Arts and Humanities Commons^™

One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten. Eleven. Twelve. Thirteen. Fourteen. Fifteen. Sixteen. Seventeen. Eighteen. Twenty. Twenty-One. Twenty-One. Twenty-Three. Twenty-Four. Twenty-Five. Twenty-Six., Liza Lacroix

Theses and Dissertations

"One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten. Eleven. Twelve. Thirteen. Fourteen. Fifteen. Sixteen. Seventeen. Eighteen. Twenty. Twenty-one. Twenty-one. Twenty-three.Twenty-four. Twenty-five. Twenty-six." is a biographical fiction of violence toward the protagonist. Comprised of writing, audio, documentation and intervention. This text is the first iteration, and the thesis work is the second iteration of the same.

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 …

The Flow Of (Re)Memory In African American And Nubian Egyptian Literature: Morrison, Oddoul, And Mukhtar, Bushra Hashem

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this thesis is to define the term rememory, which Toni Morrison coins in her novel Beloved, and explore its interplay with water imagery in the novel and in two Nubian short stories, namely Haggag Oddoul’s “The River People” and Yahya Mukhtar’s “The Nile Bride.” The three narratives have core common features: they centralize water bodies as key sites of events, they depend heavily on the retelling of history and mythology, and they are told predominantly from the perspective of women. How do the writers weave rememory, history, and mythology to produce these narratives? Are they attempting to …

Where The Animals Sleep At Night, Meghan Reed

Theses and Dissertations

When the world is full of so much fear and worry, pain and tragedy, we need new ways to work through our own personal loss; we need new ways to heal. It is my opinion that stories are meant to heal, to make us feel and take us to a better place. Stories offer understanding, a good laugh, a way to move forward, they thrill us, make us cry, show us love, or scare us into momentary elation. My creative thesis will be a collection of short fiction that employs elements of literary realism and magical realism to explore the …

Workers Of Iniquity: Stories, Isaac Huckaby

Theses and Dissertations

In her essay, “The Grotesque in Southern Fiction,” Flannery O’Connor notes, “Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one” (44). In the introduction to this collection, I investigate the importance of the grotesque, gothic, and surreal elements that tend to make up the depictions of the South in the works of authors such as Flannery O’Connor and Brad Watson and several horror writers, such as Stephen King, Edgar Allan Poe, and H.P. Lovecraft, exploring how horror can be used to emphasize the …

Department Of Longing, Anthony Gabriel Coffman

Theses and Dissertations

Many have chosen to divide the world of fiction into literary and genre. I do not believe these have to be mutually exclusive. Writers such as Shirley Jackson, Stephen King, and Benjamin Percy note the importance of literary devices while simultaneously creating plots that elicit emotional responses from readers. It is my goal to accomplish the same, and bridge the gap between literary and genre fiction in my collection of short stories by using symbolism and imagery to create a sense of the foreboding.

Snapshots Of A Fictional Past: Photographic Nostalgia In The Early 20th Century Art Novel., Harry A. Jones Iv

Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation I argue that the proliferation of a mass codependent relationship with nostalgia in the twentieth century shares a parallel history with the widespread adoption of the reproducible image being used by collective audiences as a supplement for natural memory, or what Proust names “voluntary memory.” This conflict between nostalgia-hungry consumers and artists inspired groups such as Alfred Stieglitz’s Photo-Secessionists and artistically minded authors like Henry James, who employed increasingly complex photographic and literary practices to resist the images’ tendency to debase the aesthetic quality of their own work. Authors such as Marcel Proust and William Faulkner used …

Dungeons And Devised Theatre: A Study Of Tabletop Gaming And Its Application In Playwriting And Character Development, Sabrina E. Becker

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is an exploration of the connections and application of tabletop gaming in theatre. It looks at the initial process that was used in devising a play from tabletop gaming and also the applications of using tabletop gaming to further character development. This paper serves as a journal of first-hand accounts and interviews during this process so you may be inspired to build your own process either based in what you read here or discovering your own. There is a sample excerpt of the play to show what can be accomplished as well as other artistic works that came …

To The Studio, In The Studio, Home, Miquel R. Veldkamp

Theses and Dissertations

A curated series of poems and mini essays that reflect on personal life, politics, art history, folklore, science, identity and race. It addresses the questions that inform my work, and echoes its ethos of play, exploration, curiosity, vulnerability.

