A study through short stories of the emotional effects on close family relationships before and after a traumatic death.

Running From My Youth: Essays is a collection of nonfiction essays that explore important moments and experiences from the narrator's youth, and how he has addressed and remembered them in the years since. Some of the essays explore the narrator's time as a distance-runner, while others explore the awkwardness and discomfort onset by religion and nudity.

This dissertation examines intra-racial colorism in works by writers who began their careers during the Harlem Renaissance, but whose writings span almost a century. In these writings, colorism; which can be defined as a bias directed toward an individual that is based on skin tone, is portrayed an intra-racial practice that results from the internalization of racist ideals. The practice relies on a hierarchy that most often privileges those closest to the color line. However, these depictions also show that the preponderance of skin tones can sometimes determine who is targeted. For the purposes of this study it is called reverse colorism when the bias is directed by individuals darker in skin tone toward those who are lighter. Consequently, the careful descriptions of the shades and hues of black characters becomes more than aesthetics and can be seen as a coded reference to experiential differences. While Alain Locke hailed the start of the Harlem Renaissance to signal the rise of The New Negro, the writings featured by female writers in this dissertation advance a less optimistic reality for women, who had to contend with both inter- and intra-racial bias because of their skin tone. Colorism is identified as a particularly …

Collection of poems.

Brazos is a collection of poetry that comments on and critiques life in a small town in Texas. These poems situate the speaker both in this town and in spaces removed from the town, but the work always grapples with questions of how the speaker identifies himself via the relationship to that space. The creative portion is accompanied by a critical introduction that looks at the intersections of poetry and the lyric essay.

An interrogation of male behavior in isolated masculine spaces through short stories, an essay, and chapters from a novel-in-progress.

A collection of poems that explores notions of disability, family, and belief, with a preface that meditates on questions related to the ethical ramifications of various approaches to the making of poetry and art that takes up the suffering of others as subject matter.

A collection of interconnected short stories set in diverse corners of Texas, converging on Galveston Island before and after Hurricane Ike.

Life Holders is a collection of personal essays reflecting on my interactions with others concerning my military service.

This dissertation explores both the production of underclass literature and the vibrancy of material between 1868-1935. During an era of rampant materialism, consumer capitalism, unchecked industrialism, and economic inequality in the United States, poor, working class Americans confronted their socioeconomic status by abandoning the linear framework of capitalism that draws only a straight line between market and consumer, and engaging in a more intimate relationship with local, material things – found, won, or inherited – that offered a sense of autonomy, belonging, and success. The physical seizure of property/power facilitated both men and women with the ability to recognize their own empowerment (both as individuals and as a community) and ultimately resist their marginalization by leveling access to opportunity and acquiring or creating personal assets that could be generationally transferred as affirmation of their family's power and control over circumstance. Reading into these personal possessions helps us understand the physical and psychological conflicts present amongst the underclasses as represented in American literature, and these conflicts give rise to new dynamics of belonging as invested in the transformative experience of ownership and exchange. If we can understand these discarded, poor, and foreign things and people as possessing dynamic and vibrant agency, …

Union is a novel about a Super AI that takes over all human technology.

Charles Stewart Parnell was James Joyce's most significant political influence to a degree that has yet to be fully acknowledged or explored. This thesis proposes a "theory of Parnell" in Joyce's works up to the end of Ulysses, arguing that close attention to Parnell's evolution points to a significant shift in the evolution of Joyce's literary forms. In Joyce's juvenilia, political writings, and early fiction, Parnell always appears with a heroic, even Messianic, cast, which the most significant moments in the fiction pair with a strict adherence to dramatic forms. However, significant moments in both "Ivy Day in the Committee Room" and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man lay the groundwork for stylistic and representative transformations in Ulysses. In that novel, the myth of Parnell is deflated, even as Joyce appropriates its most essential qualities in the development of his panoply of styles. Episodes from "Telemachus" to "Wandering Rocks" critically examine the myth of Parnell even as they link it with the constraints of dramatic forms. Later episodes, most notably "Cyclops," "Circe," and "Eumaeus" attempt to make use of elements of "Parnellite" style, training a community of readers in acts of collective imagination that keep the Parnellite …

A collection of creative non-fiction essays that document the life of an Indian American immigrant.

