Fiction Commons^™

Some Thoughts On Aiiieeeee! In 2019, Shawna Ryan

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

A creative writer reflects on the legacy of Aiiieeeee!

The Bird Woman, Erinn Beth M. Langille

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

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 …

The Sad Kitchen And Song Of Neon: Two Novellas, John Paul King

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

The Sad Kitchen, a work of magical realism, tells the story of a saintly woman named Helen. She opens an underground kitchen where people who feel guilty can come to be comforted and nurtured in the middle of the night. The story is, at its heart, a reflection on forgiveness. Song of Neon, also of the magical realist genre, is an existential work about a nurse named Avery and her husband, an owl house maker, named Saul. Their town, Milliard, is under a trance. Avery and Saul struggle with their respective identities in the quiet, vacuum the town has become.

“To Be Men, Not Destroyers”: Developing Dabrowskian Personalities In Ezra Pound’S The Cantos And Neil Gaiman’S American Gods, Michelle A. Nicholson

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Kazimierz Dabrowski’s psychological theory of positive disintegration is a lesser known theory of personality development that offers an alternative critical perspective of literature. It provides a framework for the characterization of postmodern protagonists who move beyond heroic indoctrination to construct their own self-organized, autonomous identities. Ezra Pound’s The Cantos captures the speaker-poet’s extensive process of inner conflict, providing a unique opportunity to track the progress of the hero’s transformation into a personality, or a man. American Gods is a more fully realized portrayal of a character who undergoes the complete paradigmatic collapse of positive disintegration and deliberate self-derived self-revision …

Universe Of Things: A Human Presentation Of Food-For-Thought., Madeline Halpern

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

I present this statement under three loose categories: People, Objects and their Environment. I consider People as human, Objects as art objects, domestic objects, and food, and Environment as the shared space of the former groups. Food directs this statement as I present each concept and creative process as a metaphorical dish. Material exploration carried me from a direct practice of reorienting acrylic paint and questioning object functionality through personified sculptures into theoretical thesis work in which I use interpersonal relations and the idea of consumption to translate tactile, gustatory and olfactory sensations into digital film. In this meal I …

“Flowing Along The Wall”: Anarcha-Feminist Bioethics And Resistance In Octavia E. Butler’S Dawn 2019., Theresa Mendez

Master's Theses

Science fiction (sf) texts conversant with the temporal play between past, present, and future push readers to imagine the extremes of human and environmental existence, interaction, and potential. Simultaneously, despite the sf genre’s tendency to traffic in extremes, these texts provoke readers to consider the ways in which these imagined worlds are grounded in history as well as in the contemporary social moment. As Donna Haraway has argued, “the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion” (306). This illusory boundary must continue to be traversed in order to consider how sf literatures, particularly those which imagine …

Posthuman And Alien Breeding: The Implications Of Cybersex In Octavia Butler’S Dawn 2019., Elizabeth Rutkowski

Master's Theses

Speculative science fiction affords new ways for authors to represent social problems of the modern day in an apocalyptic manner. Authors such as Octavia Butler use science fiction to analyze social injustices revolving around race, gender, and sexuality. Throughout her novel Dawn, Butler uses the posthuman to represent minority groups in the late twentieth century. The posthuman represents those who have moved from humanity towards a new opportunity that is mixed with the potential for struggle. 1 As demonstrated through Butler’s work posthumanism blurs the lines between binaries such as male / female, straight / gay, and consensual / nonconsensual …

Between The Living And The Dead, Laura Henriksen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Throughout my studies at the Graduate Center, I have attempted to deepen my understanding of how some people, such as myself and my family, came to be white, and what that means, and how it can be undone. This question of whiteness has pushed me further back ontologically, or deeper down, to include how some people came to be human, and then even further, how some matter came to be living. In my thesis project I attempt to participate in dismantling one of the most fundamental binaries in binary thinking — the strict and uncomplicated division between the living and …

“Belle Reve? Lost, Is It? No!:” The Disillusioned Home In Tennessee Williams’ Early Plays, Rayben Lee

Merge

No abstract provided.

All That You Say Is Beautiful: Stories, Omaria Sanchez Pratt

Theses and Dissertations--English

From the city of High Point to New York City, this collection portrays a certain black experience. Through a sociological lens, the stories in All That You Say is Beautiful study intersections of class, race, family, and sexuality by bending forms, expectations, and seeks to understand what it means to be human when your experience is not that of mainstream American culture.

