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Description
Claiming Impossible Bodies is a collection of poetry and collage exploring gender and sexuality through the lens of the vampire. For this project, I researched various representations of the vampires through folklore, classical and modern literature, film, and pop culture. The liminality of the vampire allows such figures to take different forms and identities, ranging from dark and grotesque creatures, such as the succubus or incubus from mythology, to modern sex-icons, like Edward Cullen from the Twilight Saga. Considering this wide range of performances by vampiric figures throughout history, the poems in this manuscript seek to deconstruct the binaries that vampires live between and expose the liminality in social norms that attempt to define our identities and shape our performances.
ContributorsWitter, Genevieve Michelle (Author) / Ball, Sally (Thesis director) / Meinen, Avery (Committee member) / Department of English (Contributor) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2021-05
Description
For this Creative Project, I decided to explore the elements that set novellas apart from other genres and then experiment writing in the form. In doing so, I took into account three main categories: Plot Structure, Character Development, Style/Format, and then used my findings to write 45 pages of a novella titled Emmy and Me.
ContributorsBingham, Roxanne Marie (Author) / Irish, Jennifer (Thesis director) / Danielson, Jonathan (Committee member) / Department of English (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2021-05
Description
This collection entitled “Poems on Home, Family, and the Self” is about the author’s role as a daughter to immigrant parents, who is finding her drive, and understanding where she comes from and how she will use that to find her purpose. The poems in this collection touch upon the author’s upbringing in Northern California, her transitioning relationship with her parents and her brother, as well as her experiences relative to her growth in Arizona. These pieces are greatly inspired by author Arundhati Roy and poet Li-Young Li. Specifically, the author is influenced by Li-Young Li’s approach to poetry – his commentary and storytelling of his life and his parents are objective, observatory, and allow the readers to make opinions for themselves. In this collection, the author aims to make statements about her family and upbringing and show the readers her new understanding of life and her ambitions.
ContributorsMecwan, Aarya Cyril (Author) / Solmaz, Sharif (Thesis director) / Natalie, Diaz (Committee member) / Department of English (Contributor) / Harrington Bioengineering Program (Contributor, Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2021-05
Description
Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic theory proposes that the personality has three components, the id, superego, and ego. The id is concerned with pleasure and gain, the reason it is often identified as a human's animalistic side. Additionally, the id does not consider social rules as closely and is the uncensored portion of the personality. The superego is the id's opposite; the superego considers social expectations and pressures immensely, is more self-critical and moralizing. The ego mediates the id and superego, and is understood as the realistic expression of personality which considers both the "animal" and human. A Fractured Whole: A Collection of Short Stories, explores Freud's construction of human personality in both form and content. Within the collection are three sections, each with a different pair of characters. Within each section, the same scene is written in the three "modes" of the id, superego, and ego, as three separate stories. The fifteen stories comprising this collection address the substance of daily life: sexuality, body image, competition, among other topics, to consider how a single person can balance the desires for personal pleasure and to satisfy social expectations. Writing the same scene in three "modes" allows for the observation of how the characters attitudes and actions alter under the influence of different parts of their personalities.
ContributorsOtte, Aneka (Author) / Sturges, Robert (Thesis director) / Bryant, Jason (Committee member) / School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies (Contributor) / Department of English (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-05
Description
The seven interconnected short stories of Miserablists spring from a reality created by its protagonist and ostensible author: Paul Marston, a persistently melancholy undergraduate who tries to exorcise the ghost of a past love by adapting the story into a screenplay for a film entitled Miserablists. What happens to our identity, Paul asks, in post-narrative selfhood—that is, when the meaningful narratives we’ve told ourselves about others and ourselves collapse?
In other stories (wherein Paul tries—and often fails—to figure himself a secondary character), the tangled lives of his immediate social circle unravel, overlap, and disintegrate amidst the decaying milieu of the Scene and the maddening sprawl of Phoenix. A brief sampling of happenings: Sophie confronts ideological qualms with capitalism by way of a summer gig selling knives to depressed housewives; Brett nearly burns a house down on the Fourth of July; hallucinogenic kombucha is foisted upon a hapless Alex; black mold overtakes Paul’s residence; etc.
