American Literature Commons^™

Black Girl Magic: History, Identity, And Spirituality In Contemporary Fantasy And Science-Fiction, Taylore Fox

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

In 2013, activist and social media influencer CaShawn Thompson composed a Tweet claiming, “Black Girls Are Magic,” which shortened to the hashtag “#BlackGirlMagic.” As the hashtag began to circulate social media, the phrase birthed a digital movement that celebrated the beauty, accomplishments, and mere presence of Black women and girls. This project argues that Black Girl Magic, operating as a social and literary framework, combats the injustice, inequality, and lack of respect and representation that Black women and girls faced in the past and continue to face today. In Black Girl Magic literature, Black women characters perform literal and figurative …

Where Epistemology And Metaphysics Touch In Lois Lowry's The Giver, Seth Vannatta

Far West Popular Culture Association Annual Conference

In Lois Lowry’s dystopian young adult novel, The Giver, the veil of perception— the gap between appearance and reality— is woven into the community as a policy measure meant to establish Sameness—the effort to insure a world without conflict, inequality, difference, pain, or freedom of choice. But a question lingers in the premise of the novel’s community. Given that our options for bridging the gap amount to building a bridge of experience across it or digging a tunnel of existence under it, has the bridge been sabotaged to render perception spurious, or has the tunnel been blocked to alter reality …

A World Of Infinite Possibilities: Recoding Popular Culture In Modern U.S. Ethnic Fiction, Todd Martinez

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This project examines how the U.S. ethnic authors Ralph Ellison, Maxine Hong Kingston and Junot Díaz reflect the dynamic, reciprocal process of transculturation by decoding popular cultural forms. Using strategies made available by cultural studies, hemispheric theory and neoMarxism, critical attention will be directed to each author’s major literary work: Ellison’s Invisible Man, Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey, and Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. This dissertation further analyzes a hitherto overlooked area of U.S. multiethnic literary studies: the ethnic subject’s relationship to encoded popular culture forms and how they impact dentity formation. Recent scholarship has focused on the ethnic …

The Transformation Of Edgar Huntly: An American Awakening, Willie C. Sosa

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Since Charles Brockden Brown published his first novels in the late eighteenth century, he has subsequently shifted back and forth, in importance, from the center to the periphery of the American literary canon. In recent years however, a dramatic increase in scholarship on Brown shows his significance is once again trending back toward the center of importance in this field. Scholarship has tended to coalesce around four topics which can be categorized as postcolonial expansion, the wild city, the distinction between the city and wildness, and identity. Looking closely at identity, although the discourse has done a thorough job of …

Manufactured Insecurity: Mobile Home Parks And Americans’ Tenuous Right To Place. By Esther Sullivan. Berkeley: University Of California Press, 2018. Pp. Xiv+264. $85.00 (Cloth); 29.95 (Paper)., Ranita Ray

Sociology Faculty Research

Traditionally, ethnographers of urban poverty in the United States have tended to write about the everyday lives, tentative morality, and curious practices of the "poor" as if poverty were a suprise outcome of illusive structures and intensely complex behaviors of the poor. ... See full text for complete abstract.

Sex And Death On The Western Emigrant Trail: The Biology Of Three American Tragedies, Debra E. L. Martin

Anthropology Faculty Research

This book offers a different look at how to think about the starvation and death that hounded emigrants attempting to get to California and Oregon in the early years of nineteenth-century US expansion. Specifically, the Donner party and two lesser-known Mormon handcart groups are scrutinized for what the patterns of age at death by sex can reveal. In the subtitle The Biology of Three American Tragedies, “biology” here means solely demographic data on sex and age at death. These are really the only biological variables examined, so the title Sex and Death on the Western Emigrant Trail is more accurate …

Faulkner's Media Romance, Julian Murphet., James Altman

English Faculty Research

No abstract provided.

Broken Hearths: Melville's Israel Potter And The Bunker Hill Monument, John Hay

English Faculty Research

No abstract provided.

