Fiction Commons^™

The Beauty Within Us, Areli C. Hernandez

First-Gen Voices: Creative and Critical Narratives on the First-Generation College Experience

This piece of prose, inspired by Chapter 23 of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, tells the story of a simple, yet vivacious get-together of migrant Latino workers, exploring the beauty within us--members of the migrant farm worker community.

Mbiti And Achebe On The Forward Movement Through The Past, Chima Anyadike

The Journal of Traditions & Beliefs

No abstract provided.

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 …

Diario De Perla Jimenez, Brenda Dorantes

World Languages and Cultures

The aim of this project is to present the effect of the immigration issue in the United States, with a direct focus in San Luis Obispo, and including a spread of intercultural knowledge between the Hispanic and the Caucasian community. Through a fictional short story, the manifestation of these ideas will relate to current events occurring in our society today. These events focus primarily on immigration in California, deportation issues, socioeconomic issues in Mexico, and the cultural barrier seen in Mexican and American cultures; expressed through the main character: a young college student named Perla.

My primary goal in completing …

A Narrative Of The Torments And Unlikely Freedom Of A Child Slave, Hanna Taylor

Slave Narrative - Short Stories

This short story was written as part of the Slave Narrative project, created for an African American Literature class taught by Allison Harris in fall 2015. Students created stories based on the perspectives of real individuals documented in the UM Libraries Special Collections’ Slave Documents Collection.

Betsey Simons: Freedom At What Cost?, Anthony Maristany

Slave Narrative - Short Stories

This short story was written as part of the Slave Narrative project, created for an African American Literature class taught by Allison Harris in fall 2015. Students created stories based on the perspectives of real individuals documented in the UM Libraries Special Collections’ Slave Documents Collection.

Earth And Ashes, Michele Mobley

Slave Narrative - Short Stories

This short story was written as part of the Slave Narrative project, created for an African American Literature class taught by Allison Harris in fall 2015. Students created stories based on the perspectives of real individuals documented in the UM Libraries Special Collections’ Slave Documents Collection.

Her Taste Of Freedom, Orlandra Dickens

Slave Narrative - Short Stories

This short story was written as part of the Slave Narrative project, created for an African American Literature class taught by Allison Harris in fall 2015. Students created stories based on the perspectives of real individuals documented in the UM Libraries Special Collections’ Slave Documents Collection.

Nameless People, Keep Trekking, Brandi Webster

Slave Narrative - Short Stories

This short story was written as part of the Slave Narrative project, created for an African American Literature class taught by Allison Harris in fall 2015. Students created stories based on the perspectives of real individuals documented in the UM Libraries Special Collections’ Slave Documents Collection.

The Hill, Named After Some White Man, O’Shane Elliott

Slave Narrative - Short Stories

This short story was written as part of the Slave Narrative project, created for an African American Literature class taught by Allison Harris in fall 2015. Students created stories based on the perspectives of real individuals documented in the UM Libraries Special Collections’ Slave Documents Collection.

The Example, Nate Bradley

Slave Narrative - Short Stories

This short story was written as part of the Slave Narrative project, created for an African American Literature class taught by Allison Harris in fall 2015. Students created stories based on the perspectives of real individuals documented in the UM Libraries Special Collections’ Slave Documents Collection.

The Match, Marcus Hines

Slave Narrative - Short Stories

This short story was written as part of the Slave Narrative project, created for an African American Literature class taught by Allison Harris in fall 2015. Students created stories based on the perspectives of real individuals documented in the UM Libraries Special Collections’ Slave Documents Collection.

Gender And Self-Representation In Maya Angelou's Autobiography I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings 2014, Jay-Nel Steitz

Master's Theses

A voice that has been silenced for so long has much to say. Whether still confined or set free, the statement applies equally to both. The silenced voice wants not only to tell his or her story, but to share the life experiences which in turn reveal the identities of these individuals. These silenced voices then are not those of the oppressors, but the oppressed; and when an oppressor wants to share his or her story, the oppressed wants to tell their side of it as well. How can those labeled the marginalized outcasts of society express their feelings and …

Généalogies De L'Errance, Cilas Kemedjio

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

The city narrative is Chamoiseau’s most original contribution to the west Indian worldview. Such writing is based on the poetics of creolity and on the memory of housing, visible in the ancestral hatred of dogs by municipal workers. It also builds up intertextual links which question both Cesairian Negritude and Glissant’s poetics. The historical memory of Chamoiseau’s characters and the intertextual links in his works transform his writings on townlife into a form of consolidation of a literary tradition which renews the genealogy of wandering life.

