Creative Writing Commons^™

The Direction His Eyes Are Facing: An American Geography, Amelia R. Gramling

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Projects

This paper tracks the archetypical figure of the conquistador across the historical impressions and canonical depictions left in his wake since European “explorers” like Columbus sailed into an unidentified land mass five hundred years ago and ushered the New World into the Imperial age. Through diverse and disparate set of sources--from pop culture to Columbus' log books--this paper maps conquest across the mythology of the American nation, weaving school shooters manifestos in with fictionalizations of the American West in with personal interviews and memoir to complicate and challenge the American understanding of nation—our gendered mappings of power and identity then …

Souvenir Program Booklet For The Women And Spirituality Symposium, Regennia N. Williams Phd, Patricia A. F. O'Luanaigh Ma

The Journal of Traditions & Beliefs

No abstract provided.

The Circumference Of Community, Patricia A. F. O'Luanaigh Ma

The Journal of Traditions & Beliefs

No abstract provided.

“Yellow Crowfoot In The Pond,/Not Lotus, Not Lily”: Mapping The River, Mapping Voices, Pamela J. Rader

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

This paper examines the prosody of Chin’s eponymous poem, "The Phoenix Gone, The Terrace Empty," through an eco-critical lens. While it does not dismiss the hybrid cultural influences of the poem, it focuses on the ways the non-human agents, or the figures in the poem’s landscape, “speak.” Poetry, like the poem’s terraced gardens, traces tension between the controlling human forces experienced by the narrating female I personas and the natural world’s affective inclinations.

Faroosh And Elina, Faroosh, Elina, Tsos

TSOS Interview Gallery

Faroosh was a cameraman for a private television program in Afghanistan working on a documentary about the Taliban. When he and his crew were discovered, the Taliban attacked them and he and his wife fled to Turkey, walking 12 hours to get there. Upon arrival the police arrested and harassed them. Turkey was not a safe place. After several suicide bombings in the area, they decided to move on to Greece, where they are in a refugee camp without any progress in their situation. They have no money to move forward and no ability to work and the economic situation …

Devising Performance & Queer Futurity, Brendan F. Leonard

Honors Theses

This project argues that devising performance is an inherently queer and utopian form. In response to recent political movements, such as Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter, which seek to stage dissatisfaction with the systems of late capitalism, I turn to devising performance as a site. Informed by the queer and performance theories of Jose Esteban Munoz, Lee Edelman, and Jill Dolan, I argue that devised theater allows us to process disillusionment, rehearse collectivity, and stage futurity. In conversation with Munoz, I define futurity as an imaginative site that considers what will follow what some scholars suggest will be …

The Color Of Memory: Reimagining The Antebellum South In Works By James Mcbride Through The Use Of Free Indirect Discourse, Janel L. Holmes

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the use of interior narrative techniques such as free indirect discourse and internal monologue in two of James McBride’s neo-slave narratives, Song Yet Sung (2008) and The Good Lord Bird (2013). Very limited critical attention has been given to these neo-slave narratives that illustrate McBrides attention to characterization and focalized narration. In these narratives McBride builds upon the revelations he explores in his bestselling memoir, The Color of Water (1996, 2006), where he learns to disassociate race and character. What he discovers about not only his mother, but also himself, inspires his re-imagination of the people who …

Matilde Ros Leaves The Jungle, Susana Beatriz Camacho Vivar

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

When Matilde defies her mother and abandons her privileged life in a South American capital to fight for environmental justice in the Amazon jungle, she never imagines her journey will bring her right back to where she started. As she insists on freeing herself, four other women around her do the same, defining their freedom when class, gender and race may still get to tell them who they are.

Embracing The Abject: Explored Through Kristeva’S Theory Of The Maternal And The Abject In The Creative Work “Listening”, Michelle Symes

Theses : Honours

Kristeva and Jung are both concerned with marginalization. For Jung, it is marginalization of the hidden unconscious (Hauke, 2000). For Kristeva, it is marginalization of the hidden physical realm of women and the “feminine” (Hauke, 2000, p127). Using Kristeva as my primary theorist, I will compare her subject-inprocess theory of the maternal and abject to Jung’s static unitary theory of individuation and the Shadow. Because of the parameters of this project, I have not been able to focus on the nature of Jung’s central feminine principle. By comparing Kristeva to Jung, women’s shame, as represented by patriarchy’s rejection of the …

Animal Welfare And Animal Rights, M.E. Rolle

Animal Sentience

This overview of Broom’s book, Sentience and Animal Welfare (2014), considers the role the book could play in the animal rights debate. In a thoroughly researched and objectively presented text, Broom lays out information that could place doubt in the minds of decision-makers. By highlighting not just the ways animals resemble humans, but also the ways humans resemble animals, Broom shines a light on a solidly grey area in the animal rights debate.

