Creative Writing Commons^™

Material Encounters: Making Memory Beyond The Mind, Ariel Wills

Masters Theses

Can acts of making carry the memories of our embeddedness within the world? This thesis explores how making things can nurture a sense of kinship that cuts across the organic and inorganic, erasing the distinction between living and dead, material and spiritual. Through handwork such as art-making, sewing, knitting, cooking, woodworking, and beyond, the burden of remembering and of archiving is shared across human and non-human bodies, cultivated through practices of making, and through the materials themselves. By recounting the stories of my family’s experience as Jewish immigrants in the United States, I aim to reveal how their domestic practices …

"There Is Nothing Else Like It": The Innovative Personality Of Lowney Turner Handy, Nathan Crews

Masters Theses

No abstract provided.

The Cast Of A Giant's Shadow, Angela Kay Steineman

Masters Theses

Adapting fairy tales and folklore has been an ongoing endeavor by storytellers and artists since the very first story was repeated. The evidence can be seen in the many versions of fairy tales like those of the sleeping beauty, from Giambattista Basile’s “Sun, Moon, and Talia” to Walt Disney’s Maleficent. However, unlike their European counterparts, adaptations of American tales outside of children’s literature are not as ubiquitous. My writing rectifies this by adding to the resurging interest as seen in recent retellings like Matt Bell’s Appleseed: The Monstrous Birth (2019).

In an effort to reframe the American tall tale …

“We Are The Walking Dead”: Morality In Robert Kirkman’S Comics Series, Amy L. Jacobs

Masters Theses

Despite widespread cultural success, Robert Kirkman’s comics series, The Walking Dead, has received little critical attention in the literary canon. The limited critical attention it has received fails to provide an in-depth examination of the work’s morality. This could be a result of the ever-present influence of Frederic Wertham’s claims in his 1954 work, Seduction of the Innocent. However, when viewed through the frameworks provided by John Gardner’s On Moral Fiction and Wayne C. Booth’s The Company We Keep, Kirkman’s zombie narrative exhibits morality in multi-layered and complex ways with every turn of the page. Through the …

The Lyric And The Lathe: Dreams Of Perfect Poetic Efficiency, 1800-1917, Steven A. Nathaniel

Masters Theses

This study examines patterns of efficiency in the poetry and theory of William Wordsworth, Hilda Doolittle, and other figures from the Modernist and Romantic periods. I begin by defining perfect efficiency as occurring when energy transforms, without loss, inside a closed energy system, and I offer perpetual motion machines as hypothetical examples of this impossible state. I then demonstrate the process of efficiency in William Wordsworth's poetry, which begins with circumlocutory poetic cycles but contracts into terse repetitions. Since technical efficiency is calculated by the formula output/input, poetry's subjectivity makes poetic efficiency difficult to measure. However, I suggest that repetitions …

This Man's Heart: Masculinity In The Poetry Of E.E. Cummings, Willis John Whitesell Iii

Masters Theses

"This Man's Heart: Masculinity in the Poetry of E.E. Cummings" explores changing masculinity in the life and poetry of E.E. Cummings. The relationship between Cummings and his father, his first male role model, became strained when Cummings was a teenager finding his own male identity. As he rebelled against his father, a Unitarian minister, he began writing poetry in a modernist style under the direction of a new mentor, Ezra Pound.

Cummings' early modernist poems criticize conventional male roles and configurations of masculinity as outdated. As Cummings continued to grow as a man and writer, he confronted new realities which …

Inside Or Outside The Whale: George Orwell's Art And Polemic, Richard H. Walker

Masters Theses

This chronological study of the evolution of the works of George Orwell is helpful for the futurist, the citizen awash in groupthink, scholars of standpoint epistemology, of mind and nature, of radical humanism, and others. A former British officer and Spanish revolutionary, he became a Democratic Socialist who believed in intellectual freedom above all and was a champion of the common man. Described as the leading exemplar of the public intellectual, he focused on activism vs passivism (and pacifism), and transforming art and politics into cultural power with mind and nature as the foundation. Like few others, he understood cultural …

The Technical Achievement Of C. Rossetti In Goblin Market And Other Poems, Jay D. Fisk

Masters Theses

During Christina Rossetti's lifetime (1830-1894), and for some fifty years after her death, critical attention focused on her life, more specifically on how that life affected her poetry. Critics tried to show how her Italian ancestors, artistic brothers, spiritual mother and sister, and her many illnesses influenced her works. Other than these basic facts, little else was known.

Later, psychological critics found much sexual symbolism in the "repressed" poet's works. "Goblin Market," with its tale of strange little goblin men seducing innocent maids with their fruits seemed particularly well-suited to a Freudian approach. This poem received so much attention that …

Charles Simic: Trends Toward An International Poetry, Denise Clark

Masters Theses

In his article "Wrong Turning in American Poetry," Robert Bly believes that American poetry has been lead astray by the likes of Eliot, Pound, Moore, and Williams. He feels that the main failing of American poetry is its lack of inward, spiritual life. It is the Spanish speaking poets that Bly looks to as the true path-finders of spiritual poetry. If Bly believes that poets like Eliot and Williams were responsible for steering American poetry down the wrong path, it is a foreigner, Charles Simic, who will give American poetry the right turn it needs.

What Simic has been able …

The Endlessly Elaborating Poem: A Comparative Study Of Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens, And The American Experimental, Long Narrative Poem, Paul Freidinger

Masters Theses

Up to the middle of the nineteenth century, British and American poetry was expected to employ rigid metrical and rhythmical patterns. Any verse that did not conform was considered devoid of aesthetic merit. In addition, some critics, Edgar Allan Poe being one of those, argued that there was no place for a long poem in poetry. Walt Whitman and Wallace Stevens, two proponents of the long narrative poem, both wrote in free verse and, thus, directly confronted these traditional theories.

This study demonstrates that the verse of Whitman and Stevens constitutes a new approach to poetic style and structure. A …

From Ritual To Resurrection: The Exploratory Poetic Of Seamus Heaney, Susan L. Morris

Masters Theses

Heaney's poetry has grown and changed since the publication of his first collection of poetry, Death of a Naturalist. This paper is an attempt to present the development of Heaney's exploratory poetic which was created through his use of language and image, allowing him metaphorical vehicles for the examination of oppositions.

Heaney began his poetic exploration, or "dig," with the collections Death of a Naturalist and Door Into the Dark. The poetry presents nature images which represent Heaney's search into the unknown, the dark places. These images symbolize a searching for the imagination and for the purpose of …

The Whole Of Harmonium Music In Relation To The Poetry Of Wallace Stevens, Mary Alice Hollowell

Masters Theses

No abstract provided.