Violence, Altérité De L’Intérieur Et Citoyenneté De Seconde Zone, Hervé Tchumkam

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

This article proposes an examination of violence in the French banlieues where riots erupted in the fall of 2005. Building on the observation that violence seems to have become the main determiner for banlieues inhabitants in the media and political discourses, the author scrutinizes Mohamed Razane’s Dit Violent (2006) in order to understand the status of young banlieue dwellers as outsiders within who are caught between second-class citizenship and exclusion from the French public political sphere. It is the contention of the author that the public construction of an enemy within imply shadows a socio-political reality, which is the invisibility …

« Banlieue Noire » : La Question Noire Dans La Littérature Urbaine Contemporaine, Stève Puig

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

Just as the “beur” movement started to flourish in France in the 80’s and the 90’s, a new question has emerged in French society in the last decade: the “black question”, which deals with the place of Africans and Antilleans in French society today. At the same time, a new literary genre has emerged: urban literature, which largely tackles themes related to the presence of Afro-caribbean people in metropolitan France. This article seeks to analyze three urban novels which take place in France, and more specifically how characters situate themselves regarding their Frenchness as the French government attempted to redefine …

The Apartment, Jeesun Choi

English Honors Projects

Lenn never considered herself one of the foreigners in Bangkok. She believed that she was different from her privileged peers at international schools, the posse of multinational corporation workers and the unwitting tourists with a colonial mindset. But when she meets Jon Hayes Wichasak, a wandering luk khrueng, her conviction starts to crumble. She begins to question her motives behind returning to Bangkok and her desire for intimacy. Set on the road that stretches from the Thai-Cambodian border to the Chao Praya River, the novella explores expatriation in the twenty-first century.

Aurora Bertrana: Una Trayectoria Literaria Marcada Por La Perspectiva De Género, Sílvia Roig

Theses and Dissertations--Hispanic Studies

My dissertation explores the narrative of Aurora Bertrana (1892-1974), an unknown writer today, but a successful and recognized female author in Catalonia and Spain during the mid 20^th century. The written work of Aurora Bertrana is almost never mentioned in manuals of literature. Relegated almost to absolute oblivion, her rich, intellectual writting has not received the attention it deserves. I have studied seventeen of Bertrana’s novels –practically her entire oeuvre– written in Catalan and Spanish, including the following excellent books that have escaped critical attention: Ariatea (1960), “El pomell de les violes” (mn.), L’inefable Philip (mn.), La aldea sin …

Langue Et Identité Chez Leïla Sebbar. Vers Une Filiation Renégociée, Cécilia W. Francis

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

In Je ne parle pas la langue de mon père (2003), L’arabe comme un chant secret (2010a), as well as in other components of her intimate prose, Leïla Sebbar reflects on her sense of dispossessed identity due to linguistic exile and an unknown heritage, resulting from ruptures in her paternal filiation. Drawing from the works of Jacques Derrida, Régine Robin and Simon Harel, which form the basis of our argumentation, we examine various dimensions of the severed parental bond. The article proposes to examine how Sebbar’s autobiographical writings, which incorporate scenarios dealing with legacy transmission expressed in terms of auditory …

Assunta And A Bag Of Food, Michael C. Vocino

Technical Services Faculty Publications

Life in the Mezzogiorno of Italy in the town of San Nicandro Garganico. The author briefly ponders his aging.

The Sacred Role Of Animal Beings In Iroquois Lore, Melissa J. Martinelli

English Theses

The act of storytelling provides a connection between the spiritual and physical spheres, and the Haudenosaunee people (more commonly recognized as Iroquois) utilize the oral narrative to convey the most sacred truths of their culture. In focusing primarily upon animals and animal beings, one can recognize the deep reverence traditional tribal members feel toward animals as certain legends seek to unite individuals with the spirits, personalities, and bodies of such creatures in narrative form. Too often animals are overlooked as “lesser” beings, yet in legends of the Iroquois they possess potent orenda (great power) that can help one achieve success …

Six Crosses, Michael C. Vocino

Technical Services Faculty Publications

Brief short story or observation about life in a small southern Italian town.

