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- Genre: Masters Thesis
Description
Dark Tourism explores the grief borne of losing a connection to the past. As detailed in the prologue poem, "Baucis and Philemon," the speaker's stories in Dark Tourism "have been resistant / to [their] drownings" and that refusal to stay buried has "[sent] ripples in every direction." The voices in Dark Tourism track the trajectory of these ripples by animating the past, especially through the formal work in the partial sonnet crown that acts as centerpiece to the manuscript. The sonic and rhythmic repetitions reinforce an idea central to Dark Tourism as a whole: the things we inherit from the past endure, with or without our permissions, and the speakers seek to interpret this haunting in a way that unifies past and present.
ContributorsAndoga, Rachel (Author) / Savard, Jeannine (Thesis advisor) / Dubie, Norman (Committee member) / Hogue, Cynthia (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
ABSTRACT This collection of poetry focuses on the experiences of a soldier who served six years in the Army National Guard and eleven months in Iraq. The collection is primarily divided into six sections (though each is not separated explicitly) and each section generally involves activities such as training for Iraq, deploying to Iraq, and returning home. In these poems, the speaker recalls different scenes from his experiences: encountering roadside bombs; performing guard duty; burning feces in a can; and living on small military base while at war. The main goal is to provide the reader with an in-depth, sincere, and unfiltered look at the life of a soldier in the military, and of course, in Iraq. The work relies on mostly free verse form with some of the work utilizing the sonnet form and couplets. The poems were greatly influenced by the work of Modernist Poets including Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and T.S. Eliot. This entire collection, which often does fall into that long trail of the war-poem genre, was influenced greatly by the following notable poets who went to war or served in the military: Isaac Rosenberg, Wilfred Owen, Yusef Komunyakaa, Randall Jarrell, and Bruce Weigl.
ContributorsMartin, Hugh, 1984- (Author) / Hogue, Cynthia (Thesis advisor) / Ball, Sally (Committee member) / Dubie, Norman (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
During the first half of the last decade, there was a heated debate regarding what type of critical approach best suits the study of video games. Those who argued for approaches traditionally associated with narrative studies were primarily interested in video games as a new frontier for storytelling. The opposition claimed that video games are not systems for storytelling, and that applying literature and film theories to video games dismisses the interactive nature of video games as games. The argument was bitter, but ended abruptly with no clear results or consensus. Yet are narratology and ludology, the two proposed critical theories, so disparate that the use of one means the exclusion of the other? This paper suggests the possibility that narratology and ludology share more in common than critics have thus far realized. Both games and story share themes of conflict, and in focalizing on the antagonist of single-player video games it becomes possible to trace the development of conflict and how it functions in the video game medium. In analyzing antagonists and the conflict they embody, it becomes apparent that narratology and ludology are not so incompatible in their methodologies and assumptions. Finally, because video games themselves are a multifaceted medium, it is only appropriate that critics use multiple theoretical approaches in their analysis to broaden critical knowledge of how the medium functions.
ContributorsNeel, James (Author) / Hayes, Elisabeth (Thesis advisor) / Gee, James P (Committee member) / Daer, Alice (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
John Herdman provides a brief explanation for neglecting the Victorian sensational double in his work The Double in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, "Nor have I ventured into the vast hinterland of Victorian popular fiction in which doubles roam in abundance, as these are invariably derivative in origin and break no distinctive new territory of their own" (xi). To be sure the popular fiction of the Victorian Era would not produce such penetrating and resonate doubles found in the continental, and even American, literature of the same period until the works of Scottish writers James Hogg and later Robert Louis Stevenson; and while popular English writers have been rightly accused of "exploit[ing] it [the double] for sensational effects," (Herdman 19) the indictment of possessing "no distinctive new territory of their own" is hardly adequate. In particular, two immensely popular works of fiction in the 1860's, Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White (1860) and Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1862), employ the convention of the double for a simultaneous sensational and sociological effect. However, the sociological influence of the double in these two texts is not achieved alone: the "guise of lunacy" deployed as a cover-up for criminality acts symbiotically with the sensational double. The double motif provides female characters within these works the opportunity to manipulate the "guise of lunacy" to transgress patriarchal boundaries cemented within the socio-economic hierarchy as well as within other patriarchal institutions: marriage and the sanatorium. Overall this presentation formulates "new distinctive territory" in the land of the Victorian sensational double through the works of Collins and Braddon.
ContributorsSims, Rachel (Author) / Bivona, Dan (Thesis advisor) / Broglio, Ron (Committee member) / Lussier, Mark (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
Screenplays and novels are similar in that they both tell a story. However, the two are not the same. Screenplays and novels have a significantly different function and purpose from one another. With that being said, this thesis conducts a register analysis to discover the prominent linguistic differences in each register. Overall, this study finds that novels and screenplays do in fact have linguistic features that differ from one another. The linguistic features distinctive to a screenplay are: shorter sentences, more non-standard sentences, and more nouns. Longer sentences, independent clause coordination constituents, phrasal constituents, and reduced predicate adjective phrases are the linguistic features present in the novel.
