Creative Writing Commons^™

Blend It Like Beckett: Samuel Beckett And Experimental Contemporary Creative Writing, Sam Nicole Campbell

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Samuel Beckett penned novels, short stories, poetry, stage plays, radio plays, and scripts—and he did each in a way that blended genre, challenged the norms of creative writing, and surprised audiences around the globe. His experimental approach to creative writing included the use of absurdism, genre-hybridization, and ergodicism, which led to Beckett fundamentally changing the approach to creative writing. His aesthetics have trickled down through the years and can be seen in contemporary works, including Aimee Bender’s short story collection The Girl in the Flammable Skirt and Mark Z. Danielewski’s novel House of Leaves[1]. By examining these works …

A Poetic Ethnodrama: Discussing The Impact Of The Pressure To Publish On Creative Writers' Production, Abby N. Lewis

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study examines the presence of the pressure to publish while in college as an undergraduate or graduate student, and the impact that pressure has on students’ ability to produce creative work. After interviewing participants, the researcher created an ethnodrama to best represent participants’ emotions and unique experiences with publishing while in school. An examination of the literature reveals that master’s-level students are often overlooked in scholarly research on the subject of publishing. This study uses a qualitative research method to identify key emotional experiences from students at the master’s and undergraduate level in the hopes of providing a platform …

Unsettling The American Old West: Women Of Color Write The Archives, Alison Turner

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation gathers Louise Erdrich’s Four Souls (2004), Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men (1977), and Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive (2019) into a literary corpus that I call postwestern histories. Building on scholarship that situates these novels in Native American, Chinese American, and Mexican/American literary traditions, I show how these novels simultaneously cross bounds of ethnic literary genres to unsettle a dominating narrative of the United States West that roots Anglo expansionist experiences as foundational in archives, historiographies, and literary canons. This unsettling occurs in postwestern histories through three shared characteristics: prioritization of communities that are underrepresented in archival holdings, …

Spontaneous Minds And Electric Romanticism: Kerouac, Ginsberg, Dylan, Joplin, Sasha Tamar Strelitz

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation postulates a sub-category of Romanticism: electric Romanticism. As opposed to its “acoustic” forebear, electric Romanticism exists in an electric age, beginning after Henry David Thoreau’s rumination on the telegraph wire as an electric rendering of the æolian harp image. Romantic poets used the æolian harp to analogize the act of writing activities set into motion by spontaneous thoughts, a central attribute of the Romantic literary movement. The modernized electric version of the æolian harp—the telegraph wire—signals that electric Romanticism branches off from its source and evolves along with technology to engage more synchronously with the spontaneous.

Electric Romantics …