Digital Commons Network^™

Generational Gap: Tales From A Vaquero Fracasado, Shawn Michael Gonzalez

Theses and Dissertations

Mexican American culture holds a strong grasp in the roots of South Texas. The proud Latino heritage is at the forefront of The Valley’s metaphorical cover page. Naturally, with such strong cultural influence comes adaptions of antiqued ways of living and the morality of a dying generation which is slowly losing their stronghold on the throats of the youth. The elders are used to a specific, and sometimes socially problematic, lifestyle that includes machismo, patriarchal sovereignty, and gender based roles that are fitting to a specific generational expectation.

This collection of writing aims to highlight the differences between the old …

South Texas Elegy: Life During A Global Pandemic, Brianna Bullion

Theses and Dissertations

South Texas Elegy: Life During a Global Pandemic highlights the narrator’s experience with loss and grief during the coronavirus pandemic, which started in early 2020. This piece is written from the perspective of a narrator living in the Rio Grande Valley, which is in the southmost region of Texas.

This memoir contains thirteen chapters, which discuss deaths of close friends and family members, periods of waiting which occurred in between deaths and updates on the coronavirus, and the narrator’s reflection at the end of the piece. This memoir is a tribute to lost loved ones and an account of an …

Flowers For The Dead, Joaquin Castillo Jr.

Theses and Dissertations

This collection of poetry and photography is a practice in creating a multimodal work that gives equal weight to each medium. These are presented as three sections, Mictlān, Kingdom of the Sun, and Old 83; for the purpose of this manuscript, they are in reverse chronological order. The first two sections use the trials of Mictlān as a narrative throughline to explore language, displacement, and the loss and mourning of indigenous identity. These pieces are a criticism against the systemic issues and institutional violence that contribute to the ongoing disenfranchisement of borderlands communities and people. The third section is more …

A Thin Line Or Intimations Of Violence, Saul A. Rodriguez

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is meant to be an honest discussion about the state of literature from the perspective of a student. Each chapter deals with a different aspect of writing, whether it be putting pen to paper, garnering sufficient experience to achieve verisimilitude, or dealing with critique. Interspersed between the essays are fiction vignettes.

The nonfiction aspects of this body of work are inspired by the voices of philosophers and traditional essayists alike: people such as Fyodor Dostoevsky, T.S. Eliot, Aristotle, D.H. Lawrence, Henry Adams, and Ralph Ellison. The topic of liminality regarding culture and migration is also addressed, mainly through …

Terrence Loves You, Quentin Dakota Steadman

English Theses & Dissertations

TERRENCE LOVES YOU is a novel that highlights the queer, working-class South and the lifelong navigation between past trauma and present adversity - how these upheavals nourish a lifelong resignation for the future, convincing us we have no control over Fate.

In stories irrational as they are visceral, we follow Damian as he experiences the world on the heels of his transient and independent mother. From the backwoods of Kentucky to a nightmarish carnival, from a guitar store heist to the criminal underworld of Music City U.S.A., Damian is left stumbling behind, bearing witness to a disfigured love. When Damian …

Coalescing Pedagogies: Creative Writing And The Esl Composition Classroom, Kariana Anderson

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

I have proposed an intersectional pedagogy between second language acquisition (SLA), creative writing principles, and translingual composition classroom pedagogy. The purpose of this paper was to demonstrate a need for a comprehensive, creative writing-based composition class by integrating existing research ideas, introducing new activities and assignments, and demonstrating how these pedagogies that were once considered distinct can be bridged together to develop more competent and engaged learners and users of English. In the first section of this thesis, I presented an in-depth review of each theoretical framework: translingual composition pedagogy, creative writing philosophies and educational applications, and Teaching English as …

House Of Grief, Megan Eralie

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

This collection of essays examines how I house the grief for the losses of my religion and my grandfather. My first essay, “Body of Feathers,” looks at my body as a house of shame and how I transformed my body into something that could be mine instead. It explores a series of moments from my life where I felt disconnected from my body, usually because of rules or expectations set by someone other than me. In the essay, I move from feeling like I had no control of my body, to taking back control and experiencing my body as mine …

The Consumption Problem, Caelan (Ellie) Davis

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

No abstract provided.