The Visual Framing Of The Three Cycles Of Climate Control In The New York Times 1851 To Present, Jason Lee Thompson

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This research explored the visual framing of climate control in The New York Times through three cycles of media history. Although no peer-reviewed study has explored this specific topic, a wealth of prior communication articles on both the visual and textual aspects of climate change and geoengineering in the media was mined in order to discover the frames present. Once the visual frames of climate control (war, fix, people, and impacts) were revealed a content analysis was conducted in order to see which frame elements were most and least frequent considering the images of climate control. When combining all three …

Multiplicity, Marianne Leslie Chan

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This manuscript, Multiplicity, is a collection of poems that addresses the varying dimensions within human interactions and the multiple nature of the self. The speakers in these poems confront the “arbitrary constraints” and the categories that define our identities, as well as how these categories are almost always blurred by the complexities of the self and the differences between people. These categories include gender, sexuality, ethnicity, siblinghood, daughterhood, and religion. Two of these poems— “Really, It is All Arbitrary Constraint” and “Other Stories,” which appear in the second section—attempt to dismantle these constraints and/or categories by breaking from traditional poetic …

The Escape Artists, Daniel Gene Hernandez

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

My thesis, “The Escape Artists”, is a collection of short fiction that represents most of the work I did as a creative writing master’s student. The title is taken from my longest story, a narrative about a young man’s struggle to avoid violence in a federal prison. As a title, “The Escape Artists” also captures major themes in my other stories; characters often pursue emotional escapism or literally seek to evade predators in my fiction. As a writer, I often explore breakdowns in social order, so my stories tend to be set in turbulent, oppressive political climates or else inside …

The Pleasantly Problematic Nature Of J.D. Salinger's Glass Family Stories, Ceasare Joseph Filipelli

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The following thesis analyzes the problematic nature of J.D. Salinger’s principal Glass family stories (“A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” “Franny,” “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters,” “Zooey,” “Seymour: an Introduction,” and “Hapworth 16, 1924”) primarily by means of examining errors in narrative structure, complications in constructing a clearly defined sense of spirituality, and a lack of a functional organization between stories. I argue that although these components of Salinger’s Glass family stories ultimately prove to be problematic and account for inconsistencies within the overarching narrative, they are a product of experimentation with form and, as such, should be viewed positively …

Uncommon Convergences: A Hemispheric And Comparative Approach To The Great Gatsby And Pedro Páramo, Ariel Jade Santos

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Over the past thirty years, American literary scholarship has shifted focus away from a national approach centered on the United States to a hemispheric methodology that includes all of the countries within this hemisphere. As scholars begin to break down the once iron-clad borders that stood between the American canon and the authors of our hemispheric neighbors, new opportunities have arisen for literary exploration. As an original contribution to this field of scholarship, my thesis project uses a hemispheric and comparative methodology to identify and examine the manifestations of reification and patriarchy in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) …

Las Vegas Paperboy, Matthew O'Brien

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

I’m an author and journalist who has lived in Las Vegas since 1997. My first book, Beneath the Neon: Life and Death in the Tunnels of Las Vegas, chronicles my adventures in the city’s underground flood channels. My second book, My Week at the Blue Angel: And Other Stories from the Storm Drains, Strip Clubs, and Trailer Parks of Las Vegas, is a creative-nonfiction collection set in off-the-beaten-path Vegas. These two books grew out of my eight years as a writer and editor for Las Vegas CityLife alternative-weekly paper.

I enrolled in UNLV’s MFA creative-writing program in the fall of …

Transplants, Denise Weber

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

transplants is a body of poetry that joys in migration and grafting; in change and self-destruction; in cycles of survival and death; in resurrection and reincarnation. In this collection, I write of saints and prophets as regular people, faulted and accessible, transposed into the landscapes I’ve inhabited: from the deserts of Las Vegas and Mesa Verde in the U.S. to the coasts and jungles of Belize and Costa Rica in Central America. Through their eyes, one may find the profound within things overlooked, and the vulnerability of our mortal condition. transplants draws on not only stolen and transformed identities, but …

Going Anywhere: Stories, David Armstrong

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Growing up in a rural, Appalachian town, I recognized that tight-lipped doggedness was a mark of strength. As a writer, I became intrigued by how I might portray people whose defining attributes were silence, how essentially to give voice to voicelessness. The answer for me was to begin exploring place as an origin of inner expression. The stories in Going Anywhere track people moving through the landscape, their journeys, often destinationless, traversing the space between life's dark realities and the fantastic leaps of faith we all make to survive. A father seeks out a way to deal with the unexpected …

Hotel Bukovyna, Rebecca Ann Bosshart

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This collection of short stories and first chapter of a novella take place in the historical area of Bukovyna, the beech tree land, partly located in Chernivetska region, western Ukraine. On the edge of it, or under it, or traveling to and from it, in contemporary time. I've been occupied with "the outsider," represented here, and where the seven stories reside, by the giant grande dame tourist hotel on Main Street, across from Shevchenko Park, in Chernivtsi, the region's city center. The occupants: the outsider looking in and around. Outsiders looking at other outsiders. An outsider being welcomed in. Most …

