Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Satori 2021, Caitlyn Salinas, Jacelyn Schley, Megan Haldorson, Carly Weber, Megan Martin, Amanda Gade, Shannon Laurance, Miranda Templeton, Ryanne Mikunda, Jay Lee, Emily Venné, Cheyenne Halberg, David Som, Xandra Okori

Satori Literary Magazine

The Satori is a student literary publication that expresses the artistic spirit of the students of Winona State University. Student poetry, prose, and graphic art are published in the Satori every spring since 1970.

The Satori 2021 editors are Andrew Sitter, Cheyenne Halberg, Kaela Appicelli, Meghan Haldorson, and Xandra Okori. The Satori 2021 faculty advisor is Dr. Delta Eddy, Professor of English.

Where Light Greets Night: A Modern Retelling Of "The Sea-Hare", Kelsie Peterson

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

Set in the Pacific Northwest, this contemporary retelling of the Brothers Grimm’s traditional tale sees a tower as a lighthouse, a princess as a keeper, and suitors as candidates for her replacement. The critical introduction of this thesis discusses the idea of “telephoning the narrative” and establishes the importance of modern fairy retellings. With an in-depth examination of binaries within the traditional tale and how they are handled within the retelling, the introduction sets the stage for the way “Where Light Greets Night” works to blur such black and white ideas. This tale also seeks to question judgment and bias …

The Bannerlight Sanctuary, Sydney Anderson

Honors Projects

This is a fantasy novel about four heroes who are tasked with saving a city from a deadly threat just outside its walls. It's set in the Mesoamerican inspired land of Atrea and is led by a full cast of LGBT+ characters.

A Collection Of Misfits, Kayla Gates

Master's Theses

The following creative writing thesis, A Collection of Misfits, includes a critically informed introduction which places my works of fiction within the larger conversation of contemporary fiction. These short stories explore numerous ways in which characters fail to connect to the world around them. Characters falter with relationships, religion, and fitting in. The collection also explores how the use of humor works to bridge the fissure that can form around a character who fails to connect–creating a personal connection between reader and character. Taken in sum, these stories indicate that we, as humans, have a binding thread that intertwines …

Madwomen And Mad Women: An Analysis Of The Use Of Female Insanity And Anger In Narrative Fiction, From Vilification To Validation., Lindsay Haralu

College of Arts & Sciences Senior Theses

This project examines the use of female insanity and anger in narrative fiction, as demonstrated by the character of the madwoman. Madness is a concept that has long been gendered female throughout Western history, in medicine, language, religion, and culture. Socially and culturally constructed madness can be used to determine the boundaries of society, the norms and values from which “madness” deviates, while the character of the madwoman can be used to demonstrate how women have challenged these boundaries and how the roles of women and definitions of femininity have changed over time. This study analyzes the madwoman trope from …

More Than Just A Fantasy: Literary Fantasy As An Architectural Tool, Kae Schwalber

Architecture Senior Theses

Fantasy literature world building can suggest and support alternative paths for architectural practice using the super stimuli of fantasy “otherworlds” to promote and create more “placed” spaces and improve the wellbeing of communities. According to Edward Relph, the United States has had an issue with “placelessness” since the 1950’s, where building typologies are nationally distributed and rarely localized. Literary Fantasy has created worlds so desirable that they have permeated into a multi-billion dollar industry that reaches past literature, making the consumption of fictional worlds a central behavior in modern societies. The cultural importance and success of the genre is due …

Sweat, Cigs And A Ball Of Noise, Tyler Jacob Hughes

Graduate Thesis Collection

Corduroy Jones is contacted by a local promoter to reunite his band Streetwise Preacher. Over a three week span, Corduroy and his bandmates Tony and Johnny go through a series of events leading up to their Halloween Night reunion show.

Sometimes I Think I’M Going Crazy, Connor Kesslering

Graduate Thesis Collection

"Sometimes I Think I’m Going Crazy" is a short story collection containing three stories of more or less equal length. Each of three main characters face conflict that tests their resolve and ultimately forces them to reevaluate who they are as human beings. Stress helps people to grow and evolve and the protagonists in these stories are forced to face their greatest fears head on and (with varying degrees of success) come out the other end better for it. But not before going a little crazy in the process.