The Black Testament: A Portrait Of Female Genealogy In The African Diaspora, Raven Mcshan

Graduate Theses and Dissertations (2019 - present)

The Black Testament: A Portrait of Genealogy in the African Diaspora is a hybrid work of creative nonfiction and poetry. These pieces are based on my genealogical research into my family history. The collection traces from my discoveries in the present time back through my lived experiences, the lives of my relatives, and the lives of my ancestors. The subject of the work focuses on the women in my family and the various influences they have had in my life. The collection grapples with themes such as black womanhood, diasporic existence, and complex heritage. The traveling back of genealogical research …

A Screenplay With Critical Preface: 5150 Tarot Canyon, Jacob B. Phillips

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

5150 Tarot Canyon—a screenplay/dreamplay—anonymous twenty something, X, has left a deadend job, spent savings, and gone, in a last-ditch effort to follow a dream, to art school (in the middle of the desert and a pandemic) but struggles to cope once there with high stress and heavy deadlines. Exhaustion, fear, and loneliness begin to creep in—and, along with them, a stranger, a Walking Sam (possibly X’s double) always at a distance, but never far away. X can’t be sure, but it’s almost like someone’s started stalking them. X tries to ignore it, tries to focus, to grow—but things aren’t coming …

I Lie Awake, Pauline Juliet Ku

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Maggie Kim is a Korean American girl coming of age in Chicago and San Jose before moving to Pasadena, CA to study Biology at Caltech. Her struggles with her own sexuality, immediate family, growing up in an abusive church, traumatic memories and hallucinations and delusions make for a riveting read that validates her personal experience through trauma, stigma, and mental illness in the first-person point of view.

Naturally: Memory In Verse, Heather L. Drouse

English Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis is a collection of free verse poetry that I have written that share a common theme of nature and family. This is a creative work that explores my personal memories and the feelings associated with them with the intention to spread joy and cause readers to reflect upon similar experiences they might have had as children. It consists of four major sections -- mother, father, love, and bridges -- and 18 poems, with "love" having 7 minor sections.

The Body Seeking Magnificence, Taylor Franson Thiel

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This thesis focuses on how my time as a college athlete, my relationship with my mother, and my experience of an abusive relationship have intersected to impact my personal relationship with my body as I have fluctuated between trying to make it perfect, trying to ruin it, and trying to love it. The collection of poems examines how these forces collided in various ways to change how I thought about myself and my identity. After dealing with the idealized version of what a college athlete should look like and act like, inherited trauma from a mother, and trauma from a …

At Least Eight Poems, Stone Mcdonald

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

This reflective essay displays the super thematic theme that's clearly present on this project. It is at least eight poems, and you cannot dispute that claim. This project clearly was made to satisfy those college requirements, but I will admit that its theme is merely the theme of Stone. It is a sample of my perception, a slippery path that directs readers into my creative process and brisk way of thinking. If you ever get confused about what you’re reading, just remember, it all falls under the theme of stone; the rock without surface, clearly with depth. It’s a theme …

Derailed Fortunes: California's Forgotten Railroad, Alexis Depaolis

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

At a mahogany bar in Collins Saloon of San Francisco’s Montgomery Street, a successful businessman James G. Fair traced a trail of water droplets for his partner Alfred E. Davis to create the map of a visionary rail line soon to be known as the South Pacific Coast. Using historical records and photographs compiled by a selection of local authors and historians, this non-fiction retelling of Davis’ experience highlights the tribulations and triumphs of the most successful narrow gauge line in California history in order to share a largely forgotten but crucial aspect of local industrial archeology, as well as …

