Matching Items (389)
ContributorsWard, Geoffrey Harris (Performer) / ASU Library. Music Library (Publisher)
Created2018-03-18
Description
There has been a recent push for queer fiction, especially in the young adult genre, whose focus is gay and lesbian relationships. This growth is much needed in terms of visibility and the furthering of acceptance, but there are still subjects within the LGBTQ+ community that need to be addressed, including bisexual, asexual, and non-binary erasure. There are many people who claim that these identities do not exist, are labels used as a stepping stone on one's journey to discovering that they are homosexual, or are invented excuses for overtly promiscuous or prudish behavior. The existence of negative stereotypes, particularly those of non-binary individuals, is largely due to a lack of visibility and respectful representation within media and popular culture. However, there is still a dearth of non-binary content in popular literature outside of young adult fiction. Can You See Me? aims to fill the gap in bisexual, asexual, and non-binary representation in adult literature. Each of the four stories that make up this collection deals with an aspect of gender and/or sexuality that has been erased, ignored, or denied visibility in American popular culture. The first story, "We'll Grow Lemon Trees," examines bisexual erasure through the lens of sociolinguistics. A bisexual Romanian woman emigrates to Los Angeles in 1989 and must navigate a new culture, learn new languages, and try to move on from her past life under a dictatorship where speaking up could mean imprisonment or death. The second story "Up, Down, All Around," is about a young genderqueer child and their parents dealing with microaggressions, examining gender norms, and exploring personal identity through imaginary scenarios, each involving an encounter with an unknown entity and a colander. The third story, "Aces High," follows two asexual characters from the day they're born to when they are 28 years old, as they find themselves in pop culture. The two endure identity crises, gender discrimination, erasure, individual obsessions, and prejudice as they learn to accept themselves and embrace who they are. In the fourth and final story, "Mile Marker 72," a gay Mexican man must hide in plain sight as he deals with the death of his partner and coming out to his best friend, whose brother is his partner's murderer.
ContributorsOchser, Jordyn M. (Author) / Bell, Matt (Thesis director) / Free, Melissa (Committee member) / Department of English (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-05
ContributorsBolari, John (Performer) / ASU Library. Music Library (Publisher)
Created2018-10-04
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
ContributorsOftedahl, Paul (Performer) / ASU Library. Music Library (Publisher)
Created2018-09-29
Description
In the essay, "Maps and Legends of Hell: Notes on Melodrama," Charles Baxter defines it as, "about, among other things, the failure of explanations." He goes on to describe the ways that melodrama interfaces with emotion, pulling us as readers in directions that we do not expect to feel the way we do. This conflict between emotional and logical responses is a critical part of the human condition, and its value in a literary space is often overlooked as juvenile and not worthy of the same kind of consideration as other, more distinguished driving forces for stories. We don't always feel the way we think we're supposed to, and those moments can tell us a lot about who we really are, as people. This trio of selected stories all have some element of this failure of explanation of emotions. "Table for Two" centers around a couple whose anniversary dinner ends with their landing in Hell. "Melodramatic Fools" is the story of a bad night out that results in a fantasy battle that the narrator cannot believe he is seeing. Finally, "Throwin' Slop" is about a minor league ballplayer past his prime, who can't understand what it was that held him back, in all aspects of his life. All three interface with the unknown in a way that explores it, tries to understand it, but ultimately fails to do much beyond notice it's there. The collected stories seek to explore the human condition through a mixture of the aforementioned melodrama, comedy, and surreal elements.
ContributorsShahon, Benjamin Clark (Author) / Irish, Jennifer (Thesis director) / Bell, Matthew (Committee member) / Historical, Philosophical & Religious Studies (Contributor) / Department of English (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-12
Description
Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis influenced literary criticism and cultural studies in profound ways; significant modern and postmodern theories of literature frequently engage with Freud's theories of the human unconscious. Psychoanalytic criticism and the arrival of "Deconstruction" in America destabilized the boundaries between linguistics, philosophy, psychology, and literature. When theorists applied psychoanalysis to literary study in the twentieth century, texts suddenly brimmed with secret meaning, distortion, the Symbolic order, and Ecriture feminine; writers and poets became patients susceptible to regressions, unconscious repression, projections and interjections appearing in their work. Reading a text was a form of dream interpretation for the literary critic and using a psychoanalytic approach provided the necessary framework to decode symbolism and untangle loose fantasies. Decades before Freud developed any of his theories, Edgar Allan Poe illustrated the unconscious and other uncharted psychological territory with his Gothic tales. Poe's fascination with psychological behavior has been the perfect subject for psychoanalytic criticism for decades. This project will analyze representations of psychoanalytic denial and projection in Poe's short fiction: "The Fall of the House of Usher", "The Pit and the Pendulum", "The Imp of the Perverse", "William Wilson", "The Tell-Tale Heart", "The Cask of Amontillado", and "The Masque of the Red Death".
ContributorsSmith, Noah (Author) / Hattenhauer, Darryl (Thesis director) / Cisler, Sherry (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-05
ContributorsMarshall, Kimberly (Performer) / Meszler, Alexander (Performer) / Yatso, Toby (Narrator) / ASU Library. Music Library (Publisher)
Created2018-09-16
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
ContributorsTaylor, Karen Stephens (Performer) / ASU Library. Music Library (Publisher)
Created2018-04-21