American Literature Commons^™

The Father Birth, Alissa Nutting

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This creative dissertation is a fabulist and satirical novel. The book follows the story of main character and narrator Earleen, an atypical and hyper-intelligent sixteen-year-old who continues to be traumatized by her sociopathic father even after he dies. A self-taught bookworm born in the early 1980s, her formative years were spent trapped inside her parents' rural methamphetamine cookhouse. When her parents blow up inside their house during a drug-manufacturing incident on the eve of Earleen's early adolescence, she finds herself in the arms of an affluent adoptive couple (Dennis Stark, a fertility specialist, and his homemaker wife Beverly) who have …

“'You Done Cheat Mose Out O' De Job, Anyways; We All Knows Dat'”: Faith Healing In The Fiction Of Kate Chopin, Karen Kel Roop

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1850, the half-way mark of the century in which the country itself would be broken in two, Kate Chopin was destined to bear witness to the many divisions that have distinguished the United States. Especially noticeable in the post-Reconstruction period in which she wrote was the expanding chasm between the races. This dissertation argues that even Chopin's most seemingly orthodox Southern stories betray a quest for a theology capable of healing the physical, emotional, and spiritual ills omnipresent in the country and especially apparent in the post-Civil War South. The alternative to mainstream Protestantism …

Summerview, Laura Breitenbeck

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Summerview is a thesis-length work of fiction in fulfillment of the requirements of the MFA program in Creative Writing. It is a story about a religious family with a disruptive event in its past. It is also about objects such as billboards. Everyone in the story lives in the United States of America and is afraid of something.

Sew Speak! Needlework As The Voice Of Ideology Critique In The Scarlet Letter , "A New England Nun," And The Age Of Innocence, Laura L. Powell

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

In the Nineteenth Century, needlework, and embroidery in particular, became a signifier of feminine identity. Needlework was such a significant part of women’s lives and so integral to the construction of femininity in nineteenth-century America that both pictoral and narrative art demonstrate numerous representations of women embroidering. The sheer volume of these representations in the Nineteenth Century suggests that the practice of embroidery provides a way of speaking for women—a representation of the voice of subjectivity silenced by patriarchal ideology. Because needlework serves as a signifier of ideal femininity, it provides uniquely fruitful and previously unexplored opportunities for investigating how …

A Montage In Its Leaves, Andrew S. Nicholson

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This dissertation consists of a series of lyric poems preceded by an introduction to those poems. The introduction gives a background to the method of composition and historical precedents to the poems, connecting the lyric poems to the writing and thoughts of William Blake, Martin Heidegger, and Robert Creeley. The poems are presented in three parts, and cover a variety of subjects, frequently favoring the presentation of subjective experience over an imagined objectivity.

Raise The Still Rabbit, Michael Kroesche

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

My first collection of poetry, Raise the Still Rabbit, explores the literal landscape we live in, the themes of language and lyric, as well as the relationships between people. The poems are rooted in the experiential, the moments when the act of writing becomes a navigation of the various themes of the local environment, cohabitation between individual people, and the geography of the poems' content and textual construction. Navigating these themes, the poems attempt to dissolve the illusory barriers that appear to separate subjects such as the interior of a home from the desert surrounding it. In this collection, …

History And Transnational Identities In Junot Díaz’S The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao, Brian Joseph Flores

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The purpose of my thesis is to analyze Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and evaluate the role literature plays within the larger context of the relationship among the different countries and cultures in the Western Hemisphere, as well as the place historical events play within this understanding. In Díaz’s novel, there is an understanding of the presence of multiple cultural identities. This awareness of multiple cultural identities leads to the difficulty the characters encounter when trying understanding themselves as individuals. On a much larger scale, the characters also try to understand their cultural, social, and historical …

Your Presence Is Requested At Suvanto, Maile Chapman

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This creative dissertation is a novel set in a fictional private hospital on the southwestern coast of Finland. The main character, Sunny Taylor, is an American nurse whose loneliness and isolation give the novel its distant emotional atmosphere and outsider’s perspective on life in Finland (a densely forested country long perceived as linguistically, culturally, and geographically remote from the rest of Europe). Other main characters include a reserved, chronically ill Finnish woman born before independence from Russia and educated as an architect; an unpleasant expatriate Danish woman who once gave ballroom dance lessons in Finnish cafés; an American obstetrician who …

The Crooked Median, Monica Zarazua

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Words search. There are specific points designated by written language, where one might stand for just a little while until the satisfaction of a pattern is revealed. In this collection of stories, one of the forces that serves as a catalyst for this search is the outside gaze. The gaze exerts itself onto characters. The characters may or may not be conscious of it, may or may not welcome it, but they must grapple with it. The gaze projects its needs and desires onto the characters. It seeks to control them, and it desires to be viewed with admiration, lowered …

