Some of the material in is restricted to members of the community. By logging in, you may be able to gain additional access to certain collections or items. If you have questions about access or logging in, please use the form on the Contact Page.
Some of the material in is restricted to members of the community. By logging in, you may be able to gain additional access to certain collections or items. If you have questions about access or logging in, please use the form on the Contact Page.
This project engages Antonin Artaud's highly influential critical volume, The Theater and Its Double, through the dual critical lenses of Psychoanalysis and Deconstruction in order to generate responses to questions posed by Artaud’s...
Unless a language user's position in language is authenticated--that is, unless the "I" has a tenable sense of what it occupies--language is vitiated as a means of communication: it isn't right between the "I"s. Such is the primary...
The easiest way to make a living as a poet is to write fiction. That is: When you visit the museum that is the African equivalent of Auschwitz, the hallways are not lined with piles of long hair of Jewish girls or luggage stamped...
In SALVATION PHILOSOPHY FOR TODAY, Melinda Wilson explores questions and grievances regarding feminism, everyday sexism, motherhood, fertility, marriage, love and domesticity. The poems approach and unearth our darkest appetites in...
In this manuscript, I explore issues of masculinity, mental illness, and spirituality—often using the form of elegy. Many of the elegies in this manuscript are in conversation with critic Jahan Ramazani's arguments about elegies: "the...
Water Hammer is a collection of poems that explore what it means to be online in the 21st century. Taking inspiration from the rapid pace of social media feeds—and the mysterious workings of the predictive algorithms that dictate our...
The following poems focus upon fundamental experiences with technologies, physical forms, obsessions, and ideas in order to reveal an inherent unity in humanity. These “artifacts” are found in ancient, but also contemporary, contexts, ...
Black Nova is a collection of poems written before, during, and after the death of the poet's mother. Split into three sections, each section represents a construction of identity through the fictional and nonfictional, through...
The poems of Willing draw on my personal experience and family history to explore the metaphors, mythologies, and lived experiences of Mormonism. As a whole, the book is framed by Joseph Smith's declaration that one must "search into and...
His Visible Bones follows its speaker from active illness and addiction through recovery and into a long-term relationship. The poems focus on lived experiences of queerness, mental illness, addiction, recovery, and romance. They operate...
"Representation and the Modern Female Subject" examines the socio-cultural work of the fictional woman painter in novels by women authors writing in or about the United States between the years 1870-1930. I focus on representations of...
The poems in Dear Bright explore the possibly of love in a deeply anxious world. They are often epistolary, addressing the eponymous Bright through a series of imagined universes in which the speaker and Bright can create and recreate...
In this dissertation that discusses the American novels by William Faulkner, Nathanael West, and Richard Wright, I delineate the concept of modernist empathy as a radical urge for intersubjective immediacy, while adjusting the concept of...
“The dislocation of man in the modern age”: The Pilgrim Condition and Mid-Twentieth Century American Catholic Literature highlights the ways in which the major Catholic voices in mid-twentieth century America—Flannery O’Connor, Walker...
In A Year With Swollen Appendices, Brian Eno writes, The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white,...
Overwriting Literature and Other Acts of Cultural Terrorism in the Control Era examines American experimental writers and artists who compose in what Gilles Deleuze called the control era. This project locates the beginning of the...
There is a Guidebook in the Hands of the World Around You is a collection of poems separated into three sections. The first section includes a long poem which makes the argument "All Art is Buddhist, the second section is a series of...
The poems in The Lubbock I Carry primarily operate according to traditional free-verse poetic convention, working to render, as a means of both illumination and interrogation, the emotional and physical landscapes of the past, how they...
This project seeks to examine the way in which modernist novelists John Dos Passos, Claude McKay, Louis Aragon, and Virginia Woolf depict urban spaces in the early-twentieth century metropolises of New York, Paris, and London. These...
Flowers as Mind Control is a debut collection of poems that mixes the Welsh notion of Hiraeth and memories with a fiery, insatiable need to "power through." It also blends narrative elements with lyric ones. Here I try for a raw edge...
With reference to her poetry, prose, and visual arts from the 1910s to the 1950s, this dissertation considers Mina Loy’s representation of grotesque bodies within the context of the theory and artistic practice of early twentieth century...
There is no namesake figure in the dissertation manuscript, Barnburner, and no single "Barnburner" poem appears. Instead, the poems reflect a specific modern mindset. The concept "barnburner" was popularized in the mid-nineteenth century...
A Wedding of Jackals is a creative dissertation in poetry. It follows a queer speaker who, after the end of his marriage, tries and fails to restore a relationship with his estranged father. In evaluating and moving through these...
Telling the Bees is a collection of poems that approaches grief, confession, tradition, and community from a queer perspective. It uses a tradition Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier describes in his 1858 poem of the same name in which...
Originally Nothing is a poetry collection that traces the intersection of immigrant experience, place, obsession, distance, loss, and avoidance through a balance of lyric, narrative, minimalist, and serial modes. The book’s core second...
This Dissertation includes my first book of poetry, Earnest, Earnest? (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020), winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, and work from what I hope will be my second book. I refer to this second...
Nature has long been a container for the desires of humankind and the stories we tell about nature are stories that render it transparent and passive. In his book, We Are the Weather Jonathan Safran Foer’s examines how eating meat is...
The following collection of poems represent the author's best attempts are writing and cultivating poems which continue the creative tradition of the "Seriously Funny" as defined in the anthology of the same name, edited by David Kirby...
The King of Ketamine is a thesis made up of 41 poems, through which I explore such themes as the prison system, child neglect, alcoholism, body positivity, death, love, and an array of other emotions. There are three sections contained...
With the theme of leaving home to return home, my dissertation starts with my memory of being born like a stranger in the extended family and growing up as an only child in Wuhan, the hometown’s history and current struggle examined...
This dissertation project, “Museums of the Mind: The Ekphrastic Imagination in the African American Literary Tradition, ” at its core is a project of redress and reclamation that seeks to uncover the connection between the non-inclusive...
Andre Breton states poetry is “a room of marvels.” Every poem in Space Struck could be considered its own room—heck, stanza is Italian for room—with tall doors and portraits of influential poets (and scientists and saints and...
Part coming of age, part battle cry, this debut poetry collection explores the many roles women play, for themselves, for others, and traces one woman’s struggle to emerge and transform herself, while navigating the expectations and...
“Book of Soft Joys” is a book-length manuscript of poetry. The poems are somewhat confessional, but their purpose goes wider than the speaker’s individual experiences, as they also examine community, romantic bonds, and how the animal...
Some of the material in is restricted to members of the community. By logging in, you may be able to gain additional access to certain collections or items. If you have questions about access or logging in, please use the form on the Contact Page.
