Matching Items (10)
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- All Subjects: creative writing
- Creators: Rios, Alberto
- Creators: Blasingame, James
- Status: Published
Description
The Way Home is a full-length young adult novel. The story is split between the perspectives of Theo and Ella, best friends from high school who are starting their freshman year in college. Neither is extremely excited about the start of the new phase of their lives; Theo struggles with severe anxiety and is just hoping to survive the four years; and dark memories in Ella's past don't seem to want to let her start over. A series of murders happening in town don't help their nerves at all, making it hard to focus on the "college experience." They were supposed to be there for each other... But then Ella goes missing, and Theo is left without a clue of where she went. While he searches for her desperately, she wakes up miles away from home, surrounded by strangers. In their efforts to find one another again, they instead find themselves presented with opportunities to study the impossible: magic. Things become stranger and stranger as murders, magic, police investigations, and ever-looming final exams begin to challenge Theo and Ella in ways they never expected. In writing this novel, I hoped to depict the transition from high school to college and the worries and wonders that come with it. The story is almost split directly in half, beginning with normal school life and shifting into the world of magic. The conflicts presented to the characters during the first half, such as grades, majors, and socializing, persist throughout the second half, but are also metaphorized once the characters begin studying magic. I chose to include a protagonist with an anxiety disorder because I believe mental disabilities are not represented enough in YA literature, though it is something that many high school and college students deal with. I wanted to create a character that could inform others and that students with similar mental disorders could relate to. Additional themes I deal with include newfound independence, individuality, growth, and friendship.
ContributorsWoner, Catherine Flynn (Author) / Blasingame, James (Thesis director) / Irish, Jennifer (Committee member) / Department of English (Contributor) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2017-12
Description
Each part of the book is written from a different relative, literarily-inclined perspective. The portion of this submission that captures what my experience as a Barrett student has lended to my approved manuscript (by Dorrance Publishing Co.) lies with the excerpted material from Part IV. Below is the table of contents for the novel work itself, as well as the styles of writing assumed per part.
ContributorsDampare, Patrick Nelu (Author) / Blasingame, James (Thesis director) / Glenn, Bruce (Committee member) / Department of Psychology (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2017-05
Description
A creative project that is the culmination of undergraduate studies in science fiction, young adult fiction, and literary fiction theory. A novel-length science fiction manuscript detailing the effects of a global catastrophe known as the Comeback, a planetary reaction to excessive pollution that results in hyper-accelerated plant growth and natural disasters; a story about the journey of a young girl growing up in a post-Comeback world.
ContributorsNguyen, Lena Dong-Giao (Author) / Blasingame, James (Thesis director) / Eschrich, Joseph (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Politics and Global Studies (Contributor) / Department of English (Contributor)
Created2014-05
Description
In The Queen of Technicolor, poems draw from the lives of Mexican-Americans as immigrants and their experience of otherness. Facets of a more complex identity—assimilation, language, and a shared human experience—are woven to suggest the need for recognition. The poems are set in the Southwestern United States borderlands as well as Mexico during present day but with a layer of narrative reaching back to the 1940’s and the 1910 Mexican Revolution.
ContributorsBalderrama, Jacqueline (Author) / Rios, Alberto (Thesis advisor) / Ball, Sally (Committee member) / Hogue, Cynthia (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
The Book of Mortimer is a satirical account about the rise of a new modern day Mormon woman prophet named Champ. The mother of six—and wife to a very codependent man that can’t be left alone with a comfortable couch—believes a new testament is buried in a small field conveniently next to her kids’ bus stop. Taking place in a lower class area constructed entirely of beige apartments in Mesa, Arizona, The Book of Mortimer plays on similar themes of the early day Mormon Church and reimagines this American religion if it were discovered in the 21st century. Complete with an elite Home Owner’s Association, a corrupt frozen pizza company, a ten-year old capitalist, a trio of milk purveyors that hold a group of unfortunates hostage in the biggest grocery store in The United States, and an elementary school that is quite possibly run by a Neo-Nazi principal hiding his identity, The Book of Mortimer is an exhaustively entertaining novel, exploring themes of poverty and class, relationships and commitment, and figuring out one’s self-worth in an overwhelming world of persuasion and guilt.
ContributorsWilcock, Heath (Author) / Ison, Tara (Thesis advisor) / Bell, Matt (Committee member) / Rios, Alberto (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
The Cries of La Corrida is a longing for homeland. These poems, written in a blend of English and Castilian, are about an American discovering a hidden self, what it means to be Spanish having only experienced that part of his heritage in glimpses. Comprised of three parts, The Cries of La Corrida mirrors the three stages of la corrida, the Spanish bullfight, each part exploring different aspects of self as culture, place, and language. These poems visit Andalucía in the south, País Vasco in the north, and Spain’s capital, Madrid, in the center, in a journey of self-discovery and in search of belonging, family, and home.
