A collection of poetry concerned with loss and the act of creation.

This dissertation is composed of a critical preface, "Reconciling Art and Account in the Creative Essay," and the essay collection Resurrection Attempts: Essays. The preface situates the following essay collection within the genre of contemporary creative nonfiction. Specifically, it argues that genre-bending or genre hybridity are inherent and unavoidable features of creative nonfiction writing and should be celebrated, rather than denied or lamented. It points to other writers who deliberately challenge the bounds of genre, and discusses some of the collection's innovations in form and other ways it offers experimentation, such as use of unusual or borrowed points of view, disruption of chronology, and adoption of elements from other genres of writing, including fiction, poetry, and academic. Ultimately, embracing the artistic side of creative nonfiction (as opposed to its "purely" journalistic side) allows for heightened intimacy with the reader, a much wider breadth of storytelling, and a more vulnerable—and therefore more truthful—interrogation of legacy and the human experience. Resurrection Attempts is a collection of essays exploring the writer's rural Texas childhood and the early and tragic losses of her parents, including the effect of those experiences on her adult life and performance of motherhood. The voices of the writer's sisters …

In this dissertation, I examine the political shift or reorientation of Arabs and Muslims from the supranational Ummah to the Western form of nation-state by attending to modern Arabic novel in the period between World War I and World War II. I explore the emergence of secularism in Arab national formation. One of my central arguments is that Arab nationalism is indeed a misleading phrase as it gives the impression of unity and coherence to a complex phenomenon that materialize in a number of trends as a form of struggle. In the first chapter, I defined the scope of my argument and the underlying structure and function of nationalism as a form of representation masked by nationalist ideologies. To investigate the reorientation of Arabs and Muslims from Ummah to adopting nation-state, I utilize Spivak's criticism of the system of representation along with Foucault's theorization of discourse. I argued along Edward Said that although the Western national discourse might have influenced the Arab nationalists, I do not believe they prevented them from consciously appropriating nationalism in a free creative way. I also explained that the Arab adoption of a secularist separatist nationalism was more an outcome than an effect in the …

Louisiana Saturday Nights is a collection of poetry and accompanying critical introduction written for the doctorate in Literature and Creative Writing.

The Ends of Smaller Worlds is a collection of short stories set in Indiana. The preface is about the representation of the information age using elements of dirty realism and Gothic fiction.

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 …

A novel about intergenerational sexual violence.

This work contains a series of essays examining childhood trauma through the lens and experience of the author.

To what extent does Margaret Atwood draw from American slavery to write The Handmaid's Tale? How does Offred's narrative compare with traditional slave narratives, and to what effect? This thesis explores intersectionality (or lack thereof) in The Handmaid's Tale and compares Offred's narrative to traditional slave narratives to find answers to why Atwood chose to draw from American slavery to write her novel in the first place. Offred's narrative is compared to three traditional slave narratives written/orated by three women, Harriet Jacobs, Hannah Crafts, and Mary Prince, to demonstrate how enslavement dehumanizes Offred in similar or different ways to these three women, and to reveal how the enslavement of and violence committed against the female slave body ultimately deforms even the most intimate human relationships in both Gilead and in historical American slavery. I discuss other tactics used to maintain control of the slaves both in Gilead and in historical American slavery, with particular emphasis on the development of justifications for enslavement in both societies. Violence against the body is not enough in Gilead, so Gilead implements religious rhetoric and controls knowledge to maintain its control of the Handmaids. Despite being used to control, religion also becomes a source of …

Shakespeare references humoral medical theory and social definitions of gender throughout much of his work. His references to medical practices like purging, the siphoning of excessive emotional fluids to bring the body into balance, are more than allusions to medical theories. Shakespeare's works unveil and challenge early modern approaches to emotional experience, most particularly when it comes to traumatic experiences that overwhelm comprehension. In Titus Andronicus (1592), The Rape of Lucrece (1593), Hamlet (1603), King Lear (1608), and Macbeth (1606), Shakespeare invokes humoral theory to articulate the early modern traumatic experience and to criticize the efficacy of purging in representations of trauma. For Shakespeare, the siphoning of destabilized emotions, through metaphorical and rhetorical practices, has dangerous consequences for bodies coded as feminine.

