Fiction Commons^™

Untitled Screenplay, Lora A. Herman

University Honors Theses

The following document is a working copy of an untitled fictional screenplay in which the story and characters are the original work of Lora A. Herman.

In 2082 North America, the United States no longer exists as a governing entity. The vast majority of the landscape that once comprised the USA is unlivable due to irreparable advances in climate change -- flood, fire, freeze, and drought.

The remaining society has restructured itself to focus less on controlling its population and their free will, and to instead focus on maintaining the integrity of and resources for the man-made contained communities that …

Sixth Form, Adrienne Barton

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

The ten stories in this short story collection explore the liminal spaces created by certain physical spaces as well as times in the characters’ lives. The stories are largely related to a school environment, and the relationships and experiences that are unique to the players living and moving within that context. How much are the relationships and actions of the characters influenced by the setting. What weight do institutional forces and tradition carry in the characters’ lives, and how do they exploit it for their own will or conform?

Crossroads And Crow Feathers, Travis E. Bowman

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

This thesis uses the short story form to examine the influence of myth, magick, and the supernatural on the interstitial areas of the United States. The power of words as a force for change figures prominently in these stories. This thesis looks at the monstrous as it moves in the darkness and in the minds of humans, but also at the tremendous depths of compassion and courage we find in ourselves when faced with monstrous situations.

Road Closed To Thru Traffic, Jordan C. Crook

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

This collection of nine fiction stories explores the journeys of men and women who find themselves unable to continue on the path they've set for themselves. So often, the roads we follow are dictated by social conditioning. This collection considers how are paths are predetermined by social norms and follows the characters as they react to unexpected obstacles encountered in common scenarios. Will they forge new paths? Turn back? Or will they take a detour and return to their original road?

The First Rule Of Improv, John M. Gilder

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

The First Rule of Improv is a collection of fictional short stories concerned with loss, life’s unfairness, the weight of the past, and how people succeed or fail in coping. Each story explores these notions through its characters, who vary wildly in terms of both dramatic severity and success in the face of adversity, with the first rule of improv—to accept and build—being suggested by the author as the healthiest manner of approach, if not necessarily the easiest.

Undertow, Adam Karlin

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

A short story collection that explores themes of culture, history, race, movement, stagnancy, and freedom. All stories are connected by elements of water, swimming, rivers, or wetlands. All contain characters seeking to escape their circumstances, with varying degrees of success. For some characters, the arc of their development lays in their movement; for others, it lays in their learning to live with a lack of movement.

Dark Smoke Rising, Matthew Knutson

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

A collection of short fiction set in and around Southern California.

“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 …

The Half-Lives We Were Living, Chelsey K. Shannon

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

This short story collection deals with themes of race, kinship, desire, subjectivity, and appearance vs. reality.

Philadelphia Stories, Leigh A. Stuart

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

These stories provide a look at a Philadelphia family over decades.

Writing A Speculative Fiction Novel, Ashlyn Victoria

Honors Projects

This Honors Project is a speculative fiction novel, and its setting includes topics like artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and sustainability. Though it's not yet complete (which was expected), I was able to write forty-four pages (the equivalent of more than one-hundred pages using the standard 12-pt, double-spaced Times New Roman font) over the duration of the project. A synopsis is attached, but the manuscript remains unpublished; revealing it could reduce the novel's chances of publication in the future.

Mutts: A Collection Of Short Fiction, Shane E. Page

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

This thesis begins with a critical introduction about narrative closure, as opposed to traditional narrative resolution, in fiction. I cite the work of John Gardner, T.S. Eliot, Milan Kundera, and Charles Baxter to explore the functions of motif, objective correlative, and symmetrical composition, focusing on how these three ideas inform effective characterization. I argue that narrative closure achieves equally if not more satisfying endings by prioritizing characterization above all other aspects of plot. After the critical introduction, you will find works of short fiction and flash fiction. A common theme among the longer, more traditional stories is the process through …

The Resurrection Of Nora O'Brien, Abigail Elizabeth Benson

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

There is a cave, hidden in the hills, that brings the dead back to life. Its power is the driving force behind the blood feud between the Walshes and the O’Briens that lasts for generations. Jeremiah Walsh, a young boy growing up just after the civil war, is entrusted with the location of the cave and its secrets. But when he kills to protect his family legacy, he is stricken with guilt and questions his loyalties. His story parallels Nora O’Brien’s, a teenage girl who moves to the Ozarks with her family after the death of her grandfather. As she …