ContributorsAbeytia, Ernesto L (Author) / Rios, Alberto (Thesis advisor) / Dubie, Norman (Committee member) / Hogue, Cynthia (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
Description
In this study I hope to begin evaluating contemporary young adult literature that focuses on the bereavement of adolescents to see if the novels portray psychologically proven productive coping methods. I hope to initiate a conversation around how complicated bereavement is depicted within young adult literature that will establish a body of research that can be expanded into a further exploration into the young adult literature market. Within my study, I will conduct a psychological literature review on young adult complicated grief and coping mechanisms. Then I will create an instrument of analysis, a rubric/model to evaluate the fidelity of novels based on the research within the literature review. Finally, I will evaluate the depiction of productive adolescent grief coping mechanisms in the recently published novel All My Rage by Saaba Tahir based upon my literary model. Finally, I will write my own short story based upon my research and findings in analyzing the model, seeking to represent methods not seen in the literature or not discussed within research.
ContributorsBeadle, Ruth (Author) / Blasingame, James (Thesis director) / Irish, Jenny (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Department of English (Contributor) / School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences (Contributor) / School of Art (Contributor) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor)
Created2023-05
Description
A Brief Theory of Entanglement examines the philosophical consequences that quantum mechanics has on our lives, our bodies, and our relationships. By framing themselves within the context of "daughter universes”—the theory that each choice on our plane of consciousness spawns an alternative universe in which the opposite choice was made—these poems consider pain and the power we choose to give it while imagining a multitude of worlds in which everything—even grief—occurs very differently.
ContributorsComeaux, Alexandra (Author) / Hogue, Cynthia (Thesis advisor) / Dubie, Norman (Committee member) / Rios, Alberto (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
The generation following post-modernism has been left with little to the imagination. In a world defined by continual technological distraction, Millennials absorb their world primarily through visual media. Where, then, is there a place for poetry, and how do writers reconcile a narcissistic world monopolized by "selfies" and virtual communication? How does a poet use the "I" selflessly in order to achieve the universal? "Poetry as a Development of Human Empathy" attempts to bridge the divide between everyday society and poets that has been growing since experimental writing became more widely accepted after the atomic bomb, while exploring reasons as to how poetry has alienated itself as an art and ways in which poets might find a way back into being an important force in the world.
ContributorsAsdel, Bryan (Author) / Dubie, Norman (Thesis advisor) / Rios, Alberto (Committee member) / Goldberg, Beckian (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
In Arizona: A History, Thomas E. Sheridan writes that Arizona isn't something real but "only a set of arbitrary lines on a map." I disagree with that statement. Writers such as Jane Allison, Jerome Stern, and Peter Turchi have all written craft books analyzing the structures of narrative, and it could be argued that at the core of their individual arguments is the shared sentiment that it is the shape of something which gives it meaning. As such, those "arbitrary lines" which Sheridan dismisses have created geographical perimeters in the real world, which have fostered historical, cultural, political, ideological, familial, artistic, and literary perimeters as well. So arbitrary or not, those lines have created boundaries which have given real meaning to people's lives. This dissertation attempts to explore the lives shaped by Sheridan's arbitrary lines. Based on what historian Robert L. Dorman calls the "localist west" in Hell of a Vision: Regionalism and the Modern American West, this dissertation uses fiction to investigate the state of Arizona as its own unique yet limited knowledge apparatus, specifically how the state's mostly forgotten cowboy heritage, both real and mythic, serves as an underlying ontological practice for part of its population. The stories presented here attempt to be reflective of the metaphysics for that population and are constructed from an assemblage of the region's territorial-to-present history, literature, conservative politics, economies, racial discourses and populations, and its arid yet diverse desert ecologies. There's also some Waylon Jennings. While this work examines existence within a limited Arizona population--mostly lower to middle class conservative white folk living within the mythos and realities of the Western tradition and its associated spectrums of masculinity--it does not prove a thesis for it. I did not collect quantifiable data or make conclusions about how and why a particular population acts they way it does. Instead, I've simply tried to undertake what Milan Kudera writes in The Art of the Novel is the writer's purpose, to be an "explorer of existence."
ContributorsDanielson, Jonathan James (Author) / Broglio, Ron (Thesis advisor) / Irish, Jenny (Thesis advisor) / Ison, Tara (Committee member) / Rios, Alberto (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023