In this memoir, I use the elements and conventions of creative nonfiction to examine particular strands of my experience for significance. Initiated as an inquiry into my father's suicide, this book quickly shifted focus, re-centering around my own development as an individual, a woman, and a writer. Both my father's suicide and the subsequent birth of my daughter serve as focal points for this inquiry, which I use to articulate and explore questions related to identity development, male-female relationships and gender roles, female sexuality, mental illness, trauma, loss, grief, and the inheritance of intergenerational traumas. In places, my investigation also broadens to consider the social, economic, and cultural contexts in which my story, and my family's story, have taken place. My goal in writing this book was to reclaim something of value from a series of personal and familial tragedies and triumphs. I believe that the act of using tragedy as raw material for a new creation is in itself an act of hope. By bearing witness—both to the events that have occurred, and to my personal experience of these events—I see myself as contributing to a larger human project. Every contribution to this project, whether technological innovation or philosophical …

In this work, I examine and analyze women representation and themes in Pakistani literature in order to explore the emergence and development of feminist thought as reflected within it, from pre-independence to present day Pakistan. One of my central arguments is that the theorization of a workable feminism in the conflictual Pakistani state depends on understanding and accounting for the socio-political, religious, and economic milieu of the country under which women live. In the following chapters, I delineate the challenges feminism in Pakistan faces in conjunction with the analysis of selected literary works to highlight the way the figure of the woman emerges in public discourse. It is through this engagement, that I demonstrate, the complexity of Pakistani feminism and its negotiations with nationalism, religion, and patriarchy to create the basis for theorizing a workable Pakistani feminist politics. Following Dipesh Chakraborty's theorization of historicism in his book, Provincializing Europe, the basic premise of this dissertation is to explore the emergence of feminist thought in Pakistani literature while keeping the changing religio-political and socio-economic realities of the country at the forefront to establish an analysis grounded in worldliness of these texts. The goal of this exploration is to theorize a feminism …

Because You Previously Liked or Played is a poetry manuscript that attempts to respond to the Trump administration in a new way unique to the medium of poetry. Trump is the central, all-pervading subject of this text, but the rise of web 2.0 and new media which normalizes a quick and unrelenting consumption of information is another essential focal point. The manuscript works both within and against the various political channels, discourses, and entanglements, within and against the various ways these mediums affect and are affected by Trump. Ultimately, the problems associated with our information age inform much of the manuscript's sense of loss, confusion, and questioning, but they also give shape to a spirit of cultural critique, amounting to a register that both speaks from within but looks from outside the Trump-Technology continuum. In order to achieve this effect, the manuscript approaches this Trump-Technology continuum and the ensuing political climate from a variety of contradictory emotions and responses to the reality we find ourselves in via a multitude of psychological frames, outlooks, and experiences, however uncomfortable, that this presidency has altered. And it does this through poetry's unique ability to provide the reader with an embodied and immediate experience, …

A collection of short stories exploring patterns that play out in people's lives and relationships.

In this dissertation, I examine the Sonoran Desert trilogy by Kathleen Alcalá through the lens of post-oppositional theory as developed by AnaLouise Keating. Moving beyond the use of post-oppositional theory to analyze non-fiction works, I apply this theory instead to the fiction of Kathleen Alcalá—whose work appears in such anthologies as The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature. Alcalá, though well published, is underrepresented in contemporary literary criticism, as can be seen by the only eight entries under her name in the MLA International Bibliography. Therefore, I have chosen her most significant fiction work, her trilogy about the Sonoran Desert, as the perfect text upon which to map post-oppositional theory. Through analysis of her three novels, I show that her work is an ideal example of post-oppositionality in action and that her characters act as post-oppositional revolutionaries and prophets within the pages of the text. The first chapter outlines the parameters of the project. In Chapter 2, I argue that post-oppositionality can be seen in Alcalá through gender bending, looking at the characters of Membrillo and Manzana, Corey, and Rosalinda. In Chapter 3, I argue that the characters of Estela, La Señorita, and Magdalena are enacting post-oppositionality through their transcendence of …

This study focuses on the discourse that orders and creates a logic of the extraterrestrial during postmodernity, what I term "Fringe." Using Foucault's notion of discourse, I define and theorize Fringe and its formation during postmodernity, looking at the particular features of the historical moment post-1960 that contributed to the creation and regulation of a particular extraterrestrial. I then investigate historical conceptions of the extraterrestrial from Aquinas to Kant. This genealogy of the extraterrestrial reveals a rich history of the extraterrestrial and compares this history with Fringe. After this I discuss two precursors of Fringe discourse: the Society for Psychical Research and the writings of anomalous researcher Charles Fort. This investigation of pre-Fringe notions of the psychical in discourse shows how the SPR and Fort's work both created new ways of looking at and speaking about phenomena falling outside the purview of "normal science" and contributed to the formation of Fringe while also being distinguishable from it. Finally, I analyze two popular iterations of Fringe discourse—the ancient aliens hypothesis and the abduction narrative—as popularized in the works of Erich von Däniken and Whitley Strieber.

Stalking in the nineteenth century was a dangerous, increasingly violent behavior pattern circulating in society. It was as much a criminal act then as now, and one the Victorian novel exposes as a problematic form of unwanted intrusion. The realist novel of this period alongside its more sensational counterparts not only depicts scenes of close surveillance, obsession, and harassment as harmful. It exposes the inability of social laws to regulate such conduct. I argue Charles Dickens is the most pivotal figure in observing how stalking emerged as not only a fictional motif, but as an inescapable, criminal behavior pattern. Throughout his work and its nuanced characters, Dickens reveals underlying truths about stalking and stalkers. Early books like Barnaby Rudge and The Old Curiosity Shop feature Gothic villains and predatory motifs adapted from prior literary genres. The works of his middle period foreground stalking in the context of the modern city and institutional power. In the final decade of his life, problems associated with unrequited love examine the pathological patterns of romantic obsession in modern stalker archetypes. Such an analysis and its transformative insight perceive crucial truths about unwanted intrusion, social attachment, and problem of predatory behavior.