Toward An Ontology Of Exhaustion: On The Affective Structures Of Masculinity In The American Oilfield, John W. Jepsen

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

What is the significance of the oil encounter in the lives of men living and working in the modern oilfields of the United States? Engaging with both literary examples of the lives of men in the Interior West and the personal experiences and reflections of the author, this essay seeks to examine the connections between ideology and place as it works to shape the identity and affect of men in America's oilfields, ultimately ending in them identifying with the very resources their activities seek to exploit and exhaust. Utilizing Theodore Adorno's Minima Moralia as its moral touchstone, this essay works …

Happily Ever After And Other Lies My Childhood Told Me, Rachel Anna Neff

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

A manuscript-length book of poetry with a critical preface centered on the idea of mythology, nursery rhymes, and foundational (Western) fictions and how the cultural norms and expectations that those texts create influence an individual, particularly with respect to gender and gender identity.

Gender, Othering, And Loki 2015, Amanda Munson

Master's Theses

With many enigmatic characters and engaging stories, Norse literature and mythology have had a formative impact on English literature from the early Middle Ages in poetry like the Edda and many Icelandic sagas. A lot of scholarship has been done on Nordic myth and literature, including character studies on many figures, especially Odin and Thor. However, it is difficult to find studies of the figures who make up the "other" in Nordic tales, such as the trickster Loki. While Loki plays a significant role in many tales, his position as the "other" in general Norse mythology and folklore is perhaps …

"Persephone's Contemporary Dilemma: Consent, Sexuality, And "Female Empowerment." [2015], Cassandra Elizabeth Cerjanic

Master's Theses

Greek mythology never strays very far from Western imagination. Though every few years literature involving the infamous Gods tapers off into the back of our collective minds, a resurgence soon follows. The late Romantic literary movement (as popularized by Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelly, and John Keats) depended heavily upon Greco- Roman mythology to help illustrate characters that existed somewhere between the shadow of imagination and the truth of humanity. Perhaps in an attempt to harken back to Romanticism, contemporary poetry has once again given life to the Greek Gods. Mythological characters can be seen throughout the works of modern …

"Casting Aside That Ficticious Self.": Deciphering Female Identity In The Awakening 2015, Anne L. Dicosimo

Master's Theses

Kate Chopin’s female protagonists have long since fascinated literary critics, raising serious questions concerning the influence of nineteenth-century female gender roles in her writing. Published in 1899, The Awakening demonstrates the changeability of the various representations of woman. In the nineteenth century, the subject of women may be divided into two categories: the True Woman and the New Woman. The former were expected to “cherish and maintain the four cardinal virtues of piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity” (Khoshnood et al.), while the latter sought to move away from hearth and home in order to focus on education, professions, and political …

Daisy And Frederick: An Exploration Of Innocence And Its Consequences In Henry James' Daisy Miller: A Study 2015, Mark Andrew Meyer Ii

Master's Theses

No abstract provided.

Tearing Down Walls And Building Bridges, Melba J. Boyd

Criticism

A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness: Writings, 2000–2010 by Cherríe L. Moraga. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Pp. 280, 9 illustrations. $84.95 cloth, $23.95 paper.

"Fire And Water Imagery" In Jane Eyre 2015, Shannon O'Loughlin

Master's Theses

Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre is a study in contrasts. Critics have argued the implausibility of the novel, that an orphaned governess who marries her dashing employer is too far-fetched to be believed. However, a proper understanding of Jane Eyre must be based not on a sequence of events, but on the thematic form of the novel in which the signifiers relate to each other and shift throughout. Ferdinand de Saussure explains in his "Course in General Linguistics," that the mental concept one has of a word is its "signifier" (62). Charlotte Bronte relies not simply upon a sequence of events …

Revision In The Multiversity: What Composition Can Learn From The Superhero, David Hyman

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

Constant and ongoing revision is the compositional tactic through which many contemporary superhero narratives negotiate the powerful struggle between reiteration of the genre’s past, and creative expression of its future. Instead of a gradual succession of improved renditions of a text, each one effacing and superseding the imperfections of its predecessors, revision is revealed as the production of multiple versions whose differences and diversities are “capable of being in uncertainties”, as Keats describes the creative attitude which he terms Negative Capability: ontologically equal textual variations that wear their inconsistencies openly, and reject the pressure to resolve their multiplicities into the …

Pim Pedagogy: Toward A Loosely Unified Model For Teaching And Studying Comics And Graphic Novels, James B. Carter

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

The article debuts and explains "PIM" pedagogy, a construct for teaching comics at the secondary- and post-secondary levels and for deep reading/studying comics. The PIM model for considering comics is actually based in major precepts of education studies, namely constructivist foundations of learning, and loosely unifies constructs inherent therein with other available frames and frameworks for studying comics. As such, the article fills a dire need in the scholarly literature on comics pedagogy and paves a way for those who seek to teach comics courses in the future but who need direction and for those who seek to study/read comics …

