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Description
Set in the former Yugoslavia, contemporary Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Midwest America, the collection of short stories follows the complicated trajectory of war-survivor to refugee and, then, immigrant. These stories---about religious prisoners who are not at all religious, about young, philosophizing boys tempting the bullets of snipers, about men retracing their fathers' steps over bridges that no longer exist---grapple with memory, imagination, and the nature of art, and explore the notion of writer as witness.
ContributorsHusić, Vedran (Author) / Pritchard, Melissa (Thesis advisor) / Ison, Tara (Committee member) / Turchi, Peter (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
In this collection of stories, people find themselves face to face with great trouble: a house lost to flood, a brother lost to the river, a girl on the edge of an adulthood she can't possibly survive. Set in Northern California along the banks of the Sacramento and American Rivers, the stories feature characters who live below the radar of the middle-class. Central to the narratives are notions of loss, lust, pleasure, and struggle.
ContributorsFowler, Courtney (Author) / Mcnally, T.M. (Thesis advisor) / Turchi, Peter (Committee member) / Ison, Tara (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
In Everything I See Your Hand is a collection of short stories that takes place in the "Little Armenia" neighborhood of East Hollywood, California--an ethnic enclave made up of immigrants from the former Soviet state who came to Los Angeles following the collapse of the USSR in the early '90s. These fictions are rooted in my own personal experience and are about dispossession, domesticity, and the tangled ties between generations, focusing particularly around the tensions that arose from assimilation and disillusionment, from changing attitudes towards sex and homosexuality, violence and masculinity. Many of the stories grapple with the idea of self-exile, or ruminate on the difference between leaving the motherland, and leaving the mother, or other familial bodies, in order to pursue grander desires: a better life in America, superior education in distant universities, love in marriages with foreigners, etc. The body, therefore, becomes a central motif in the collection, principally the hands and forehead, which are traditionally areas in which the destinies are written for the Armenian people. The Armenian-American protagonists of In Everything I See Your Hand struggle with the belief that their lives are already written, their futures already decided, futures that they can only escape through death or departure--if they can escape them at all.
ContributorsKuzmich, Naira (Author) / McNally, Thomas (Thesis advisor) / Ison, Tara (Committee member) / Pritchard, Melissa (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
A Cut Kite, a collection of linked stories about a Nepali family haunted by the past, examines the anatomy of troubled hearts. In these lyric tales, characters often seek love, but they end up finding it in the unlikeliest of places: in a moth darting toward a candle flame in a dark house, in the middle of a barrage of blows, in the seething currents, ruthless and forgetful.
ContributorsLama, Shertok (Author) / Pritchard, Melissa (Thesis advisor) / Dubie, Norman (Committee member) / Ison, Tara (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
DescriptionThe stories in this document are only loosely related thematically. They cohere instead by way of other mechanisms. They are often the products of significant formal experimentation. They are an attempt to privilege mystery and asymmetricality over causality and shapeliness.
ContributorsCorbin, Kent (Author) / Turchi, Peter (Thesis advisor) / Ison, Tara (Committee member) / Mcnally, T.M. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
An investigation into the cultural phenomenon surrounding books and movies that are considered critical failures, but are nonetheless championed in popular culture. Stories are an essential part of American culture, and many people not only tolerate but truly enjoy those stories that are shocking, confusing, and, in some cases, those that were created by storytellers with almost no talent at all. The continued production of these lackluster stories was considered, with an eye to the corporate influences on film studios and publishers. This paper also looked at two storytellers, the filmmaker Ed Wood and the author Stephen King, whose value as artists has been debated by passionate fans and their strongest critics. The sociological concepts of taste and cultural capital, as defined by sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, and the art movements of postmodernism and metamodernism, particularly the style of camp as defined by Susan Sontag and the value of bad taste in art as defined by John Waters, were investigated in regards to their connection to the popularity of bad films and novels. A brief investigation into the psychological effects of consuming bad stories, especially in children, was also included. From this foundation of the bad story as an important part of our culture's ideas about art and its consumption, the paper then addresses some of the popular methods of consumption of the bad story. For novels, the paper examines the trend of pulp fiction novels and of romance novels, going into depth on the role of E.L James' Fifty Shades of Grey in popular culture. For film, the paper examines the impact of the midnight movie trend on the popularity of subversive, counter-culture films, the role of camp genre films like Sharman's The Rocky Horror Picture Show in our culture, particularly with an eye towards audience participation screenings, and the way in which other projects, like Joel Hodgson's Mystery Science Theater 3000, transform bad films into new, enjoyable entertainment. Overall, this paper investigates all of the positive aspects around a failed story that allow these missteps in writing and directing to still find success in our culture.