Todd In Eternity, E. J. Pettinger

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

This work represents the first significant portion of a novel in progress. It is a first-person narration following a teenage boy’s involvement with a modern-day prophet. The story examines the nature of visionary belief systems and the ways in which they can degrade a person’s connection to the everyday world. The bulk of the narrative is concerned with the protagonist’s struggle to escape the dark dream of the prophet and reconnect to the plain givenness of the world. The narrative explores the religious use of horror and glory as visionary elements, and the role of humor and affection in the …

Miracle, Gabrielle Sullivan

Honors College Theses

This original, speculative fiction novella follows Miracle Beckett, a young woman raised on a dying, climate-change ravaged Earth in an isolated religious cult. While she eventually escapes, she finds herself trapped in another deathtrap, abandoned by her crewmates on a spaceship that is rapidly running out of air. Struggling to reconcile her past with her present and her imminent death, Mira cannot avoid remembering everything she has tried to leave behind.

Engaging with sexual identity, religious trauma, and the difficulty found in reconciling the complexities of a left-behind existence, Miracle highlights the power of memory, friendship, and knowledge in guiding …

Fragmented Worlds, Fractured Families - Narrative Levels In Graphic Memoir, Henry Wilson Essman

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

This collection of creative writing explores the dynamics of parent-child relationships, as well as the way time can cause these roles to shift and reverse, bringing into question who has the right to tell another’s story. The individual pieces are both in the mediums of prose and graphic narrative, often focused on themes of family and trying to reconcile fractured perspectives. These works are introduced through an essay demonstrating how graphic narratives are uniquely situated to show narrative levels, and how narrative levels are key to showing the shifts in parent-child relationships and the way perspectives can differ while still …

Position: A Fiction Collection, Joelle Byars

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The creative thesis “Position: A Fiction Collection” is composed of sixteen short and flash fiction stories. The critical introduction to this thesis looks at my journey as a writer that led to its genesis. I analyze the methods used in my writing process, consider the ways in which instruction and passive reading influences what drives me to write, as well as delving into how the personal informs the creative. I discuss the themes of my stories, gender, sexuality, socio-economic class, toxic relationships, and mental illness, and how they emerged in this collection. A creative sample that touches on all of …

Como Lobos, David Andrew Place

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

In a world of conflict, Storm Crow, a Comanche warrior, leads a war party making its way through Mexico and Texas, stealing horses, abducting children, and wreaking chaos as he seeks spiritual and magical power, increasing his notoriety and prowess as a warrior. During one raid, Storm Crow abducts a white child, six-year-old Wade Vance. When Wade tries to escape, Storm Crow attempts to shoot him. When Storm Crow's gun fails twice, he realizes that the boy is not meant to die and adopts him, renaming Wade, "Broken Gun," in praise of the perceived magical intervention, the gun misfiring twice, …

Taunggyi Dreamer: Exiles, Diasporas, And Pleasures, Singh Kaur Singh

All NMU Master's Theses

Taunggyi Dreamer: Exiles, Diasporas, and Pleasures, a collection of poetry and prose (creative non-fiction and fiction), reflecting themes of trauma, memory, psychic fragmentation and survival is told through hybrid narratives. The writing arises from my own multiple migrations from Taunggyi, Burma, to India and eventually to the United States of America. Taunggyi Dreamer is inspired by: my exile from my birth country, Burma, after the military coup of 1962; my resettlement as a stateless citizen in my ancestral home in India during my teen years; and my arrival to the United States of America in my thirties as a …

Sundered: A Novel-In-Progress, Erik Renner

Honors Scholar Theses

Sundered: A Novel-in-Progress is a creative thesis that discusses the creative process involved in preparing for and writing a fiction novel. It is a thesis of four parts: a critical preface documenting the history of the project and breaking down the creative process involved; the prologue to the eponymous novel-in-progress; an annotated example of an in-progress first chapter; and an annotated transcript of a character sketch made of the book's protagonist. The novel itself is a post-apocalyptic western, with some additional steam-punk and historical influences. The core theme of the project revolves around finding a peaceful way to fix a …