The Pinocchio Boy: A Collection Of Queer Creative Written Work, Lucas Olvera

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

The Pinocchio Boy is a series of short stories/memoirs and poems about my experiences as a Transgender and Gay man. Structured in five parts, I explore my childhood, young adulthood, and adulthood. My collection offers me an insight into what made me who I am today. There are drastic tonal shifts between the poem segments and the memoirs, I intended to act as the narrator of my story in which the poems and dialogue act as the characters in motion and the memoirs as my direct narration. A tongue-in-cheek fairy tale tone, but coming from a sincere place. My intent …

Four Junes, Sara Brown

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Four Junes is a poetry collection of elegies and pastoral elegies that aims to discuss and explore the interconnectedness of the body within the frame of health and illness to the landscape of long-term and short-term dwelling and ideas of home. Through fractured frames of home oppositional in landscape and environment, the collection discusses how the body functions and exists in health and unhealth and explores the reactions and processing of half-deaths involved in cancer, and specifically, stem cell transplants as treatment for terminal illnesses. More specifically, the cancerous body and healthy body are contrasted to one another and considered …

Some Stories From A Black Girl From The Bronx, Serenity Marshall

English Theses & Dissertations

The focus and purpose of this work is to create a collection of original stories both fiction and creative non-fiction, that detail my life while living in New York City, specifically the Bronx. This collection is the culmination of the work arising from the program and represents my attempt at a blended genre collection. My goal is to create a series of stories that reveal New York City’s underbelly, along with its beauty, and how those worlds collide.

Sight Words: Poems, Benjamin Harrison Socolofsky

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Sight Words is a collection of poems that questions the image as the central unit of meaning in poetry. Sight words is a lyric bildungsroman, that traces the process of metaphysical alienation that an individual undergoes in the postmodern world. The speaker is exposed to an overabundance of meaning that the visual world transmits and as the order of language deteriorates, meaning multiplies and falters. The language and poetics of Sight Words struggles to reconcile the disconnect between visual language and spoken language. Every missed communication points to a denial of access to the self, which the speaker apprehends as …

The Red Deeps: A Retelling Of George Eliot's The Mill On The Floss., Emily Denton

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The culminating project toward my Ph.D. in Humanities under the Public Arts and Letters track is a combination of creative and scholarly work composed of two parts: a retelling of George Eliot’s novel The Mill on the Floss and a critical introduction outlining the creative concerns to the project. The novel, The Red Deeps, reimagines The Mill on the Floss in the recent past—during the late 1980s in the Copper Basin, the former copper mines in Eastern Tennessee. The critical preface draws broader categories of adaptation, ecocriticism, and climate fiction and incorporates theorists from new southern and Appalachian studies …

“The Urgent Necessity For More Original Creative Works By Transgender And Gender Expansive Artists" Is Not The Title Of My Thesis., Alicia Fireel

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is a mix of personal reflection, academic research, and an examination of The Girl Crazy Queer and Other Fairy Tales, a play I wrote and performed in October of 2023, co-produced by The University of Louisville’s Department of Theatre Arts and Pandora Productions, a Louisville-based theatre company dedicated to Queer theatre. This thesis and the play mirror each other; both contemplate Queer experiences, Queer histories, Queer trauma, and Queer stories. In the thesis I accomplish this through examining four subjects: myself, my play, the connection between modes of storytelling and aspects of transgender Queerness, and the perils that …

Something Holy, Madison Silva

Masters Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

This thesis contains two parts: a craft paper on interiority and seven chapters of a young adult social realism novel. The craft paper explores different strategies for “showing and telling” as a means of conveying interiority in faith-based characters, and it analyzes these strategies in two YA novels, Let’s Call it Doomsday by Katie Henry and Autoboyography by Christina Lauren, both of which center around queer, Mormon characters. The novel chapters in the thesis are from Something Holy, which follows Beck Taylor, an eighteen-year-old, mostly closeted bisexual boy who only has a few months until he leaves on a two-year …

