Matching Items (4)
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- All Subjects: Fine Arts
- Creators: McNally, Thomas
DescriptionRest for Machines is a fragmented novel about a woman named Tina Medina
ContributorsFore, Chad (Author) / McNally, Thomas (Thesis advisor) / Turchi, Peter (Committee member) / Ison, Tara (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
These five stories present and trouble a question that has been posed in literature from courtly love poetry to Romantic anti-heroes to the writing born of Twentieth Century human and civil rights movements: what if one's individual desires are greater than or different from what she is allowed by her world, or half her conscience? Where should her fidelity lie? Unrepentant transgression and the penance one must endure after such a choice: in one way or another that recognition and impulse, and the aftermath of following it, is the force that moves characters through these stories. The stories are of romantic love, and the love is both literal unto itself and an allegory: the question of fidelity has to do with the self, as the characters' choice to attain the lover, in each case, is also an attainment of the self because it is an assertion of the "rightness" of individual desire against the decrees of a greater system. The "crossing" thus refers to that of boundaries: the characters make choices to push or break through what is sanctioned and what is untried; they transform; they become from one self into another as they resolve to defy, love, and simply be, drawing new lines through and around their worlds.
ContributorsBoyer-White, Branden (Author) / McNally, Thomas (Thesis advisor) / Turchi, Peter (Committee member) / Ison, Tara (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
Rusalka and Other Stories is a creative thesis composed of short fiction and the first section of a novel. The two stories - entitled "In Deep" and "The Rain" - are concerned with the troubled relationship between childhood and adulthood, and the complicated network of influences that construct us as human beings. Combining the tools of psychological realism, philosophy, and fabulism, these stories explore the boundary between objective reality and the imagination. The novel, entitled Rusalka, traces four generations of women from pre-World War II Poland to contemporary Chicago. The story begins in 1921 with a powerful Polish woman outside Warsaw making a devil's bargain: she must sacrifice her honor to give birth to a daughter, who will be beautiful and musically gifted. Each subsequent daughter born into the family is a refinement of the woman who came before, including the novel's narrator Luscia - an operatic soprano and new mother, raised in Chicago to see herself as the zenith of her family's strange legacy. In this novel Luscia shares the stories - both historical and fantastical - that shaped her childhood as she struggles with the decision of whether to allow her daughter to be tied to the same birthright.
ContributorsCelt, Adrienne (Author) / McNally, Thomas (Thesis advisor) / Turchi, Peter (Committee member) / Pritchard, Melissa (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
This project explores the cultivation of artistic methodologies centered in embodied movement practices. I worked in collaboration with dancers to inform the development of a movement vocabulary that is authentic to the individual as well as to the content of the work. Through the interplay between movement and subconscious response to elements such as writing, imagery, and physical environments I created authentic kinesthetic experiences for both dancer and audience. I submerged dancers into a constructed environment by creating authentic mental and physical experiences that supported the development of embodied movement. This was the impetus to develop the evening length work, Flesh Narratives, which consisted of five vignettes, each containing its own distinctive creative process driven by the content of each section. This project was presented January 29- 31, 2016 in the Fine Arts Center room 122, an informal theatre space, that supplemented an immersive experience in an intimate environment for forty viewers. This project explored themes of transformation including cycles, concepts of life, death and reincarnation, and enlightenment. Through the art of storytelling, the crafting of embodied movers, and the theory of Hauntology, the viewer was taken on a journey of struggle, loss, and rebirth.
ContributorsGerena, Jenny (Author) / Standley, Eileen (Thesis advisor) / Rosenkrans, Angela (Committee member) / Britt, Melissa (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016