A collection of prose.

In this dissertation, I examine the various ways in which medieval authors used the term "lollard" to mean something other than "Wycliffite." In the case of William Langland's Piers Plowman, I trace the usage of the lollard-trope through the C-text and link it to Langland's dependence on the Parable of the Wheat and the Tares. Regarding Chaucer's Parson's Tale, I establish the orthodoxy of the tale's speaker by comparing his tale to contemporaneous texts of varying orthodoxy, and I link the Parson's being referred to as a "lollard" to the eschatological message of his tale. In the chapter on The Book of Margery Kempe, I examine that the overemphasis on Margery's potential Wycliffism causes everyone in The Book to overlook her heretical views on universal salvation. Finally, in comparing some of John Lydgate's minor poems with the macaronic sermons of Oxford, MS Bodley 649, I establish the orthodox character of late-medieval English anti-Wycliffism that these disparate works share. In all, this dissertation points up the eschatological character of the lollard-trope and looks at the various ends to which medieval authors deployed it.

This project explores the intersection of literature and science from the mid-eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century in the context of this shift in conceptions of space and time. Confronted with the rapid and immense expansion of space and time, eighteenth and nineteenth-century philosophers and authors sought to locate humans' relative position in the vast void. Furthermore, their attempts to spatially and temporally map the universe led to changes in perceptions of the relationship between the exterior world and the interior self. In this dissertation I focus on a few important textual monuments that serve as landmarks on this journey. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the intersection of literary and scientific texts transformed perceptions of space and time. These transformations then led to further advancements in the way scientific knowledge was articulated. Imagination became central to scientific writing at the same time it came to dominate literary writing. My project explores these intersecting influences among literature, astronomy, cosmology, and geology, on the perceptions of expanding space and time.

In this work, I trace and reconstruct Taiwan's nation-formation as it is reflected in literary texts produced primarily during the country's two periods of colonial rule, Japanese (1895-1945) and Kuomintang or Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) (1945-1987). One of my central arguments is that the idea of a Taiwanese nation has historically emerged from the interstices of several official and formal nationalisms: Japanese, Chinese, and later Taiwanese. In the following chapters, I argue that the concepts of Taiwan and Taiwanese have been formed and enriched over time in response to the pressures exerted by the state's, colonial or otherwise, pedagogical nation-building discourses. It is through an engagement with these various discourses that the idea of a Taiwanese nation has come to be gradually defined, negotiated, and reinvented by Taiwanese intellectuals of various ethnic backgrounds. I, therefore, focus on authors whose works actively respond to and engage with the state's official nationalism. Following Homi Bhabha's explication in his famous essay "DissemiNation," the basic premise of this dissertation is that the nation, as a narrated space, is not simply shaped by the homogenizing and historicist discourse of nationalism but is realized through people's diverse lived experience. Thus, in reading Taiwanese literature, it is …

The Hoboken War Bride is a work of historical fiction set in Hoboken, New Jersey during World War II. A young soldier named Daniel and an aspiring actress named Hildy marry days after meeting, though the marriage is doomed to fail. This young couple is not compatible. Daniel ships out to basic training the day after their hasty marriage, leaving Hildy behind with his family, the Anellos, who she quickly becomes attached to. Hildy is exposed to family in a way she had never lived with her own, embracing them even though she doubts she'll ever have a future with Daniel. When Daniel returns after the end of the war, the young couple try to make their marriage work, but it fails almost immediately. Both Hildy and Daniel struggle to pick themselves up after their divorce, finding themselves making choices they never thought they would when they were younger.

