14942 research outputs found
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The Vanished Worlds of Konstantine Baker: A Novel
No full textThe Vanished Worlds of Konstantine Baker is novel that mixes elements of speculative, literary, and Southern fiction. The novel’s protagonist, K, learns when he is fifteen that his life exists in a time loop. When he reaches the age of sixty-five, he will be brought back to the summer he is fifteen where the older and younger K meet. This discovery as well as meeting his older self, has a dramatic impact on K as does reading the memoirs of the previous Ks, which reveal a series of different lives experienced. When the older K decides to alter the course of events in K’s timeline, the ripple effects end up traumatic, and lead K to the conviction that he should try to live a life that does not impact or influence what he deems as the normal course of events. When he meets another person like him, a woman named Silvina, this idea comes into conflict with her belief that what they have been given is a gift, one that should be used to make the world better. This conflict between ideals is at the heart of the novel, and both. K and Silvina’s adherence to their own beliefs create problems for both of them. By the novel’s final section, which takes place on the eve of K’s return to the summer he turns fifteen, K must confront the consequences of his decisions and determine whether the life he has lived was the right choice or not.Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)Englis
The Mustard Seed
No full textThis verse novel chronicles the daily observations, revelations, and reservations of a genderqueer protagonist who leaves academia to work for better pay at a local grocery store.Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)Englis
Mistress of Restraint
No full textThese poems deal with a marriage between a man and a woman and the disintegration of that marriage. Most of the poems are told from the perspective of the wife as she makes sense of her changing roles and titles. There is a shift toward the end of the thesis when she grows tired of speaking for the two of them. It is here where the poems shift from first person to third person.Master of Fine Arts (MFA)Englis
Whenever You Eat This
No full textThis collection of poetry explores food as its primary subject. It is especially interested in the intersections of food and faith, food and romantic love, and food and ecology. The book employs received poetic forms alongside free verse and prose poems. It seeks nothing less than to establish, perhaps for the first time ever, an enduring poetics of gastronomy.Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)Englis
We Are Everyone You Know
No full textThe dissertation for my PhD is a composite novel called We Are Everyone You Know. The novel is set in a small town that is neither rural nor suburban, which, like the characters, defies classification. The cast rotates. Main characters become supporting characters in subsequent chapters and vice versa. I employ this strategy so the reader is able to see each character as an individual, that even those who seem to be in the background are living complex lives. The novel explores such themes as poverty, gentrification, the loss of innocence caused by a corrupt world, and the inability of people to realize their identities when the promises of youth turn out to be lies. Each chapter or story is told from either a different point of view or in a different style or genre. While the novel as a whole is grounded around a family and group of friends in a small town, the pieces of the story range in form from simple realism, to modernism, to post-modernism, to surrealism, to meta-fiction. I experiment with genres ranging from crime drama, to disaster survival, to sports comedy, to kung-fu epic, and more. Interspersed between the genre pieces are realist stories of a new lost generation—thirty-somethings who are stuck in permanent adolescence, who work at soul-crushing jobs, and who find neither the shining future that was promised to them in their youth nor the comfortable mediocrity of their parents’ lives. For this project I have been particularly inspired by the works of Louise Erdrich, James Joyce, and Jennifer Egan.Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)Englis
lovehanger
No full textlovehanger, a creative dissertation of poetry, addresses issues of identity, self-concept, and psychological health throughout the years of a child growing into a young woman. The collection in its five sections offers an intimate personal account of the speaker’s development from childhood to adulthood, focusing on the attempt to understand how meaning and value of the self are constructed. These poems hope to articulate a sense of conscious and unconscious anxiety stemming from an unclear and unstable sense of self, which begins in childhood and deepens as the speaker participates in social institutions that assume traditional, hierarchical, and preconceived modes of being, perceiving, and thinking. For this speaker, social institutions such as education, dating, career-planning, and even health cast the shadows of her psyche into stark relief. When she finds herself falling astray of society’s worn paths, her ambivalence pushes her to unhealthy extremes and reveals unhealed psychological and emotional wounds. A lack of self-understanding and self-regard drive her psyche into further fragmentation, although even within this bleakness she rejects the idea that life is inherently worthless. These poems, spanning several decades in the speaker’s life, posit various hypotheses for how a self might develop, interact with others, and integrate with society, but in the end offer little certainty, ultimately accepting this failure to achieve stability and wholeness as a powerful new ethos for existing in the world.Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)Englis
Cold Witness: A Short Story Collection
No full textMy short story collection, Cold Witness, ties the themes of water, women, and home together in every story. My aesthetic weaves in and out of realist fiction, Southern gothic fiction, absurd realism, and autofiction. My stories often include limping relationships, dirty jobs, violence, corporeality, decay, and fleeting but defining moments. Other themes include fragile people and places (like the elderly and the Outer Banks of North Carolina, my home), the environment and ecology, and the indifference of nature as witness to human vulnerability.Master of Fine Arts (MFA)Englis
Girls' Trip
No full textGirls’ Trip is a collection of eleven short stories about reality TV, pop culture and entertainment. The stories blend fabulist storytelling and realism to comment on the exchange of viewer/entertainer intimacy, conflict as currency, voyeurism, and the price of staying relevant in the entertainment industry. Other themes include: motherhood, obsession, family trauma, substance abuse, and female friendship. Throughout the collection, characters showcase the most unpleasant parts of themselves (authentic and contrived) on camera to satisfy an audience, please a network and preserve their fame. Girls’ Trip aims to investigate these characters’ motivations, thoughts, fears, and imagines the outlandish futures of reality stardom several generations down the line.Master of Fine Arts (MFA)Englis
Social Media and Freedom: Exploring Human Connections
No full textThis dissertation discusses social media as it relates to human communication and connection. Topics covered include digital identity, personality development, expectations, friendship, and intimacy. The project will also address the phenomenon of short-form composition, and will relate this original term both to social media and to composition pedagogy. The dissertation also seeks to correlate the widespread usage of social media with an evaluation of whether society is more or less free because of its proliferation. The information presented and conclusions drawn are based on a small-scale research study, secondary research, and the personal observations and experiences of the author.Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)Englis
Orbital
No full textOrbital explores how and why we circle around both awareness and the bodies that surround us. The term “orbital” compresses into a single word the mathematics of calculating the movement of electrons around an atom’s nucleus—a process far more complex than the simple ring structures we learn in science class. In the spirit of its title, my manuscript probes the ways in which people circle around—and occasionally collide with—one another or with the self-knowledge we would rather avoid, especially the challenges posed by gender and sexuality. Moreover, when we are female, queer, or otherwise outside the “standard” orbit, our trajectories can veer off into isolation or thrust us into hostile encounters. The poems gaze into the landscape full of microscopic revelations only the deep observer may see. My collection traverses space and earth, science and psyche as it grapples with how, when we are Othered, we give our lives shape.Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)Englis