Basement Tricks, Alyssa Findley

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

O Observatory: Poems, Abbey Frederick

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Tabby Canyon, Jamie Rae Crowley Meyer

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Critical Preface1.1 Scope

In Native American traditions, dreams are a significant part of their culture. They are believed to help one connect or communicate with the spiritual world. This ability is not limited to warriors or medicine men, anyone may contribute to the spiritual knowledge of the tribe. Many nations seek visions at a young age, and children are asked about their dreams. Each tribe across the country has a different way they may interpret the dreams. Typically, dreams often have a metaphorical/symbolic, literal, or prophetic meaning.

Whereas, in many non-indigenous cultures, individuals see dreams as something to be forgotten, …

She Poses On A Wailing Stage, Kara Marie Hollowell

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

She Poses on a Wailing Stage is a work of autofiction that is part epistolary and part bildungsroman. The main protagonist Charlotte is for me a vessel to channel my thoughts on the aftermath of an abusive relationship I found myself trapped. She Poses on a Wailing Stage is a story that, at its core, is about a woman overcoming the negative effects of loneliness and becoming an active agent in her escape with the help of a support system to obtain a more fulfilling and truthful life. My goal of this novel is to challenge the perception of abused …

A Life Of Work, David Labounty

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

A Life of Work is an examination of workplace nonfiction where work is, for good or bad, a defining moment in a personâ??s life. This collection of creative nonfiction essays about the jobs that have shaped me was created to encourage people to tell their own tales. There is nothing groundbreaking about the work I have done (and continue to do); however, by sharing my experiences, I hope to spark other workplace remembrances, be they stories about slogging away for fifty years on one job or having multiple rewarding careers. The work we do has an enormous impact on the …

Isagani Cruz And His Fiction: A Footnote To The “Deconstructive Effect Of Feminist Materialism On The Newly-Discovered Cordillera Archives”, Isidoro M. Cruz

Akda: The Asian Journal of Literature, Culture, Performance

A cursory reading of Isagani R. Cruz’s literary theory and criticism on one hand, and his fiction on the other, suggests a disparity between Cruz as a scholarly literary critic and Cruz as a fictionist of stories “for adults only”; however, a detail in one of his short stories in his book, Father Solo and Other Stories for Adults Only, arouses a critical suspicion that his fiction is actually cultural criticism masquerading as irreverent or obscene fiction, so that the critic and the fictionist are one. That detail is found in “Once upon a Time Some Years from Now,” …

Lives Away From Home And Precarious Writing As Life: Reading Bienvenido Santos’S Postscript To Saintly Life, Ivan Emil A. Labayne

Akda: The Asian Journal of Literature, Culture, Performance

Towards the end of his writing career, Bienvenido Santos published two autobiographies, Memory’s Fictions and Postscript to Saintly Life—a departure in a writing life mostly devoted to penning fictional works. This paper focuses on the last autobiography which mainly looks at Santos’s experiences as a pensionado in America. It pays attention to how Santos writes about his Philippine home while in exile, taking part in a program that is part of the American colonial period. The range of Santos’s emotions—with shame and pride on both ends—while abroad is also examined. How these emotions were manifested in the book served …

Marginal Voices, Silenced Annotations: Notes On The Life Of Edith L. Tiempo, Cris Barbra N. Pe

Akda: The Asian Journal of Literature, Culture, Performance

The popular version of National Artist for Literature Edith L. Tiempo is that she holds a central position as the literary matriarch of the Philippines. However, little is known about her background as a partly tribal (indigenous) woman. This paper proposes that biography can be a form of intervention to recuperate silenced narratives and marginal lives. Drawing from the ideas of the Geneva School of Consciousness, biography can be seen as a form of reading, where latent images in an author’s works can be made manifest and reveal hidden narratives in the author’s life. Edith’s life and works yield images …