The American Dream As A Cultural Movement, Thomas W. Raskay

English Department: Traveling American Modernism (ENG 366, Fall 2018)

This piece investigates the relationship between the American Dream and automobility through a generational lens, assessing cultural change in each renewal of the American Dream. Comparing generations of Americans exploring and reforming cultural space reveals evidence of the American Dream as a tendency for generations to expand to new frontiers balanced by a duty to reform current social space. Automobility multiplies Americans’ options for exploration and explodes the rate at which modern generations engage with different spaces. Now that automobility is routine, Millenials have expanded to the new social space frontier in cyberspace, but a limitless frontier may disrupt the …

A Genealogy Of Self-Development In Modern America, Kelsey M. Binder

English Department: Traveling American Modernism (ENG 366, Fall 2018)

This article offers a hypothetical conversation between various authors and creators who have embarked on progressive self-development journeys under the influence of a shared society that intermittently embraces and rejects the structures of the American Dream. While examining the instinctive human motives that cause the radical decision to actualize one’s life, this paper attempts to bridge the psychology of the desire for personal growth to our influential cultural landscape. It explores and analyzes the self-development journeys of individuals such as William Least Heat-Moon and Chris McCandless, as well as the recent message of self-development found in a cinematic pop culture …

The New Hearth: The Creation Of A Mobile Space, James C. Mangum

English Department: Traveling American Modernism (ENG 366, Fall 2018)

The New Hearth: The creation of a Mobile Space

Mangum, James. Kutztown University, (4 December 2018).

This analysis offers an insightful look into an aspect of travel and modernity that has gone seemingly unnoticed in the culture of American Mobility. As a social product space is created to serve the function of something integral in society. Working individuals need offices for example, students need schools, and citizens need residences. These are created spaces of society that intersect the realities of life, and an automobile is how we get to and from these spaces. Modernity has allowed us to stretch the …

More Than Skin-Deep: Reading Past Whiteness In Hemingway’S “Hills Like White Elephants”, Laura Valeri

Journal of Creative Writing Studies

The author argues a much neglected element in the seminal Hemingway's story "Hills Like White Elephant." Reading the story by taking into context a subtext of racial bias lends new interpretation to the story.

Ephemera: Copy Of Friends Of Cross Creek Pamphlet.

Saffy Collection - All Textual Materials

Found in a book titled "Color Purple." Circa 1965-1985. Box 4, Folder 11

The Manner Of Your Scramble, Henry D. Goldkamp

Toyon: Multilingual Literary Magazine

N/A

Finding Aid To The Collection Of Margaret Wade Deland Materials, Margaret Wade Deland, Colby College Special Collections

Finding Aids

The collection includes correspondence, manuscripts, and first publications of Maine writer, Margaret Wade Deland. The bulk of the collection consists of letters written by Deland to various correspondents between 1884 and 1944. The collection also contains manuscript items of varying length, clippings, published writings, and a few photographic prints. Born Margaret Wade Campbell near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1857, Deland moved to Boston in 1880. She is known principally for the novel "John Ward, Preacher" and her 'Old Chester' books, based on communities where she grew up. She received a Doctorate of Letters from Bates College in 1920, and had a …

Fading Landscapes: The Culture Of Exile And The Open Road, Marc T. Rentschler

English Department: Traveling American Modernism (ENG 366, Fall 2018)

This article seeks to analyze the complex relationship between material culture and hegemonic constructions of ideology along with their tendency to make their way into larger institutional apparatuses of society. For this study this interaction is explored through the symbolic construction of the american roadways and a selective. Drawing on Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Baudrillard’s America, and William Least Heat Moon’s Blue Highways, this work attempts to combine critical perspectives on the formation of public space with the events of these works in order to formulate how the ideological values which are subsumed by the representational space of ‘The …

Tracing Writer/Reader Identity In, And In Response To, Queer Latinx Autohistoria-Teorìa, Corrina Wells

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

This project examines how diverse representation changes the discourse around queer latinx identities. This project extends theories of representation that show how a text changes the imaginary of the reader through a two-part methodology. First, through explicating Spit & Passion and A Cup of Water Under My Bed, this project examines how these texts construct a readers’ imaginary. Then, through a corresponding qualitative assessment on readers’ responses to the texts, this project identifies the extent to which the texts change the beliefs and understandings of a small group of students. Articulating an ecology of identity using the texts under examination, …

Out Of Many: Multiplicity And Divisions In America Today, Camille Goodison, Racquel Goodison

Publications and Research

An anthology of new U.S. fiction and nonfiction, as well as transnational writing. A wide variety of fiction writers and essayists describe what it means to be American in a world of changing borders. A bright showcase of progressive literary style, personality and content. Contributors include Tope Folarin, Alia Yunis, Maurice Emerson Decaul, Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich, Patricia Park, Sonny Singh, Aisha Sabatani Sloan, Zeeva Bukai, Courtney Zoffness, and others.

