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.
American Thunder is a collection of narrative lyric poems broken into four sections according to thematic, tonal, and formal patterns and tied together as one manuscript by its speakers' concerns with community, violence, embodiment, ...
Sequent Introduction is a rejection of Richard Rorty's assertion that traditional philosophical problems are no longer of use. This text is strong poetry, introducing new vocabularies and metaphors to redescribe traditional philosophical...
This dissertation argues that the rhetoric of the transatlantic birth control movement has roots in the aesthetics of literary modernism. Not only did Anglo-American modernism and the birth control movement come of age at the same moment...
This study proposes a new interpretive apparatus to examine readers' experience of sensuality in their engagement with the language of fiction. Postmodern texts explore literature's ability to signify and materialize experiences, ...
The Gigolo Speaks in Tonguesis a collection of poems that chart an evolution of a self, consisting of coming-of-age poems that explore adolescent identity in the midst of religious fervor, paying homage to fanaticism, whether it be...
In this thesis I argue that Dos Passos's politics, at least as they are manifested in his writing, do not follow any one party line, and that producing novels which suggested a strict adherence to any single political group would be...
In the following paragraphs I shall attempt to deliver a mini-poetics, or at the very least, try to clarify the main components of my thought process when writing these poems. This is dangerous territory. It's all too easy to employ...
Anonymity is a novel divided into three partsâ"Halloween, Anonymity, and Revenge"âof four chapters each, a total of twelve chapters, each approximately thirty pages long. The four chapters of "Halloween" take place on the...
The poems in this thesis manuscript, The Dirty Lover's Mausoleum, are intended to alternately confuse and enlighten the reader. They span a spectrum of emotions, from sadness to anger, and from depression to hope, never dwelling for too...
This collection of poetry explores the intersections between devotion and loss, anger and guilt, grief and hope. While some poems are buttressed by straightforward narratives, others are more impressionistic. The poems strive for...
This creative thesis is a collection of poems that tells the story of three queer women in the late-nineteenth century American Midwest and the various ways they withstood their dangerous position on the margins of society. The book is...
Inscriptions is a collection of poems inspired, in part, by the twenty-four poem opening section of Walt Whitman's 1892 "Death-bed" edition of Leaves of Grass, entitled "Inscriptions." The poems of direct address in the first section...
Postmodern theorists and authors have long argued that history is a constructed system of knowledge, and therefore prone to error. Yet, despite memory's connection to history, postmodern authors have continued to utilize it as a stable...
This thesis addresses the relationship between American literature and terrorism in works written during the last two decades of the Twentieth Century. Don DeLillo and Tom Robbins have each written novels that explore the relationship...
The late nineteenth and early twentieth century in America is an interesting time when examined through the lens of property ownership and self ownership. Technically and legally, married women could own property and many had enjoyed...
Cole Fortan, the narrator of my novel, is a character who hates himself. He's dropped out of college at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater to be the friendly, neighborhood marijuana dealer, the guy all the kids at Eskimo Joe's go to...
The poems in this manuscript are an exploration of the post-divorce grieving process. They seek out a midpoint between grief and growth, the changing definition of family, and balance between self and Other. Each section of the...
A discourse on the language of James Joyce's Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, this thesis engages the roles of particular words in these texts for the purpose of demonstrating Joyce's later poetics. Often these words communicate their own...
Since everything is a text, if only we can learn how to read it, the prose poems in the dissertation manuscript Speak Universe are about interpretations, or rather, reinterpretations, or better still, productive misinterpretations of the...
This dissertation is a collection of poems that draws on a variety of 20th century American poetic traditions, as a way to pay homage to Walt Whitman's vision of America as a democracy of diversity. These poems celebrate the diversity...
This work is a collection of short stories entitled The Way of Mothers. This collection consists of four stories that were originally produced in writing workshops and two stories that I wrote on my own. I have heard many times a quote...
Modernist literature positioned itself as the principal imaginer of what I call a "perception sickness." One character after another--usually an artist or artist figure--suffers from a too-keen perception with dangerous consequences....
Of the Out of Style takes its title from Jimi Hendrix's afrofuturist proto-prog rock masterpiece "1983…(A Merman I Should Turn to Be)." As a collection the poems, as Hendrix puts it in song, take a last look / at the killing noise / of...