In this dissertation, I explore how the twelfth-century poet Marie de France combines animals and clothing to define and teach noble conduct in her Lais collection. I suggest that the nexus she creates between animals, dress, and virtue is chimeric but consistent, appearing differently in each narrative situation but recurring as a means of demonstrating moral conduct. My chapters explore three of her lais that combine beasts and attire to address the unique way Marie features the animal-clothing combination in each to teach distinctive lessons in virtuous behavior. My chapter on Guigemar argues that Marie uses the magical hind and the exchange of a knotted shirt and a belt to rework Ovidian anti-love themes to teach the value of being tightly bound in loyal love. Chapter 3 analyzes the eponymous knight's removal of his clothing as the mechanism that triggers his appearance as a werewolf in Marie's lai Bisclavret. I show that Bisclavret's werewolf form is like a sartorial skin under which his selfhood remains unaltered rather than a true transformation, and I argue that Marie uses the knight's appearance as a wolf so that the loyalty he demonstrates to his king and his homosocial community becomes voluntary and therefore …

A collection of poems with a preface.

The work is a collection of poems entitled The Sometime Joy, comprising a mix of poems completed before and during my studies at UNT. The manuscript is my second completed full-length work after my first manuscript, the unpublished Night, Translated. The Sometime Joy shares many of the same themes with its predecessor, although stylistically the more recent work hews much more strongly toward the infusion of speculative and fantastical elements (just one example being the apocalyptic poem "Petal Storm"). The speculative components of the collection allow me to express and utilize the full range of my imagination, to use poetry to explore alternate existences and to create allegories, such as the "Market" series of poems, where capitalism is embodied as a chimerical beast that would fit in a horror film. The collection functions as my exploration of the intersections between folklore and pop culture, a series of meditations on the strangeness of human perspectives and how the relation between perceiver and the perceived alloys and transforms both. The collection also delves into horrific subjects varying from serried monsters (wendigos, the capitalist system, J. Edgar Hoover), the apocalypse, and the capacity of mundane humans to be cruel to each other, but …

Still House is a poetry manuscript that explores the relationship between traditional gender roles and traditional poetic forms. The poems in this collections seek to revise the role of the homemaker and interrogate whether it is okay to take comfort and pleasure in tasks that are often labeled as feminine (i.e. cooking, baking, decorating, organizing, shopping, choosing outfits) while rejecting other parts of the homemaker archetype, such as subservience to and dependence upon men. Limited gender roles, patriarchy, sexist comments, capitalism, toxic masculinity, the cis-hetero-white-male gaze, trauma, physical pain, illness—these all can make it feel like we are not fully in control and ownership of our bodies, like something is encroaching. The poems in Still House are invested in using the poetics of embodiment (a poetics centered around telling stories about the body through immersive sensory details) to reclaim the body from trauma, patriarchy, and chronic pain and illness.

A collection of short fiction stories that fixate on the role of the strange and the imagined.

Short novel in the fantasy genre centered around the son of a single mother in small-town Texas who becomes apprenticed to a witch to learn magic.

This dissertation examines the rise of the racialized apocalyptic genre from 1978 to 2019. The period chosen reflects the social shift of the American political right into a party that accepts white supremacy as a tenet. In the post-Civil Rights era, white Americans considered the issue of racism to be solved. With the historic Voting Rights Act and other major victories in the 1960s there was a moment when it seemed America may turn a corner. However, when Richard Nixon took office in 1969, he originated what would be a long process of positioning the American right against intellectualism, minorities, and progress. Nixon, and the development of the new southern strategy would reach decades into the future, utilizing coded language and pitting Americans against one another. Research examining the racialized elements of the American right from Nixon to contemporary times is well chronicled and vast.