Good Game, Greyory Blake

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis and its corresponding art installation, Lessons from Ziggy, attempts to deconstruct the variables prevalent within several complex systems, analyze their transformations, and propose a methodology for reasserting the soap box within the display pedestal. In this text, there are several key and specific examples of the transformation of various signifiers (i.e. media-bred fear’s transformation into a political tactic of surveillance, contemporary freneticism’s transformation into complacency, and community’s transformation into nationalism as a state weapon). In this essay, all of these concepts are contextualized within the exponential growth of new technologies. That is to say, all of these semiotic …

From The Boston Stone Jail, 1775, Jean C. O'Connor

The Montana English Journal

Primary sources can open doors to stories we can only imagine. I share the discovery of an actual letter written by American patriot James Lovell in September of 1775, the more startling because in my research for my historical fiction novel The Cause I had already read a clerk-written version of the letter. I encourage teachers to utilize primary sources to entice their students’ development of narrative, and offer links to excellent sources from the Montana Historical Society.

Secrets On Morgan Hill: A Story Of An Unlikely Friendship Amid An Apartheid South, Camille Kleidysz-Ferreira

Master of Arts in American Studies Capstones

Introduction

The Burden of History and Fiction

“How much of the burden of history can fiction bear?” – Margaret Walker

Comprehensive historical research can often become the inspiration for art. The greatest pieces of historical fiction, are a result of years of historic scholarship before the creation of a compelling historical narrative or fiction piece. Through my two-year ethnographic study and collection of oral histories of the black community, surrounding the historic Bethel A.M.E. church in Acworth, Georgia, I was told a story about a friendship between two little girls who remained friends until the end of their lives. What …

The Founding Farce, Or, The Lost Debates Of The Constitutional Convention: Being An Account Of The Discovery Of An Overlooked Document, And The Loss Again, And Rediscovery Of Said Document, Wherein Is Written Unheard Proceedings In The Crafting Of The Glorious Constitution Of These 13 Colonies (Which Has Lately Been Misplaced), Alexander W. Pickens

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

The Constitutional Convention was shrouded in mystery, yet America has been confidently given a narrative of what went on behind closed doors in Philadelphia. Though most of our authentic records of what went on were written by men assumed to be reliable, the deeper one reads into history the more unreliable they become, recent evidence even suggesting that James Madison altered his notes on the Convention years after it was concluded. What if our perception of history is flawed and the Convention was not the glorious meeting of intellectual giants but instead a town hall full of immature behemoths who …

Civil Rights Gone Wrong: Racial Nostalgia, Historical Memory, And The Boston Busing Crisis In Contemporary Children’S Literature, Lynnell L. Thomas

American Studies Faculty Publication Series

On May 14, 2014, three white Boston city councilors refused to vote to approve a resolution honoring the sixtieth anniversary of Brown v. the Board of Education because, as one remarked, “I didn’t want to get into a debate regarding forced busing in Boston.” Against the recent national proliferation of celebrations of civil rights milestones and legislation, the controversy surrounding the fortieth anniversary of the court decision that mandated busing to desegregate Boston public schools speaks volumes about the historical memory of Boston’s civil rights movement. Two highly acclaimed contemporary works of children’s literature set during or inspired by Boston’s …

A Theory Of Veteran Identity, Travis L. Martin

Theses and Dissertations--English

More than 2.6 million troops have deployed in support of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Still, surveys reveal that more than half feel “disconnected” from their civilian counterparts, and this feeling persists despite ongoing efforts, in the academy and elsewhere, to help returning veterans overcome physical and mental wounds, seek an education, and find meaningful ways to contribute to society after taking off the uniform. This dissertation argues that Iraq and Afghanistan War veterans struggle with reassimilation because they lack healthy, complete models of veteran identity to draw upon in their postwar lives, a problem they’re working through collectively …

Metaphysics Of Mania: Edgar Allan Poe's And Herman Melville's Rebranding Of Madness During The American Asylum Movement, Alexis Renfro

All Master's Theses

The “madman’s” place throughout history has tended to be a mystery on both ontological and epistemological levels. From the perception of the madman as a crazed oracle in the sixteenth century to the perception of the madman as a criminal in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the nineteenth-century madman was even more difficult to define. Because insanity was deemed the inverse of bourgeois normativity and conservative moral standards, those categorized as mad in America during mid-1800s were institutionalized in reformed mental asylums, establishments which sought to homogenize human behavior through moral treatment. Both Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville drew …

Thematic Bibliography To New Work On Immigration And Identity In Contemporary France, Québec, And Ireland, Dervila Cooke

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

What’S In A Name?: The Evolution Of The Female Identity In Shalimar The Clown, Jessica Barksdale

Undergraduate Conference on Literature, Language, and Culture

No abstract provided.