Let It Run is the story of Oakley Isom, a neurotic, disturbed young woman stuck in a small town of two thousand people where she lives with her father, Waldemyre, a fly-fishing guide. Oakley works at the local newspaper as the editor of the "What's Biting?" section, something the fishermen live by. Oakley also works nights at a therapeutic boarding school for troubled youth. Entrenched in a world of self-loathing and obsessive thoughts, Oakley spends her time dreaming of a way out of Victor, Idaho. When a murder in the small town pulls Oakley into its eddy, she attempts to escape into her own compulsive thoughts, and the friendship of a striking young therapist at the boarding school. Unusual events continue to unfold, reeling Oakley in, and she must face a reality far more disturbing than a killer on the loose. Cosmic bottom line, the dissertation novel is about the issues of human identity, and if memory is fixed or dynamic, unified or multiple—and how readers deal with loss, guilt, and regret.

The Divine Coming of the Light is a memoir-in-essays that covers an experience, from 2007 to 2010, when I lived in Kosuge Village (population 900), nestled in the mountains of central Japan. I was the only foreigner there. My memoir uses these three years as a frame to investigate how landscape affects identity. The book profiles who I was before Japan (an evangelical and then wilderness guide), why I became obsessed with mountains, and the fall-out from mountain obsession to a humanistic outlook. The path my narrator takes is one of a mountain hike. I was born in tabletop-flat West Texas to conservative, Christian parents in the second most Republican county by votes in America. At 19, I made my first backpacking trip to the San Juan Mountains of western Colorado and was awed by their outer-planetary-like massiveness. However, two friends and I became lost in the wilderness for three days without cell phones. During this time, an obsession possessed me as we found our way back through the peaks to safety, a realization that I could die out there, yes, but amid previously unknown splendor. I developed an addiction to mountains that weakened my religious faith. Like the Romantic …

A collection of poems that seeks the balance between imagination and reality that Wallace Stevens calls for in art, with a preface exploring Elaine Scarry's On Beauty and Being Just through the work of two contemporary poets.

This dissertation argues that early modern writers such as William Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, George Herbert, John Milton, and Andrew Marvell played a critical role in the transition from the Neoplatonic philosophy of beauty to Enlightenment aesthetics. I demonstrate how the Protestant Reformation, with its special emphasis on the depravity of human nature, prompted writers to critique models of aesthetic judgment and experience that depended on high faith in human goodness and rationality. These writers in turn used their literary works to popularize skepticism about the human mind's ability to perceive and appreciate beauty accurately. In doing so, early modern writers helped create an intellectual culture in which aesthetics would emerge as a distinct branch of philosophy.

In this dissertation, I examine the complex role that the body played in early modern constructions of judgment. Moving away from an overreliance on anti-theatrical texts as the authority on the body in Shakespeare's plays, my project intervenes in the field Shakespearean studies by widening the lens through which scholars view the body's role in the early modern theater. Through readings of four plays—Richard II, Hamlet, King Lear, and The Winter's Tale—I demonstrate that Shakespeare uses a wide range of ideas about the human body from religious, philosophical, medical, and cultural spheres of thought to challenge Puritan accusations that the public theater audience is incapable of rational judgment. The first chapter outlines the parameters of the project. In Chapter 2, I argue that Richard II draws parallels between the theatrical community and the community created through the sacramental experiences of baptism and communion to show that bodies play a crucial role in establishing common experience and providing an avenue for judgment. In Chapter 3, I argue that Shakespeare establishes correspondences between bodily and social collaboration to show how both are needed for the memory-making project of the theater. In the next chapter, I show how Shakespeare appropriates what early moderns …

Failure to Yield is a collection of creative nonfiction that explores themes of presence and emotional connection and expression. The seven essays, which include three flash essays, explore the themes by reflecting on such topics as marriage, parent-child relationships and addiction. The collection is woven together by the author's relationships with her parents and children and by her experiences growing up in a small town in Iowa.