Aimé Césaire, Jacques Roumain Et L’Équivoque Du « Retour », Fritz Calixte

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

This article adresses the issue of return in Aimé Césaire and Jacques Roumain’s works. These writers, like many other Caribbean writers, have the particularity to update the old dream of return to homeland of the slaves transplanted to the New World. They reproduce by fiction the uncomfortable legacy of colonial societies. But the authors depicting this theme, usually do so in the form of an obsessive search for an ideal life to realize somewhere else than here. Jacques Roumain is in this tradition with a few additions. Aimé Césaire for his part, proposes in his notebook of a return to …

Parades Banlieusardes. El Hadj De Mamadou Mahmoud N’Dongo Et Les Identités Criminelles, Hervé Tchumkam

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

This article aims at understanding the relation between crime and identity formations in the French banlieues, especially in the wake of the 2005 urban riots. The essay performs a reading Mamadou N’Dongo’s novel El Hadj at the intersection of aesthetics and politics in order to scrutinize identity formations and related debates at stake in the prisons of poverty and oppression that constitute the banlieues whose inhabitants are the third or fourth generation of the heirs to African immigration in France. Ultimately, the paper contention is that what I call “banlieue parade” stands out as the new model of identity that …

Aimé Césaire : Un Être De Papier Dans Le Roman Antillais Contemporain, Édouard Mokwe

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

This paper aims to scrutinize various aspects in which Aimé Césaire is represented in the Caribbean novel as a personage, on the basis of Théorie et fiction by Milagros Ezquerro. We discover that, because of the great halo and notoriety of the eminent cultural and political figure that he was, Aimé Césaire has been put on stage by several Caribbean novelists. So Césaire has become a literary material, as well as a theme with various patterns.

Postures Féminines Dans L’Oeuvre De Calixthe Beyala, Carmen Husti-Laboye

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

The aim of this paper is to analyze, through the example of the feminist positions proposed by Calixthe Beyala in the novels she wrote between 1987 and 2007, the change of the novelist’s ideological and artistic perspective. It emphasizes the progressive loss of critical voice to the advantage of a new voice wishing to understand itself as individuality in its world. This study reveals the novelist’s contribution to the construction of a new position of the individual in the context of French social and cultural life.

Roland Brival Et Le Métissage:Un Nouvel Humanisme, Yolande Aline Helm

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

the article focalizes on roland Brival’s conception of “métissage” in his fiction texts:for him, it is synonymous to a new “humanism”. i revisit the theories which have permeate French caribbean literature (negritude, creolity, creolization). they are not synonymous of “métissage”; in fact, Brival’s vision is apart from the “creolity” movement.

Enquêtes Occultistes : Les Policiers Antillais Face Au Surnaturel, Françoise Cévaër

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

Being rational and Cartesian, the detective novel is often bound by powerful constraints which seem not very compatible with the supernatural and the fantastic often defining West Indian writing. Through the analysis of Martinican Patrick Chamoiseau’s Solibo Magnifique (1988) and Haitian Gary Victor’s Les cloches de la Brésilienne (2006), we will nevertheless see how well they work together, the irrational taking hold of the detective novel, leading paradoxically to the progressive elimination of Cartesian practices and challenging an exclusively rational portrayal of the world.

Silence As Insubordination: Friday And Michael K’S Wordless Weapon, A Post-Colonial Approach Toj.M. Coetzee’S Foe And Life And Times Of Michael K, Cody C. Mullins

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

While most critics of J.M. Coetzee’s fiction focus on silence as a weapon of imperial oppressive forces to subjugate representations of the "other," this thesis argues that, on the contrary, characters representing the traditional colonially oppressed use their silence as a weapon to in turn oppress the representations of imperial power. Through close reading explication and the use of the post-colonial theories of both Homi Bhabha and Edward Said, I focus on the inverted oppression, the shifting of identity, and the role of authorial authority within the novels, Foe and Life & Times of Michael K. By engaging in this …

Wind Through The Buffalo Grass: A Lakota Story Cycle, Paul A. Johnsgard

Paul Johnsgard Collection

Wind Through the Buffalo Grass: A Lakota Story Cycle is a narrative history of the Pine Ridge Lakota tribe of South Dakota, following its history from 1850 to the present day through historical events and through the stories of four fictional Lakota children, each related by descent and separated from one another by two generations. The ecology of the Pine Ridge region, especially its mammalian and avian wildlife, is woven into the stories of the children. Illustrated by the author, the book indudes drawings of Pine Ridge wildlife, regional maps, and Native American pictorial art. Appendices indude a listing of …