ContributorsPehoushek, Scott James (Author) / Ison, Tara (Thesis director) / Free, Melissa (Committee member) / Department of Psychology (Contributor) / Department of English (Contributor) / Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-05
Description
Critical thinking has driven pedagogical development and captured the attention of educators for years and is now an important focus in classrooms today (Fahim, 2014, p. 141). Common core and STEM education are both impressive additions to the educational process and practice and exist to encourage students to ask questions, analyze information, and create their own solutions or ideas. During my time studying education at Arizona State University, I noticed that a majority of references to critical thinking were in conjunction to STEM subjects. In this study, I explore and defend the benefit of using classical literature to promote critical thinking in 21st century classrooms. Included in this study is a section of curriculum during a unit studying the novel The Great Gatsby that is centered around developing critical thinking and problem solving skills.
ContributorsSherry, Alyssa Lyn (Author) / Smudde, Christopher (Thesis director) / Esch, Mark (Committee member) / Division of Teacher Preparation (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-12
Description
The Vermillion Comedic Anthology comprises of three works of fiction, each around fifteen pages in length. The stories were written throughout the course of Hunter Vermillion’s residency in the English: Creative Writing (Fiction) program at Arizona State University. The first story Study-a-Broad, was written in his capstone fiction class, while the second story Herald’s Horticulture was the first piece Hunter wrote in his first fiction class.
The content of these stories is edgy, humorous, satirical (unlike this abstract), and generally absurd—all this while retaining elements of realism. “Realism” in the sense that any of these stories could occur; there are no supernatural elements contained. However, the actions and characters are so exaggerated that their purposes are to call attention to the character/societal flaws to which they reflect. The more edgy elements of these stories are not included for shock value; in fact, just the opposite. Their sparse use is purposeful to call extra attention to a certain scene or action. Often a story’s use of crude language is intended characterize these despicable actions as negative—to show that a boss should not be treating those around him like servants, for instance (as is the case in the story Fore!).
Disclaimer aside, the true intention of these stories is simple: to entertain. These are humorous pieces, aimed at poking fun at some typical college, workplace, and neighborhood drama. That’s not to say the pieces are devoid of any deeper meaning, because as described above, they seek to satirize overlooked bits of culture. However, the overarching goal of the Vermillion Comedic Anthology is to entertain readers and provide them much need escape from the stresses of the world.
The content of these stories is edgy, humorous, satirical (unlike this abstract), and generally absurd—all this while retaining elements of realism. “Realism” in the sense that any of these stories could occur; there are no supernatural elements contained. However, the actions and characters are so exaggerated that their purposes are to call attention to the character/societal flaws to which they reflect. The more edgy elements of these stories are not included for shock value; in fact, just the opposite. Their sparse use is purposeful to call extra attention to a certain scene or action. Often a story’s use of crude language is intended characterize these despicable actions as negative—to show that a boss should not be treating those around him like servants, for instance (as is the case in the story Fore!).
Disclaimer aside, the true intention of these stories is simple: to entertain. These are humorous pieces, aimed at poking fun at some typical college, workplace, and neighborhood drama. That’s not to say the pieces are devoid of any deeper meaning, because as described above, they seek to satirize overlooked bits of culture. However, the overarching goal of the Vermillion Comedic Anthology is to entertain readers and provide them much need escape from the stresses of the world.
ContributorsVermillion, Hunter Dane (Author) / Ison, Tara (Thesis director) / Hoyt, Heather (Committee member) / Department of English (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05
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