The Boys With The Spare Keys, Katelyn Elizabeth Grisham

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

As human beings, we are constantly losing something: our keys, our wallets, our credits cards, or the mate to our favorite pair of socks. But what if you lose something that cannot be replaced, something that will impact your life in a permanent way? This collection looks at what it means to lose something life-altering; our sense of self, our friendships, our planned futures, our grasp on reality. Some things cannot be replaced. From trust fund kids to a dad preparing a Christmas tree for his daughter, this collection will explore the idea of what we can (or cannot) afford …

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 …

For Cheryl: The Long And The Short Of It, Rachel Lebo

Graduate School of Art Theses

Short stories are an indirect way of creating a truth by showing instead of telling. They are a way to observe and communicate a single idea. A short story for me is a vehicle for hiding my truth behind a character, exploring myself in the safety of an identity that is not my own. When I read Chunky in Heat, author A.M. Homes and I hide together behind her character, Cheryl, and find solidarity.

The following writings, paintings, and sculptures are collaborations between myself and the women of short story fiction. Those women being the authors, the subjects, and …

Promethia 2018-19

Promethia

No abstract provided.

Things That Happened, Christian Chase

Senior Theses

This creative writing thesis contains a collection of short stories by Christian Chase.

• A Whole Lot of Nothing
• Grand Artistic Vision
• Architecture
• Hanging Around
• Silent Life
• A Special Dread
• Snowbound

"Are You There, Dog? It's Me, Riley": Poems, Riley Christine O'Connell

Canterbury Scholars

The end product of Riley O'Connell's Canterbury Fellowship, these poems, ranging in topic from family and loss to love and dogs, were composed over the course of Riley's four years at SCU, included but not limited to her time at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford University, where she taught creative writing therapy for her Canterbury.

Decolonizing Playwriting Through Indigenous Ceremonial Performances, Jay B. Muskett

Theatre & Dance ETDs

This dissertation attempts to express the importance of storytelling within the Indigenous Theater framework. It does so by first analyzing the progression of the writer’s unique upbringing and analyzing the influences of story upon an indigenous identity. I will also attempt to describe the aesthetics of Native Theater along two lines of methodology which includes praxis described and developed by Hanay Geiogamah and Rolland Meinholtz. I will also explain how the script 1n2ian tries to follow those concepts of Native Theater to create a ceremonial performance that uses a blending of both methodologies.

Slotus, Alison F. Huntley, Michael F.X. Daley

Honors Thesis

When a paranoid, image-obsessed woman becomes Second Lady of the United States, she will protect herself and her family from the (often non-existent) eyes of the press no matter what - despite her three step-children’s protests.

Eulogy, Kim T. Allison

Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Particular to the three short stories in Eulogyis the importance of place, as they are set in the fictional location of Potter’s Island, which is based on my childhood sense of Florida.Contradictions, complications, and disappointments can be uniquely tied to a sense of place. My own parents and grandparents moved to Florida when I was three years old, but where they lived, how they lived and worked, and what dreams they pursued was only partially an immigrant’s story of wanting a better life.

The past has weight—a weight that must be dealt with, for real people, and for …

A Sign Of The Times, Zoe Roswell

CURCE Annual Undergraduate Conference

I drafted this short story for an assignment in my Creative Writing 102z course based on techniques we learned in class including estrangement but also it was inspired, in part, by Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie”. Williams’ play touches on certain familial mental health struggles in each character that were deep rooted and I wanted to communicate the same effect. My story revolves around the present life and childhood of Charles, an underground boxer, who was orphaned at a young age due to both of his parents’ struggles with mental illness. Charles experienced his mother’s mental deterioration before and following …

Clean Slate, Richard Dinges Jr.

Westview

No one wonders why we return each morning, eyes half-shuddered, mouths yawning

On The Move, Jack Cooper

Westview

Arriving I caught the bus to the beach under a blue and white sky and sat behind five or six riders

Your Girlfriend Is A Boozy Animorph, Henry D. Goldkamp

Westview

My shadow nearly dodges your ghost for an iced glass, again a gin to toast.

A Certain Age, Anne Babson

Westview

The body churns out its red butter every Twenty-eight days but spends the whole cow to do it. The skin still glows a little, but blood vessels ruddy As the spaceship face fissures, approaching warp speed.

Ballad Of St. Stephen's Green, James B. Nicola

Westview

While loitering in St. Stephen’s Green, Watching the youth pass by, I spied an elder gentleman In a blue suit and bright tie

Beetles In Moonlight, Gordon Grice

Westview

This rooted cliff is riddled and pocked. On August nights, you can watch the moonlight clatter into shards that move apart and come together to couple.

Blimps Are Cool, Molly Sizer

Westview

Today we saw the Goodyear Blimp. It flew above the roofs of town.