The Influence Of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick On Cormac Mccarthy's Blood Meridian, Ryan Joseph Tesar

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

While many works exert an influence on Cormac McCarthy's 1985 novel Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West, I argue in this thesis that Herman Melville's Moby-Dick stands above them all in importance. I examine some areas where Melville's influence on McCarthy's work can be most notably located. I argue that Melville's importance to McCarthy can be seen in the latter's use of several characters from Moby-Dick in his own novel. I also examine the parallels that arise when one examines the confluences between the two novels' structures, vocabularies, and settings. I also consider how Melville's violent aesthetics …

Morning's Porch, Colby Gillette

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Morning's Porch continues and follows the walking, waiting, watching that begins and ends off the page. It begins "underway," with two already on the road, and ends in an eye wanting light. In between, childhood, Easter, Winter, Spring, Venice, asphalt, Summer, Fall, sunsets, moorhens, grackles, billboards, dogwoods and cottonwoods walk along the poems. They walk through the poems as they continue to walk in the world. In a similar way, the poems of René Char, George Herbert, Paul Celan, Emily Dickinson, William Blake, Arthur Rimbaud, Robert Creeley, Charles Olson, William Carlos Williams and Pierre Reverdy walk through the pages of …

Behind His Father's Saying: Robert Frost's Wisdom Tradition, James H. Altman

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

It is no coincidence that Robert Frost draws on the European/American aphoristic wisdom tradition. From the fables of Aesop, to the esotericism of pre-Socratic Greek philosophers such as Pythagoras and Empedocles, to the works of moralists like Blaise Pascal and Michel De Montaigne, to Erasmus, Frederick Nietzsche and others, Robert Frost weaves diverse wisdom into his work. He does not, however, as much take verbatim the words or sentiments of those who inspire him. Rather he adapts the spirit of their thoughts for his own purposes. Why and how does he do this? What are those purposes, and their subsequent …

The Dakini Project, Kimberley Harris Idol

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This dissertation merges creative writing with scholarship using the novel, The Dakini Project, to provide the subject matter to which the criticism applies. It will focus on the source of mystery format as that codified by Edgar Allan Poe that is later taken in hand by his fellows Arthur Conan Doyle, Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett (as novelists), authors of the hard-boiled American style, and it will use Chaos theory to assess to idea of catastrophe in terms of emergence rather than disintegration. Though the format comes from American beginnings, the scope of the stories discussed here are tangled around …

There Are Moments That Hang Suspended, Mark B. Lennon

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This project is the culmination of ten years of work in poetry. It was begun in imitation of those who impressed, not only with their fine words and dexterity with language, but also with their clear conviction in their subject material. Reflected in the works of Allen Ginsberg, Walt Whitman, and Adrienne Rich, among others, was evidence of a life lived, in Thoreau's term, deliberately. The writing of poetry seemed to be not simply a means of expression, but a goad to live a life worth examining, and to keep doing so; a progress report for a radical mind.

Politics …

Word~River Literary Review (2013), Ross Talarico, Anne Stark, Susan Evans, Gary Pullman, Andrew Madigan, Christin Taylor, Jerome Melancon, Jennie Evenson, Judith Mansour, Mary Didomenico, Annie Lampman, Maureen Foster, M. V. Montgomery, Rowan Johnson, James Hanley, Michael K. Brantley, Brooks P. Rexroat, Deborah Stark, Rachel Rinehart Johnson, Joan Crooks, Jefferson Navicky, Ed Higgins, Mike Bezemek, Leatha Fields-Carey, Maria Winfield

word~river Literary Journal

wordriver is a literary journal dedicated to the poetry, short fiction, and creative nonfiction of adjunct, part-time and fulltime instructors teaching under a semester or yearly contract in our universities, colleges, and community colleges worldwide. Graduate student teachers who have used up their teaching assistant time and are teaching with adjunct contracts for the remainder of their graduate program are also eligible.

We’re looking for work that demonstrates the creativity and craft of adjunct/part-time instructors in English and other disciplines. We reserve first publication rights and onetime anthology publication rights for all work published. We do not accept simultaneous submissions.

About A Yellow Ball, Shannon Alice Salter

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

These are poems made from many things: color, eggs, oranges, many kinds of seeds, leaves, wind, California, the desert, birds. They are things alive in the world and alive in my heart. I cannot take them out of the world, but from my heart I can have whatever appears on its surface. The language of steam.

