landscape, and personal memoir. The essays therein investigate the past through the lens of the present, and the present as informed by the past. Written from a first person perspective, many of the essays directly address individuals or time periods long gone, while all of them are constructed with the memory, research, and imagination of the author.

Though this collection is rooted in history, it also relies on the metaphysical to create a vision of the past. Intangible themes—life, death, a farewell to things and people …

18 Dorset Ct., Allison Catherine Campbell

Dissertations

The following poems and essays were completed by the author between October 2012 and April 2016.

When Winter Causes Loss: Surviving A Decade Of Pain, Sharon Vanice Bealer

Theses and Dissertations

I struggled with pain and depression for approximately ten years after my mother’s death from cervical cancer at age forty-three. I felt anxious, hopeless, and pessimistic, along with guilt, shame, and overall worthlessness. I endured these maladies for almost ten years—until Bethany, Ingrid, Liza, and Pam helped me to overcome them through experiential role modeling and loving kindness. While all the stories in this book are true, names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of the people involved. In some cases, events have been compressed and occasionally embroidered. Some parts have also been changed to varying …

Alone In The Crowd: Appropriated Text And Subjectivity In The Work Of Rirkrit Tiravanija, Liz Linden

Faculty Publications

The practice of Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija is perhaps the best-known exemplar of relational aesthetics, a distinction first made by Nicholas Bourriaud and affirmed in the writings of many subsequent art critics; but the critical focus on the interactive aspect of his works has tended to rely on utopian modes of community engagement, which ignore Tiravanija's strategic deployment of relational, interactive structures to implicate the viewer, publicly, in problematic political positions. Tiravanija commonly uses appropriation in his artworks as a way of exposing viewer's biases and this paper focuses specifically on his use of appropriated text to explore divided subjectivities …

The Cutman, Christopher S. Koslowski

Theses and Dissertations

In this novel, professional wrestler Domingo Contreras coaches his sister, Pilar, on the eve of her tryout with Mid-Coast Championship Wrestling, a small federation based in Charlotte, North Carolina. While facing dilemmas concerning his identity inside and outside the ring, Domingo comes to realize that the business which is gradually destroying him will consume his sister at an even more terrifying rate.

Strike-Slip, Amanda Mitchell

Theses and Dissertations

strike-slip is a work of poetry in which a female speaker seeks answers for a violent past she is just beginning to unravel. By revisiting and reconsidering scenes from girlhood, including the broken objects and split bodies she encountered in the Appalachian wilderness she grew up in and around, she attempts to gain insight into a present state of selfhood that continues to elude her. The poems here come together to conduct an excavation—each memory is an old bone from which the speaker must carefully brush the dust away until she can figure out something about the larger thing it …

Oy, It's Super Yenta, Or Kvetch Me If You Can, Marleen S. Barr

Publications and Research

This is a humorous short story by Marleen S. Barr.

The Tribal Blues, Josh Dunn

The Anthology

A poem

Fossils In Wet Cement, Lora Caldwell

The Anthology

A poem

Adult Food, Lindsey Monroe

The Anthology

A prose story

Memories Like Muscadine Vines, Loren Mixon

The Anthology

A poem

Full Issue, The Anthology

The Anthology

This is the entirety of the 2014 Winthrop Anthology issue.

Golden Fantasy: An Examination Of Generic & Literary Fantasy In Popular Writing, Zechariah James Morrison

Honors Projects

This essay attempts to analyze critical theory concerning the division between generic fantasy fiction and higher fantasy literature. In examining how these two different types of fantasy writing are identified by popular criticism, the space in-between is defined and labeled "golden fantasy". This kind of fantasy is identified by maintaining a balance between subversive originality, and derivative reproduction, and is generally popular among consumers and academics as a source of both entertainment and scholarly research. The essay is then followed by 3 original chapters by the essay writer, in an attempt to demonstrate some of the elements of golden fantasy …

Westview: Vol. 32, Iss. 2 (Summer/Fall 2016)

Westview

No abstract provided.

La Folie Comme Aliénation Et Dissidence Chez Mongo Beti Et V.Y. Mudimbe, Florian Alix

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

In Le pauvre Christ de Bomba and Entre les eaux, the narrator’s evolution seems a kind of madness, as Ambroise Kom defined it: a process of social exclusion based on alienation because of norms told by dominant discourses. Individuals can’t find their right place in front of “languages in madness” which rule the colonial thought and hide part of reality. Therefore novel becomes a space where individual madness appears as a dissidence against dominant discourses.

J4ck Mered34th, Edgar Hernandez

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

ESCRIBO ERGO SUM is an analysis of my writing methods, and it seeks to understand the meaning and purpose behind my novel, J4CK MERED34TH. Through this explorative piece, I create parallels between my own life and my work in order to show a much closer history and context for the novel. In it, I ultimately conclude the importance of identity and its acceptance in my writing process.

J4CK MERED34TH follows 19-year-old gamer and hacker Jack Meredith in a near distant future in which virtual reality has been achieved. After a small routine job, someone breaks Jack’s security and steals his …

Vs, Bolin Jue

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

VS is a poetic exercise in rhyme and rhythm. An exercise attempting to camouflage ideas in humor, in song, in lyrical overtures, and in social media pop culture lingo to highlight the damaging effects technology and social media have on the human relationship with the earth. VS is a mirror, is an attempt to selfie the world we have lost touch with by contemplating where our role as caretakers for our planet lies. Through varying poetic forms, VS displays and critiques the limited perspective forced upon us when we socialize and experience life solely through phones and screens.

In this …

A Meditation On I, We, And Consciousness In "Only We Can Pull", Allyson Elizabeth Jeffredo

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

In a society focused on the individual, how is community formed? As individuals predisposed to the built-in barrier of our body, our skin, how do we mediate between the self and the external? During this mediation on the barriers between our body, ourselves, and the outside world, how is consciousness simultaneously conflicted and built upon? What does it mean to be alive, to be a complex individual surrounded by a multitude of complex individuals? Can we, as a society, learn to focus balance the community and the individual? ONLY WE CAN PULL attempts to answer these questions through a series …

The American Nightmare: Land Of The Incarcerated, Jamara Bernard

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

A collection of poems focusing on the mass incarceration of African-American men and how the prison industrial complex is designed to legally exploit prisoners specifically for profits. Along with a reflective essay about the history of legal discrimination and the creative process by which the poems were created. Then how it ties in with the capstone course theme of race, gender, class, feminist theory, and social justice.