Other English Language and Literature Commons^™

2025 Persimmon Creek - Full Journal, Beth Keefauver, Wayne C. Robbins

Persimmon Creek

Persimmon Creek runs through the Susan B. Jacobs Arboretum, an oasis of nature in the center of our dynamic and thriving campus community at the University of South Carolina Upstate. My colleague Wayne Robbins and I were recently tasked with bringing back the student-edited literary journal formerly known as Writer’s Inc. Dr. Marilyn Knight stood at the helm of Writer’s Inc. for nearly twenty years, and when she retired, the journal left with her. We thought it would be an opportune time to pay homage to the legacy of Writer’s Inc. by renaming and reimagining our home department’s literary journal. …

Theodore B. Taverner, Joshua Holt

Persimmon Creek

A war veteran with PTSD wakes on abandoned train tracks, a gun in hand, blood on his clothes, and a body by his feet. Disoriented and haunted by fragmented memories, he struggles to piece together the truth as sirens close in.

Diversity In Publishing: Does Author Identity Affect Author Treatment In The North American Fiction Publishing Industry?, Chloe Comeau

Academic Leadership Journal in Student Research

The fiction publishing industry has a long history of promoting only straight, white, cisgender voices in the books they publish and the staff they hire. This study employed the Delphi method to investigate the connection between author identity and author treatment in publishing. In a series of questionnaires, 11 participants answered questions and shared their experiences with diversity in publishing. The results indicated that sexism, homophobia, and racism all exist in the industry, and author identity impacts author treatment in North American fiction publishing. Moreover, the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality of authors combined with publishing’s long history of …

Payton's Final Master's Portfolio, Payton Boshears

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

Here is my final Master's Portfolio. I did not have specialization for the English program, so for the portfolio I chose four different projects that represent the variety of courses I have taken during my time here at BGSU.

Amazing Stories: Science Fiction’S Inception In Interwar Pulp Magazines, Zachary Doe

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the creation of the science fiction genre through the pulp magazines of the 1920s. Hugo Gernsback, the creator of Amazing Stories is the first to title the budding genre as science fiction. Through his editorials, one can see a desire to create a wide community heavily involved in genre creation. By exploring these initial stories and editorials we can better understand how science fiction began as well as evolved into what it is today.

Position: A Fiction Collection, Joelle Byars

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The creative thesis “Position: A Fiction Collection” is composed of sixteen short and flash fiction stories. The critical introduction to this thesis looks at my journey as a writer that led to its genesis. I analyze the methods used in my writing process, consider the ways in which instruction and passive reading influences what drives me to write, as well as delving into how the personal informs the creative. I discuss the themes of my stories, gender, sexuality, socio-economic class, toxic relationships, and mental illness, and how they emerged in this collection. A creative sample that touches on all of …

Listening To Earth Stories: An Interview With Swarnalatha Rangarajan, Sufina K, Bhuvaneswari R

The Goose

In this interview with Dr. Swarnalatha Rangarajan, a well known Indian ecocritic and a pioneer of Indian ecocriticism, discusses ecocriticism, her novel The Final Instructions, and a wide range of Indian environmental writing.

The Sting In The Green City, Nicole Tsakoumagos

ETD Archive

In an irradiated, alternate earth, where a mysterious supernatural phenomenon caused a near-apocalypse, the human race is back on it’s feet. Four major cities dominate the landscape: New Sparta, The Mel, The Nocturn and Oz. In the first installment of “The Sting” series, explore the emerald, Greene Mob run metropolis, Oz. Gun-slinging, Ex-mercenary Kyra `The Sting’ Lee is living quietly in the outer part of the city with her dog, Doogie. The only family she has are the Castellanoses, a Greek four-part ensemble that own Kyra’s favorite greasy spoon diner. Maria Castellanos is Kyra’s best friend and her seemingly unobtainable …

"The Mouth Of The Void," "Hum", Hannah L. Comeriato

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

This project presents two distinct pieces of short fiction, linked through intentional stylized language, grammatical patterns, and a sectionalized narrative structure. Each individual piece of short fiction functions independently – as separate and distinct from the other, with no explicit connection in content (i.e. recurring characters, parallel timelines etc.). However, each narrative also displays a kind of complex interaction with the other, each crafted to produce, when read alongside one another, a shared indistinct aesthetic and emotional experience. This aesthetic and emotional experience is crafted, specifically, by the use of stylized verbs, the em-dash, and alternating dialogue-based and image-based sections. …

Course Syllabus (Sp14) Coli 211 Literature & Psychology: "The Sublime, The Uncanny, And The Imagination", Christopher Southward

Comparative Literature Faculty and Student Scholarship

Course Description:

In a world in which what counts as knowledge is predominantly restricted to the measurable and the calculable, those elements of human experience which elude and exceed these parameters are often ignored and discounted. In this course, we will examine questions of the sublime, the uncanny, and the speculative as treated in literature, psychoanalysis, and philosophy in order to think and write critically about them. Here, we will consider the possible extent to which an openness to such experiences can enrich our lives.

Byzantium 2010: Cal Poly's 20th Literary Annual, Mateja Lane, Beth Shirley

English

The concept behind this year's theme, "Bold," actually came from concepts our art director, Melissa, showed us during our first meeting. We had tossed around ideas of "Timeless," "Enduring," and "Vintage," amidst our discussions of how in the world we were going to raise money for the journal this year. With the economy tanking, we knew art programs like ours would be the first to suffer. We wanted to find a theme that captured how we felt about art and how art made us feel. We kept coming back to the same idea: We have to just be bold and …