The core text is followed by an afterword supposedly written by (the perhaps psychotic) Saul P. Thomas Marton, Ph.D. and acts as an academic analysis of the nonexistent film adaption of Miserablists. There, Marton places Marston’s work in conversation with many influential critical text and works of fiction that shaped the formation of Miserablists (including Roland Barthes’ Lover’s Discourse, Slavoj Žižek’s The Plague of Fantasies, and Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Last Year at Marienbad).
In other stories (wherein Paul tries—and often fails—to figure himself a secondary character), the tangled lives of his immediate social circle unravel, overlap, and disintegrate amidst the decaying milieu of the Scene and the maddening sprawl of Phoenix. A brief sampling of happenings: Sophie confronts ideological qualms with capitalism by way of a summer gig selling knives to depressed housewives; Brett nearly burns a house down on the Fourth of July; hallucinogenic kombucha is foisted upon a hapless Alex; black mold overtakes Paul’s residence; etc.
The core text is followed by an afterword supposedly written by (the perhaps psychotic) Saul P. Thomas Marton, Ph.D. and acts as an academic analysis of the nonexistent film adaption of Miserablists. There, Marton places Marston’s work in conversation with many influential critical text and works of fiction that shaped the formation of Miserablists (including Roland Barthes’ Lover’s Discourse, Slavoj Žižek’s The Plague of Fantasies, and Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Last Year at Marienbad).
ContributorsWebb, Zachariah Kaylar (Author) / Gilfillan, Daniel (Thesis director) / Garrison, Gary (Committee member) / Department of English (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-05
Description
In the future a Community struggles for survival on an uninhabitable Earth. A small faction of rebels, called Villains, put the lives of the entire Community at risk as they fight for domination of their home. Heroes and their Sidekicks rise up from the population to fight the Villains and win back their world. As they complete their training and begin to enter the world of Heroes and Villains, Alyssa begins to struggle with her identity as a Sidekick, her new role in the Community, and whether she can really preserve all that matters most to her. This excerpt from the larger novel, Sidekick, tells the story of Alyssa's struggles to remain true to herself, and her best friend Jeremy, all the while being called to serve the Community and eradicate the threat the Villains pose to her way of life. I conceived Sidekick as a work of speculative fiction because I believe the genre is one of the most powerful tools for education in the present time. By freeing one's mind to wonder, the dull becomes an exciting thought experiment that can (and does) influence how individuals see their world. Reading pieces like Ender's Game and 1984 I have found my ways of thinking challenged and stretched, and ideas from these works of fiction have stuck with and changed me. One major goal of the work was identifying and integrating major academic and life lessons I have learned into the overall work, providing it an intellectual and emotional grounding in reality. Having its foundations in the real world, the setting of Sidekick becomes a stage for a fantastical story as well as the reader's own imagination and introspection.
ContributorsWarren, Taylor Ann (Author) / Finn, Ed (Thesis director) / Bell, Matt (Committee member) / Department of English (Contributor, Contributor, Contributor) / Division of Teacher Preparation (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2015-12
Description
"The Problem of Hope: Literary Tragedy in Mid-Twentieth Century American Fiction" examines Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, and Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar through the lens of tragedy. This thesis delves into how conflicts between internal and external identities can create a tragic individual, what kinds of success count toward achievement of the "American Dream," and whether the tragic "common man" is the socially normative one or the socially disenfranchised one. It raises a three-dimensional theoretical approach to American tragedy and, most importantly, considers the significance of tragic hope for American literature. This paper questions the construction of American identities across class, race, and gender according to social scripts. It seeks to uncover what forces these scripts exert on American cultural myths and rereads those myths through tragedy to explore Miller's idea of a noble common man. By moving from Miller to Ellison to Plath, this thesis traces the undercurrents of tragedy through some of the most identity-focused novels of mid-twentieth century American fiction to see how the overarching American narrative changed from 1940 to 1969 as the US underwent significant social changes domestically and image changes abroad. Ultimately, this paper concludes that tragedy in mid-twentieth century American fiction points toward a new idea of American success as a success that occurs beyond social scripts.