They are poems that like to be at home.

California is my home and so is the Mojave (and so is every desert). I live in a valley about four hundred miles from the Pacific Ocean, in the city of Las Vegas. What better …

Tiny Animals Made To Do Unnatural Things, Ashley Mary Siebels

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The stories in this collection revolve around a central theme which is expressed by my titleTiny Animals Made To Do Unnatural Things. All my characters feel guilt about decisions and experiences that haunt their past. In the present, they have come to a crossroads and are trying to decipher between what they were made to do as in vocation and evolution and what they are being made to do by the authorial pressures that loom over them (e.g. bosses, parents, loan officers, prison guards.)

In this way, my thesis pivots on the word made. Made (or to make) has many …

From Martyrs To Mothers To Chick In Choos: The Medieval Female Body And American Women's Popular Literature, Gina M. Sully

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Placing the generic conventions of medieval hagiography, Nina Baym's insights about nineteenth-century American sentimental fiction's overplot, and contemporary American women's popular literature into tension illuminates some important commonalities. First, biographers of the medieval virgin saints and authors of contemporary American women's popular literature deploy the same overplot that Baym identifies as characteristic of American women's nineteenth-century popular fiction. Second, in order to define feminine virtue and establish the virtue of their protagonists, nineteenth-century and post-millennial American women writers rework the contrastive tropes by which hagiographers establish their heroines' virtue. Third, struggles for ascendance in the domestic realm gesture toward its …

Monsters In Our Midst: An Examination Of Human Monstrosity In Fiction And Film Of The United States, Michelle Kay Hansen

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The chapters within this dissertation concentrate on textual analysis of literature and film in which monsters appear in various forms, and particularly how those monsters still coincide with Noel Carroll's definition of "art-horror" in his book Philosophy of Horror, while proving that Carroll's definition of monster - and any others who may attempt to limit the definition of monstrosity - is incomplete and much too restrictive. I will be concentrating on monstrosity as it appears in gothic and horror fiction, film, and other elements of popular culture in order to explore the concept of "the monstrous" on multiple levels.

The …

Love Is Just A Word For The Last Body I'D Like To Keep Vigil Over, Robert Jagger

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Love is Just a Word for the Last Body I'd Like to Keep Vigil Over is a collection of poetry that was composed during my time spent at UNLV. Comprised mostly of prose poems, it was heavily influenced by the works of Richard Hugo, Robert Coover, Joshua Marie Wilkinson and several French poets who are often categorized as being members of either the Symbolist or Decadent movement. At its best, the collection attempts to invoke a sense of Joseph Cornell's boxes--odd juxtapositions of everyday items and language that create new and uncertain circumstances. Unlike Cornell's boxes, however, the poems aren't …

James Jones's Codes Of Conduct, Matthew Samuel Ross

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Though his work was celebrated by his contemporaries and remains highly lauded by scholars of war fiction, James Jones's novels are already at risk of falling outside the mainstream canon of 20th Century American literature. My dissertation project proposes an intensive examination of James Jones' three volume war trilogy, From Here to Eternity, The Thin Red Line, and Whistle, collectively considered by eminent critic Paul Fussell to be the finest work to emerge from the Second World War. Jones' trilogy is a mainstay within the overall genre of war fiction, yet it has been afforded relatively little critical attention by …

Word~River Literary Review (2012), Beth Mcdonald, John Hill, Micheline Mayor, Heather Duerre Humann, Ryan Leack, Anne Stark, John Baker, Lily I. Mackenzie, Judith Nichols, Meredith Devney, Marylouise Markle, Bill Bozzone, Tara Taylor, Tina Cabrera, Justin E. Kidd, Richard Foss, Kevin P. Keating, Justin P. Burnside, Matthew Swetnam, Sierra Jones-Yu, Kristen Conard, Star Goode, Andrew Madigan, K. W. Taylor, Allison S. Walker, Gary Pullman, Michael Zinkowski, Susan Nyikos

word~river Literary Journal

wordriver is a literary journal dedicated to the poetry, short fiction, and creative nonfiction of adjunct, part-time and fulltime instructors teaching under a semester or yearly contract in our universities, colleges, and community colleges worldwide. Graduate student teachers who have used up their teaching assistant time and are teaching with adjunct contracts for the remainder of their graduate program are also eligible.

We’re looking for work that demonstrates the creativity and craft of adjunct/part-time instructors in English and other disciplines. We reserve first publication rights and onetime anthology publication rights for all work published. We do not accept simultaneous submissions.