Oscuridad Unraveled, Orlinda Pacheco

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Oscuridad Unraveled is a compilation of many stylistic poems. There are narrative poems interspersed with somewhat surreal poems that tell a story about the Oscuridad as a child and adult. As Oscuridad’s childhood story is unfolding so is her adult story causing a cyclical motion within reader and writer, or maybe a rollercoaster with many loops and turns. Nonetheless, it begins with poems that shaped a small innocent girl and leads to the creation of the adult woman who cannot have children, who embraces the passion of being “the other” and luxury of sex without consequence. This is a story …

At Your Prettiest/Your Name Is, Jake Phillips

Eddie Mabry Diversity Award

This is a poem showing the progression of my feelings in relation to my gender throughout my life. I identify as both non-binary and as a genderfluid demi-boy, which means I feel my gender changes occasionally, but I usually feel male. I am a member of the trans community, specifically the non-binary portion within it, and I feel this poem accurately represents how that gender identification showed itself as I grew up, even before I realized I wasn't a girl.

Ordinary Women/Extraordinary Lives: Oregon Women And Their Stories Of Persistence, Grit And Grace, Shannon Moon Leonetti

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis tells the stories of five Oregon women who transcended the customary roles of their era. Active during the waning years of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, each woman made a difference in the world around them. Their stories have either not been told or just given a passing glance. These tales are important because they inform us about our society on the cusp of the twentieth century.

Hattie Crawford Redmond was the daughter of a freed slave who devoted herself to the fight for women's suffrage. Minnie Mossman Hill was the first woman …

The Multiple Victims Of Rape, Maureen Azar

Audre Lorde Prize

No abstract provided.

Queer Monsters, And Bruno & His Speaking Queers, Charles R. Mcgregor

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

This multi-genre thesis spans across nonfiction (Queer Monsters), poetry (Bruno & His Speaking Queers), and fiction (A Queer Empire Named Eden) in an attempt to break down the categorical control the hegemonic powers like to assert over not only the arts, but gender and sexuality as well. The creative pieces are unapologetically polemic tackling queer issues and the newfound surge in acceptance for queers across the United States. The creative works question how far queers should assimilate into a hegemonic system that was built with heteronormativity enshrined as one of its cornerstone pillars. The nonfiction piece tracks the author’s own …

“The Bedroom And The Barnyard: Zoomorphic Lust Through Territory, Procedure, And Shelter In ‘The Miller’S Tale’” & Haunchebones, Danielle N. Byington

Undergraduate Honors Theses

“The Bedroom and the Barnyard: Zoomorphic Lust Through Territory, Procedure, and Shelter in ‘The Miller’s Tale’” is an academic endeavor that takes Chaucer’s zoomorphic metaphors and similes and analyzes them in a sense that reveals the chaos of what is human and what is animal tendency. The academic work is expressed in the adjunct creative project, Haunchebones, a 10-minute drama that echoes the tale and its zoomorphic influences, while presenting the content in a stylized play influenced by Theatre of the Absurd and artwork from the medieval and early renaissance period.

Who I Am Through The Lens Of Distortion, Mackenzie Alena Boyer Ms.

Capstone Projects

Who I Am Through the Lens of Distortion is a work of fact and fiction, mixing some of Mackenzie’s actual life events with surrealistic/dreamlike details. During Mackenzie’s time at Otterbein she has loved blending her loves of fiction writing and poetry into one beautiful art form. This project is a culmination of just that. Mackenzie has chosen to focus on her life as a college student, in regards to her memories and her growth as an independent adult, feminist, woman, and writer with distortion of place and time to spice things up. In this project she attempts to answer the …

Mother's Bed: Gender Representation In Children's Literature, Karin Hanni

Senior Theses

This children's book and accompanying research paper both address gender inequity in children's literature. There is a significant imbalance of gender representation in children's literature, with the number of central male characters almost doubling that of central female characters. Additionally, the roles of males and females still tend to be stereotypical: boys are action-oriented and heroic, while girls are nurturing and passive. Further, it is believed that boys will only enjoy books about boys, while girls will enjoy books about both boys and girls. This imbalance in children's literature hurts both genders. Children not only learn to read from books, …

Ivy Leaves, Volume 90, Ivy Leaves Editorial Staff

Ivy Leaves

The 2015 edition of the Anderson University journal of art and literature, Ivy Leaves.

The names of the known editors for this issue of Ivy Leaves were Jonathan Kurtz, Charlotte Stapp, Callie Renfrow, Courtney Couch, Angel Hisnanick, Taylor Kaiser, Yvonne Didway, Noelle Hisnanick, Taylor Henry, Mitchell Dallas Herring, Rebekah Rhoden, Logan Hickey, Josie Maszk, Julia Madden, Kenneth Keller, Alex Dib, Micah Peek, Benjamin Mahaffey, Justin Parker, Teresa Jones, and Tim Speaker.

Journey With No Maps: A Life Of P.K. Page By Sandra Djwa, Mckay Mcfadden

The Goose

Review of Journey With No Maps: A Life of P.K. Page by Sandra Djwa.