ContributorsMedeiros, Amy Marie (Author) / Holbo, Christine (Thesis director) / Sadowski-Smith, Claudia (Committee member) / Department of English (Contributor) / W. P. Carey School of Business (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-05
Description
For this project, I have written a trilogy of interrelated short stories. The three stories are entitled "The Blue Bike," "Heartbeat," and "Elevators." Each of these three stories relate to each other both through the featured characters and the core themes. The little girl from the first story, Amy, is the little sister of the narrator Emma from the second story. The narrator from the third story is the son of Charles (Helen's husband) from the first story, who is also a major character in "Elevators." The gym in the second story also appears in the third story. On a thematic and poetic level, I have used the word "lift" as the inspiration behind and connecting thread between my stories. I have played with the various meanings of connotations of the word, using them to construct the plots of each story. For example, I have used it in the sense of face lifts in the first story, as well as alluded to the idea of planes lifting into the air through making Charles a pilot. There is also the idea of lifting a child into your arms, and lifting yourself or someone else up both physically and emotionally. In the second story, I use shop-lifting, weight-lifting, and the idea of giving someone a lift as in giving someone a ride. The idea of giving someone a lift also occurs in the last story, alongside the connotations of lift with elevators. There are a multitude of other instances in which I have tried to make the word "lift" resonate throughout these stories, though the over-arching theme for me would be the idea of lifting other people up. It is the exploration of meaningful connections between people and the way those connections can heal and "lift." This collection is thus an exercise in creative interconnectivity as well as an exploration of the way people can connect meaningfully to each other.
ContributorsKang, Verity Grace (Author) / McNally, T. M. (Thesis director) / Duerden, Sarah (Committee member) / Department of English (Contributor) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-05
Description
There are no words for the trauma of death when it strikes unexpectedly. What to say when a mother dies in childbirth? When a father figure contracts an unknown disease for no apparent cause? When a beloved pet, long mourned, may still be alive and hidden by estranged family? Generations may pass, and children may grow up, but the pain leaves marks that echo across time and the other borders we construct between our past and present. We may find strength on solitude, or prayer, or the words of a song written by someone else. In these four stories, spanning almost half a century, the marks of death and attempts to soothe or hide them are everywhere. Children on the cusp of adulthood grapple with the lives and the lies of their parents. Musicians examine the relationship of their music to the world. Legends and myths lurk in the shadows, tempting with false hope and rationalizing the unexplainable.
In “Playing the Changes,” we meet two men stranded in a small desert town in 1972, a time when their attraction to each other is still dangerous. Nile Walker is a jazz musician, running from a spurned lover and the law. Benji Garza is a once-devout Catholic, fixing cars and caring for his orphaned nephew, Hector. Walker and Garza’s affair will spin both lives and their heredity into sweeping tragedies that characters battle with lust and melody. Walker has a son he never meets, a drifter who finds connection with another lost soul at an airport in “La Petite Mort.” Hector is forced into early adulthood in “The Words,” when his ailing uncle’s health fails due to a mysterious disease not yet called AIDS. Later Tre—a young man struggling with the weight of his own lineage—meets him in “PHX.” These stories examine questions of death’s causes and its myriad effects, and offer this solution: Knowing that we cannot know everything, and living, loving, and singing anyway.
In “Playing the Changes,” we meet two men stranded in a small desert town in 1972, a time when their attraction to each other is still dangerous. Nile Walker is a jazz musician, running from a spurned lover and the law. Benji Garza is a once-devout Catholic, fixing cars and caring for his orphaned nephew, Hector. Walker and Garza’s affair will spin both lives and their heredity into sweeping tragedies that characters battle with lust and melody. Walker has a son he never meets, a drifter who finds connection with another lost soul at an airport in “La Petite Mort.” Hector is forced into early adulthood in “The Words,” when his ailing uncle’s health fails due to a mysterious disease not yet called AIDS. Later Tre—a young man struggling with the weight of his own lineage—meets him in “PHX.” These stories examine questions of death’s causes and its myriad effects, and offer this solution: Knowing that we cannot know everything, and living, loving, and singing anyway.
ContributorsCohen, Michael Lawrence (Author) / Bell, Matt (Thesis director) / Pearson, Dustin (Committee member) / Department of English (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-05
Description"Heirloom" is a short collection of fourteen poems.
ContributorsLaLone, Skyler Elizabeth (Author) / Ball, Sally (Thesis director) / Hummer, Terry (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Department of English (Contributor)
Created2014-05