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

Chicana decolonial feminism asks us to re envision a world that allows for various forms of beings, creating identities based on political coalitions, having an active compassion that translates into direct action that seeks to dismantle binaries that reinscribe colonialism. Chicana decolonial feminist thought actively seeks to dismantle sexism, to dismantle racism, to focus on personal experience as theory, to focus on the body as knowledge, reconceptualize knowledge, envision new ways of being, and writing that is accessible to all. I use two concepts active compassion and interconnectedness of being that are central to chicana decolonial feminism. Chicana feminist texts and newspaper articles from the 1970s are analyzed to demonstrate how chicana decolonial feminism is seen in these texts.

Hameline, Cassia Leigh. "Stay for the Heron: Essays." Doctor of Philosophy (English), May 2023, 146 pp., works cited, 27 titles. Stay for the Heron: Essays is an essay collection that explores truth, perception, and loss as it follows the writer's movement across landscapes that speak to a past she had, for so long, tried to run from. The essays in this collection seek to understand how we can write about difficult topics like abandonment, infidelity, and acts of self-destruction: do we get close to them? do we create distance? at what range are we able to relive the moments that caused us pain, or anger, or passion, or love and present them in written form for others to see? The collection challenges the narrative nonfiction form in preference for a more fluid, lyric, and hybrid genre that more accurately presents the material—at times fuzzy, difficult, confusing—at hand. Through its literary experimentations, such as fragmentation, lyricism, shifting points of view, and photography, the works here deconstruct what we consider "traditional" in the Essay genre and, instead, supports a shift towards a more contemporary tradition. The essays in Stay for the Heron explore the persona's geographical movement, paying close attention to the …

Mexican Goodbye is a collection of poetry that interrogates the dichotomy of a family fractured in conjunction with a speaker's coming of age. The collection reckons with divorce and the subsequent dissolution of the speaker's Mexican American family. Individual poems deal with sisterhood, daughterhood, Chicanismo, grief, the intergenerational impact of the immigrant experience, and inherited trauma. The titular poem illustrates the typical Mexican goodbye, a Latine despedida which can last hours, extended by continued chisme and prolonged conversation. It is this cultural phenomenon that the collection endeavors to encapsulate by lingering in narrative, listing childhood experiences, and allowing the speaker to yearn to return and remain in the past. Ultimately, the speaker desires to linger in the farewell.

An essay and short story collection about rebirth and being trans and neurodivergent. The essays and stories cover the entire length of my MA, but are mostly written before I came out as trans and edited after. The arc follows this discovery as well as the discovery of my writing following more experimental means including the twisting and playing with the braided essay, the introduction of essaying moves to fiction forms, and moving from what I thought was about death to what I realized I was writing all along about rebirth.

This thesis explores the influence of the legend of Troy on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, and Lydgate's Troy Book. This study seeks to understand why medieval English Christians held the pagan myth of Troy in such high regard beyond the common postcolonial critique of Trojan ancestry as a justification for political power. I begin by demonstrating how Vergil's Aeneid presents a new heroic ideal much closer to Christian virtue than Homeric values, Aeneas submitting his will to fate and earning his piety through suffering. I then turn to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, assessing how Gawain is not only descended from Aeneas but how the major events of his quest echo Aeneas' journey, especially in both heroes' submission of their wills to fate. Next, I reveal how Chaucer's Troilus enacts a platonic ascent from a state of ignorance to a state of truth, but as Troilus' name is also linked to the city of Troy itself, the fate of Troilus becomes the fate of Troy. In this way, Chaucer dramatizes the spiritual ascent of his Trojan ancestors in that they move from sin to salvation as a culture. Finally, I investigate how Lydgate …

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 …