Must Pay Now, David C. Perkins

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

These poems attempt to stand amidst the towering shadows of Enlightenment. One of these pillars involves the newfound land from a collective western European vantage and these lands are called the Americas. This space is where these poems are located. They suckle at the monolithic breasts of Enlightened Romance as did Romulus and Remus to the She-Wolf. The poems in their own originality engage with writers such as Jonathan Edwards, Alice Notley, Susan Howe, Frank O’Hara, William Carlos Williams, Walt Whitman, Christina Rossetti, William Blake, and John Cage. If there ever was such a thread in tradition, these people might …

A Place, Near Water, Kaitlin Mcclanahan

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

My thesis represents the crux of my goal in coming to UNLV: to begin and successfully complete the first half of a novel that I have spent years developing. I attribute much of my success to the dedication I have learned in pushing through the MFA program with the help of my advisors, and will leave the program with enough vision to complete the novel I have begun.

My novel tells the story of a fictional Pacific Northwest town circa WWII. The novel begins with the discovery of a body.It then goes back in time and follows the lives of …

"Divine William" And The Master: The Influence Of Shakespeare On The Novels Of Henry James, Amy M. Green

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Henry James's most sustained commentary on Shakespeare comes in the form of an introduction to an edition of The Tempest that was published in 1907. In it, he remarks that the play is a reflection of Shakespeare "consciously tasting of the first and rarest of his gifts, that of imaged creative Expression...to show him as unresistingly aware" (1207). This praise ties unerringly back to James's praise of the artist as one who views the world through open eyes and can capture the nuance of experience. James himself worked at the craft of fiction, and writes extensively in his notebooks and …

The Sociology Of Scenes, The Sacramento Poetry Scene, Dana Nell Maher

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

For this ethnography, I use my feminist perspective, grounded theory, participant observation, and autoethnographic techniques to explore an urban poetry scene. I suggest that scene studies are a viable alternative to community studies and that we move our articulation of social experience to reflect it as it occurs, on a multitude of continuums. My goal with this project is to develop, use, and discuss the utility of a definition of scene that is intended to be useful to scene studies researchers. To this end, I both evaluate an outdated definition of scene (Irwin 1973 & 1977), and define the three …

Gods R Us, Alivelu Nagamani

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Around Grecian orchards. On Trojan battlefields. In Siva's realm. Inside Hanuman's heart. Of gods, demons, and others who love us, hate us, serve us, interfere with us. Of humans larger than life. When gods were not in hiding. About a space not reached via explanations. Poems in Gods R Us come from Greek/Roman and Indic myths, they retell myths, comment on myths, and refer to myths - they could not have been without myths. Distillation and attentiveness create the time needed to be one in the spirit of the poem. I range from reverential to playful.

Dancing In The Ashes, Vytautas Adolph Malesh

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The following novel is the third draft of my creative thesis entitled Dancing in the Ashes . It is an exploration of the Detroit rave scene in its dying days, and it mixes real and imagined places and events in order to portray the essence of that time, if not the factuality. The bulk of the novel follows just over two weeks in the life of Thomas Kowalski, a drug dealer living with his parents in suburban Detroit. He parties constantly and seldom works except as necessary to keep his job at a local record store - an invaluable source …

From Feminism, Adam Strauss

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

From Feminism means to emphasize a world-view rather than an a-priori eye towards women; the manuscript does occasionally strike a generic feminist-didactic mode, but for the most part its concerns are with humanity/ecology and gender goes un-marked or people are altogether absent. The world is various, and in terms of form, the poems in this book are rangy: sonnets, prose poems, serial fragments, free verse tercets, measured and rhymed tercets, couplets, over-the-top monuments to generation by rhyme. Unconventional use of white-space occurs fairly frequently. My thought is that having breaks in articulation in two places, not just the end of …

Standing In The Night, Karin Jane Millhouse

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Standing in the Night has been completed under the influence of phenomenology with its curious regard towards reality. Yet it makes no claims to be anything other than what it is: really, we're just making it all up as we go along.

The Casaloma, Justin P. Burnside

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The Casaloma was written to challenge held beliefs in what constitutes genre, what constitutes "selfhood," and what constitutes borders.

First, it is an examination of Rimbaud's famous line, "I is an other," which challenges the position of the "I" in relation not only to the self, but the self in relation to the world around it. This I call the poetics of the pre-positional, or prepositional relationship. This poetics is explored and tested through the voices, and the suigenerous nature of the material that constitutes the book.

Secondly, this book is meant to be an exploration of ideas that were …