Orphans, Ryan Burden

Theses and Dissertations

This novel explores the ways in which our concepts of children and family shape our larger perceptions of reality, and vice-versa. It tells the story of a family in rural, upstate New York, using three different perspectives: Grace (the head of household), Eve (her foster child), and Bo, a recent addition to the family. Eve has lived with Grace since childhood, while Bo was taken in after attempting to escape from a rehabilitation camp for boys. Over the course of two days, the children try to manage their own internal conflicts, while Grace does her best to help them. The …

Time Machine Research And Approach, Tarek Bouraque

Theses and Dissertations

Time Machine is a hybrid documentary that explores the logics of enslavement, colonialism, eurocentrism and their interconnectedness in our globalized world. Mustapha Azemmouri, born in 1502, undertakes a journey to the 21st century to recount his own story of enslavement and exploration, and reflects on a collective puzzle of 500 years of hidden history.

An Open Bag, Matilde Benmayor

Theses and Dissertations

What do we take with us? How much space should we leave in the bag for what we might find? This paper is a journey from under the rug and onto the pavement. Sowing spiderweb maps I try to make a new city my own.

Hey Boo, I’Ve Been Lonely. What’S Good With You?, Khari Johnson-Ricks

Theses and Dissertations

I explore the interlacing macro and micro implications of capitalism on interpersonal relationships. In an attempt to reconcile that problem I use storytelling, painting, and performance to imagine radical futures when love safety and abundance are easier to access.

Robert Catherine, Sarah Nelson Rupp

Theses and Dissertations

Robert Catherine is an experimental augmented reality novel engaged in the speculative realist question: What is the point to anything if everything?

A perverted and downwardly mobile Richmond millennial man quarantined because of the Coronavirus writes a series of creative non-fiction essays for his girlfriend about suicide, panic attacks, ADHD, DNA testing, capitalism, depression, and sexual repression.

An Exploration Of The Psyche In "Era Of Black", Haley M. Karabasz

Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, I propose three parallel projects. The first is an introductory exploration of the narrative conventions that have become, over time, established tropes in Fantasy Fiction as a brief discussion of my conscious strategy to reject the normative structures set in modern fantasy literature in my own fiction project “Era of Black.” Second is an excerpt from my novel-in-progress, in which I deploy specific stylistic and narrative gestures that mark my effort to move beyond the received “rules” of the Fantasy mode. The third and final project here is to frame an analysis of my protagonist’s complex psychological …

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 …

Tuff Breeches, Arkadiy Ryabin

Theses and Dissertations

In consideration of language and it’s relationship to information and knowledge, the author explores personal set of events in relationship to that of the public, via forms of orality. 19th century American literature is posited as a hangover influencing contemporary events.

Everything Nothing Somegthing, Chris Spangler

Theses and Dissertations

This paper is an exploration of material concerns.

In The Wake Of The End Of The World: Stories, Cayla M. Fralick

Theses and Dissertations

This collection of short stories came about from my growth as a passionate but imperfect feminist, reflecting on the place I call home—how the South and its politics shape us and how I learned to shape myself.

The Color Of Memory: Reimagining The Antebellum South In Works By James Mcbride Through The Use Of Free Indirect Discourse, Janel L. Holmes

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the use of interior narrative techniques such as free indirect discourse and internal monologue in two of James McBride’s neo-slave narratives, Song Yet Sung (2008) and The Good Lord Bird (2013). Very limited critical attention has been given to these neo-slave narratives that illustrate McBrides attention to characterization and focalized narration. In these narratives McBride builds upon the revelations he explores in his bestselling memoir, The Color of Water (1996, 2006), where he learns to disassociate race and character. What he discovers about not only his mother, but also himself, inspires his re-imagination of the people who …

Please Read, Joseph W. Anthony-Brown

Theses and Dissertations

This is a semi-fictional story told through a series of fake found documents. It describes my work and thoughts through metaphor. Machines have the potential to gain self-consciousness through accumulation of errors. Creativity can be confused with randomly generated variety. The acceptance of chaos and loss of control can provide a path to enlightenment.