Life, Love, And Loss: Redefining The Trauma, Samantha Crystal Rae Barnette

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

This thesis begins with a critical introduction analyzing the use of defamiliarization and the Dostoevskian hero in literature as a catalyst for a change in perception for victims of trauma. I create a relationship between the theories of Viktor Shklovsky and Mikhail Bakhtin as applied to both my own and published works. Short stories from Carmen Maria Machado and Marly Swick and Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale help to situate my own writing within this theoretical approach. The basis of my hypothesis lies in the blurred effect that trauma can have on the individual, causing an automatic response to …

The Jordanian Novel In Postmodern Context, Hamed Alalamat

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

As the Jordanian culture is gradually impacted by the globalization process of late capitalism, this study argues that many Jordanian novels exhibit a number of postmodern characteristics, such as blurring boundaries and disrupting hierarchies, the use of pastiche as a compositional technique, formal fragmentation, and the weakness of utopian imagination. Adopting Fredric Jameson’s theory of postmodernism as a framework, the study explores ten Jordanian novels written between 1986 and 2016 to demonstrate that the modernization process and the cultural changes in the Arab world, in general, and in the Jordanian society, in particular, have increased the density of postmodern features …

Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: Girlhood In The Creation, Content, And Consumption Of Victorian Children’S Literature, Betsy Barthelemy

English Honors Projects

The Golden Age of (British) Children’s Literature was famous not only for the proliferation of fiction it hosted, but also for how much of that work featured young heroine protagonists. Starting with the publication of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and examining two other fantasy works compared with three realistic children's novels from this half-century period, this project elucidates the differences between these genres and examines how authors used the characteristics of each to empower their heroines. It argues that these fictitious heroines influenced real-world readers to create progressive futures by providing examples of rebellious girl characters finding happy endings.

A Mile And More: A Novella And A Reflection On Body-Swapping, De'avion Reid

Undergraduate Theses

The story takes place in a quiet town and follows two high school juniors, Jerome-Tyler Hodges and McKenna McKinley. Having no prior affiliation with one another, Jerome and McKenna find themselves caught in the predicament of having switched bodies after an unforeseen comet crashes on the roof of their high school. Not wanting to attract the wrong kind of attention, the two decide to weather the storm and spend some time in each other’s shoes, in hopes of the issue resolving itself. Despite living in the same town and going to the same school, Jerome and McKenna have lived different …

The Butte, Natasha Bailey

Senior Theses

The Butte is a collection of short stories about a small town in the Pacific Northwest. In these short stories I explore idealistic small-town culture and blend it with the Pacific Northwest’s own (modern) paranormal mythology. This medley of different genre aspects in my stories makes The Butte difficult to label, but ultimately, my goal while writing was to explore various styles and points of view.

The nine stories set in The Butte shift styles on a variety of levels from character switching, point of view (1^st person, 3^rd person, and omniscient), and formatting (structure and linguistics). These …

Fictional Text And Reality Of The Possible, Shusheng Zhang

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

This article explores the issue of reference in fictional texts, that is, the relationship between fictional texts and reality. Paul Ricoeur thinks that the reference of poetic language is not cancelled, but only suspended. Through its semantic creativity, it possesses the ability to transform reality and to turn our personal environment into a habitable world. The interpretation of the concept "world /Welt" and "environment /Umwelt" by Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer shed light on the significance of fictional texts in reality, for they propose to us possible modes of existence in the ontological sense. In other words, fictional texts can …

Ghosts In The Wood Pile, Susannah Rand

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

GHOSTS IN THE WOOD PILE is a creative thesis comprised of an artist statement, statement of creative influences, and five short stories. The artist statement serves to depict my goals in writing this collection—namely, to provide investigatory, critical, and joyful fantasies for a young queer audience—and addresses what work still needs to be done to complete this collection. The collection itself explores dystopian and fantastical alternate realities in which characters struggle with desire, selfhood, and societal expectation. A sample of the collection is included here.

Advisor: Jennine Capo Crucet

Rust Blooming, Alec Bartell

The Oval

No abstract provided.

Exposure, Melissa Paulsen

The Oval

No abstract provided.

Spillway, Jeffrey Gustafson

The Oval

No abstract provided.

First Steps, Jordynn Paz

The Oval

No abstract provided.

The Grey Man, Lindsay Hause

The Oval

No abstract provided.

Good Mourning Mary, Maddelyn Black

The Oval

No abstract provided.

Soup, Lindsey Gallagher

The Oval

No abstract provided.

Handicapped Parking, Tommy Brock

The Oval

No abstract provided.