In Frank O'Hara's 'Personism: A Manifesto' he famously wrote, when discussing writing poetry, that 'you just go on your nerve.' I couldn't agree more. Nerve is the leading force of this collection of poems. They deal with an array of...
These poems explore what it is to be desirable, whether sexually, culturally, or otherwise. In questioning desire, its manifestations and triggers, these poems attempt to complicate the readers' understanding of love and loss in...
The Second Knock is a compilation of poems composed between 2000 and 2006. It is written out of a sense of curiosity and in an attempt to know the world and the people in it. To see similarities and differences. To live in my imaginings...
This collection of poems considers ideas of place and culture alongside unusual, surprising portrayals of relationships to demonstrate the strangeness that characterizes our everyday lives.
Edith Wharton's writing exhibits an understanding of and fascination with the connections between pain and language. Her novel, Ethan Frome, is her first extended analysis of the cycle of silence and suffering into which her characters...
The following pages feature an atypical flavor of creative writing that merges contemporary poetry with the lyrical influence of spoken word. Each poem can be rewarding to simply read, but the lyricism is such that most of the pieces...
ABSTRACT This Heart Goes Bang Bang is broken into three sections, all of which explore classical references, much as poetry has done before, but in the context of my experiences and using a modern lens. I like a lot of things. In...
Maison is a collection of poems that operates as a novel in verse. As such, the collection probes the construction of genre, the possibility of using linguistic play as a narrative tool, and the reinvention of traditional poetic forms...
Fashioning and Refashioning Marie Laveau in American Memory and Imagination follows the life and literary presence of the legendary figure, Marie Laveau. This female spiritualist lived in antebellum Louisiana from 1801-1881. After her...
This study reexamines the unresolved American literary debate between traditional and experimental writing practices from the early twentieth century to today. By tracing what I consider to be the key episodes in this ongoing debate...
Look at My Sky is a collection of poems that expresses the value of living, the need we have to be heard, loved and understood. These pictures on the inside walls of a moment evoke emotion, celebrate the human spirit, and give voice to...
The family unit established by Adam and Eve in the first book of the Bible is often rewritten and resurrected in American literature. This dissertation explores the Genesis lore cycle in American literature as an emblem of changing...
Abstract The poems in this series seek to relocate Valmiki's Hindu epic The Ramayana to a contemporary, American voice. The confessional tone and the focus on Sita as a primary character seeks to marry the speaker to the epic, to...
The poems in the dissertation manuscript Odd Bloom Seen From Space, are, among other things, lyric pursuits of the author's fascination with the uncanny. They shape experiences of "intellectual uncertainty" in language, and seek to...
The poems in this thesis manuscript, The Dirty Lover's Mausoleum, are intended to alternately confuse and enlighten the reader. They span a spectrum of emotions, from sadness to anger, and from depression to hope, never dwelling for too...
My dissertation, The Cairo Letters, is a collection of poems that draws largely on the epistolary tradition. One section describes a series of letters I received from a first love living in Cairo, Egypt. They were long and lonesome and...
A quixotic scholar eating peanut butter on a spoon and translating Machaut's poetry is interrupted by a rumination on desire for love lost. This moment from "Fugue for Sexual Tension, Androgeny, and Wingmen in A Minor" is perhaps...
I always preferred fried chicken over hamburgers or hotdogs when I was a kid. And though that seems like a terrible way to begin an abstract about poetry, I have to admit that it sums up most of what I have learned about it. Poetry has...
Drawing off my own experiences with marriage, my dissertation, Fair Copy, explores marriage as an identity for a contemporary American woman. The dissertation is divided into three sections that loosely correspond to the categories of...
How the Irish Ended History: Postmodern Writings of James Joyce, Flann O'Brien, and Samuel Beckett, forming a pun based on Thomas Cahill's popular book, How the Irish Saved Civilization, takes as its subject, not the monks who preserved...
The story follows James Offenbach, a 25-year-old nomadic runner, who has spent seven years as a transient, stealing whatever food and supplies he needs to allow him to continue his self-inflicted isolation. He breaks this isolation when...
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.