Natural Predators, Marie-Claire Churchouse

Theses and Dissertations

Natural Predators is a collection of short stories that take place in various countries including Japan, Russia, Hong Kong, and England. Though the stories are not explicitly linked, they share themes of violence, power dynamics, and the failures of community. The collection begins with the story that features the youngest protagonist, and ends with the eldest. Food, animals, and the human relationship with nature are also major themes throughout the collection.

Maybe Mermaids And Robots Are Lonely: 40 Stories And A Novella, Matthew Fogarty

Theses and Dissertations

Maybe Mermaids and Robots are Lonely comprises 40 stories and a novella all set in or around Detroit and featuring figures that have become almost legendary in American culture. Stories in the collection range in form from a more traditional, if quirky, realism to a somewhat more ethereal or slipstream or magical realism. In the title story, for example, we meet a pair of star-crossed lovers, a robot and a mermaid, who must find a way to bridge their different worlds. "Rollo is Rollo" is a more realist play on the Cain and Abel, good brother-bad brother story. There's an …

The Lonely Empire, Andrew Valencia

Theses and Dissertations

This creative manuscript contains ten original short stories dealing with themes of alienation, imperialism, and cultural intersectionality. Though they are all influenced, in one way or another, by ideas of cultural and sociopolitical relevance, they are to be read and viewed primarily as stories, i.e., as self-contained exercises in character, plot, and language that can be appreciated for their artistic merits as well as their academic contributions. The diverse settings of the stories, ranging from Ancient Greece to Central California and from Asia to Latin America, are a reflection of the author‘s own diverse cultural experiences. In one story, a …

Speed And Resolution In The Age Of Technological Reproducibility, Shawn Taylor

Theses and Dissertations

The rate of acceleration of the biologic and synthetic world has for a while now, been in the process of exponentially speeding up, maxing out servers and landfills, merging with each other, destroying each other. The last prehistoric relics on Earth are absorbing the same oxygen, carbon dioxide and electronic waves in our biosphere as us. A degraded .jpeg enlarged to full screen on a Samsung 4K UHD HU8550 Series Smart TV - 85” Class (84.5” diag.). Within this composite ecology, the ancient limestone of the grand canyon competes with the iMax movie of itself, the production of Mac pros, …

Bottomfeeders, William Linn

Theses and Dissertations

Bottomfeeders is a collection of short fiction. It includes stories concerning life, death, hoboes, wrestling, videogames, and cropdusters, among other things. It is both very serious and impossibly dumb, as is the way of things.

The Editorial Double Vision Of Maxwell Perkins: How The Editor Of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, And Wolfe Plied His Craft, Rachel F. Van Hart

Theses and Dissertations

Scholars and literary enthusiasts have struggled for decades to account for editor Maxwell Perkins’s unparalleled success in facilitating the careers of many of the early twentieth century’s most enduring and profitable writers, among them F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe. This study seeks to penetrate that mystery by dissecting Perkins’s editorial practice and examining how he navigated the competing tensions between commercial success and aesthetic integrity in various circumstances. At play in the construction of his literary legacy are prevailing perceptions of authorship, complex interpersonal relationships, and the inherent battle between art and commerce. Focusing on his day-to-day …

Ruling Powers, Scot A. Hanson

Theses and Dissertations

While the fantasy genre is one of the most widely read modes of writing, literary criticism and academic discussion of the genre takes place at a much lower level. This imbalance has developed in part because of a misconception that fantasy genre writings cannot accomplish significant, literary purposes. This thesis first offers an argument for why the fantasy genre should receive more attention in scholarly circles, then presents an excerpt of a fantasy novel. The argument draws from the limited amount of existing criticism to highlight the strengths of the fantasy genre, building a case that, in most respects, works …

Five Days At India House, Amy M. Consiglio

Theses and Dissertations

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Sun, Moon, And Star, Christopher Kimball Bigelow

Theses and Dissertations

This fictional novella takes place during the narrator Smoot's two-year mission to Melbourne, Australia. It chronicles the intertwining of the lives and destinies of three main characters: Smoot, a Utah native who struggles with carnality and lack of conversion and spirituality; Babakian, an Australian convert who used to be a punk rocker and has become frustrated with Mormonism's blandness and conformity; and Samantha, a nonmember part-Tongan Utahn with whom Smoot was involved before his mission. Speaking generally, the novella is about how Babakian misuses his creative powers of art and sexuality, how Samantha explores the gospel and changes her life, …