ContributorsLuna, Elaina (Author) / Van Gelderen, Elly (Thesis advisor) / James, Mark (Committee member) / Long, Elenore (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
This thesis explores how to read the American experimental novel VAS: An Opera inFlatland, a collaboration between Steve Tomasula and graphic designer Stephen Farrell.
VAS demonstrates how twenty-first-century tools and technology can construct a
narrative that resembles the human experience shaped by contemporary tools and
technology. VAS includes not only a conventional story line but also narrative elements
outside the story line, such as collage material and a multimodality, all of which
contribute to the novel’s emerging, posthuman narrative. The reading experience of the
conventional novel is immersive; experiments with the novel disrupt the immersion of
reading, and this disruption produces a presence: the reader becomes conscious of
reading, of narrative structure, of the broken conventions, and even of the novel itself.
Martin Heidegger’s analyses of tools and technology can elucidate how novels produce
presence by breaking conventions, for conventions are like tools, and broken tools, such
as a broken hammer, become present to the user that was a moment ago immersed in
their use. The reading of VAS that results is two-fold: (1) a stylistic comparison of VAS
and This Is Not a Novel by David Markson, two experimental novels that differ in the
technology used and represented and, ultimately, the presence made, and (2) a reading of
VAS that considers how the novel makes present its narrative dimensions, out of which
emerges the novel’s narrative.
ContributorsStewart, Nicholas J (Author) / Hope, Jonathan (Thesis advisor) / Broglio, Ron (Committee member) / Holbo, Christine (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
Online communities have created such an outpouring of new media that academia has not had the time to catch up. Creepypasta is a genre of online horror short story that began in the early 2000’s on the forums 4chan and Something Awful. In the twenty-two years since its inception, the academic discourse around it has sprouted but not flourished. Creepypasta as a genre is perhaps one of the newest and least understood offshoots of horror and the gothic. Thus far there have been no full-bodied attempts at defining the genre or looking at the works as a whole, instead there is only focus on the parts. This thesis will be attempting to define the genre and will undertake this by first analyzing the components that define the genre, its origins, claims to authenticity, and publishing routes, as well as the folkloric connections which have been the focus of the majority of the literature thus far. This will move into an analysis of a single example of the form, Accounts from a Lonely Broadcast Station, to demonstrate the application of the definition of the genre, but also to show the wide breadth of potential of this genre in being analyzed academically.
ContributorsRamirez, Makayla (Author) / Justice, George (Thesis advisor) / Zarka, Emily (Committee member) / Baldini, Cajsa (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
Small fires in Black American women’s literature have been briefly and disconnectedly studied by numerous scholars. No scholar thus far, however, has aggregated the multitudinous symbolic presentations of small fire in Black American women’s literature. This thesis performs a literary criticism of several texts written by several Black American female authors, all of which contain deliberate uses of small fire. The conclusive product is a revelation of the way small fire functions within Black American women’s literature to imitate the cycle of the legendary phoenix—birth, flight, self-combustion, and rebirth—and to catalyze the multi-generational uplift that exists for Black American women who indefatigably create personal, domestic, and community renewal, and who undauntedly combat systems of racial, sexual, economic, and patriarchal oppression.
ContributorsBrooks, Jeremy David (Author) / Brown, Lois (Thesis advisor) / Clarke, Deborah (Committee member) / Free, Melissa (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
The hero Sarutobi Sasuke (literally, “monkey-jump Sasuke”) is one of the most popular Japanese literary characters of the twentieth century. The Tachikawa Bunko book series released in the 1910’s told the story of the samurai Sasuke, who used magic and trickery to defeat his foes. The character garnered so much interest that many other writers wrote their own books, manga, and stories about Sasuke, and filmmakers went on to adapt his story to the big screen throughout the twentieth century. Sarutobi Sasuke’s influence is so wide in Japan that he still maintains some level of relevance in Japan today. From the postwar period onward, however, modern academic and non-academic writers and media figures in both the West and Japan have advanced two controversial claims: first, that Sarutobi Sasuke was either real, or based on a real person, and second, that Sarutobi Sasuke has always been a “ninja.” By investigating the Tachikawa Bunko series that popularized the character of Sarutobi Sasuke, this thesis surveys the evidence available on both of these claims. Firstly, this thesis explores the fact that though there are a wide range of sources available that show Sarutobi Sasuke is a completely fictional character, many authors still write about the character as though he were a historical figure. Secondly, the thesis examines the sources that have characterized Sarutobi Sasuke as a “ninja” by historicizing the idea of “ninja,” which is a term that was never actually used in the original Tachikawa Bunko series to describe Sasuke. Evidence suggests that Sarutobi Sasuke was only ever understood to be a “ninja” after the ninja boom of the 1960’s, and that many of these claims characterizing Sarutobi Sasuke as a ninja have come from the anachronistic misinterpretation of the Japanese words ninjutsu and ninjutsu-tsukai. This thesis thus tells the story of the origins of an often overlooked, yet important fictional character of the twentieth century, while also highlighting a strain of Orientalism, as described by Said, in English-language ninja writing. These issues have led popular writers to ignore Japanese literary creativity and treat all Japanese texts as literal history.
ContributorsHyman, Daniel Dylan (Author) / Tuck, Robert (Thesis advisor) / Hedberg, William (Committee member) / Kroo, Judit (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023