UMD Theses and Dissertations

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3

New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

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Now showing 1 - 7 of 7
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    The Waterpark
    (2014) Kipp, Katherine; Casey, Maud; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    In The Waterpark, the Mississippi river offers the promise of escape while also freezing the fictionalized version of Cape Girardeau, Missouri, forever bound to that body of water. The novel begins with Helen detailing her father's desire to create a waterpark in the middle of Midwestern fields. In her mid-20s in the main storyline, Helen begins to learn that family responsibility and the desire to please one's parents never stops, even after death. As she takes control of her father's waterpark, she is conflicted by contrasting memories of the waterpark of her childhood and the realization that the park will ask for more of her than she is prepared to give. Furthermore, Helen realizes the consequences of her self-created loneliness as she isolates herself continually from the people around her, purposefully or not, and begins to thrive more in the memories of the waterpark than in her current life.
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    They Don't Know Us Here
    (2012) DeCarlo, Carolyn Cecelia; Norman, Howard; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    To be human is to be shaped by memory: what is remembered, what is forgotten, and what lies quietly dormant. But what of the unique mind, for whom this balance is upset? The novella They Don't Know Us Here imagines a place where David Whelan experiences past and present on a continuous plane. Confined to Ward 12 of St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C., David's mind soars between life on the ward and memories from before his confinement. But when things change in the present, what is shaken loose in the past? Through looking both inward on David and out to the other men residing on the ward, They Don't Know Us Here explores what happens when unquiet minds are confined to bodies that rest.
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    Disjuncted: A Collection of Stories
    (2009) Fang, Sarah; Lewis, William H; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This collection of fictionalized work (long short stories, novellas, novel excerpts) represents my thematic interests as a writer: challenging traditional notions of race, class, history, and culture in American identity, via the fictionalized lenses of history, school, and family life. Most of my work tends to involve a wry look at the orthodox views of "truth" and culture, and ranges from sassy cultural musings to wallowing in tragic hybrid space.
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    Ice Skating in the Sculpture Garden
    (2008-05-05) Boulard, Deanna Marie; Collier, Michael; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This collection includes a prologue and three ten-poem sections. In an attempt to sit quietly, to see and hear as clearly as possible, the poems include much tea-drinking, museum-going, and people-watching. Though most of these poems are in free verse, the vast majority employ traditional line and stanza lengths, as well as consonance and assonance, and the occasional echo of pentameter. At the same time, they try to remain true to the rhythms and vocabulary of American and Canadian speech. Influenced by Elizabeth Bishop, Billy Collins, and Anne Porter, the poems are concerned with the observation of light, the distance between people, the sound of the language, and with finding art in the everyday and the everyday in art.
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    The Fourth Tap, and Other Stories
    (2007-05-03) Weaver, Kenneth Michael; Casey, Maud; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    What follows are three short stories and a novella, all currently in progress. "The Fourth Tap" pours beers with a brewpub owner who finds a long-forgotten, dusty bottle. "Pella" collects truffles with an American and his hound in the oak groves of southern France. "Forecasting - A Collection of Vignettes" plummets through the roof of a gymnasium in Loma Linda, California like an inexplicable ice block. "The Pursuit of Rivers" proceeds in four parts, beginning with a trip to the Delaware shore.
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    I Stole a Briefcase and Other Poems
    (2006-12-12) Gordon, Jason William; Plumly, Stanley; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Arranged in chronological order, the poems in I Stole a Briefcase show my development over the past five years. While the poems in Part One employ surreal images to create an ominous mood, those in Part Two begin to use a more detailed narrative voice. The poems in Part Three continue to utilize this narrative voice, but with greater comedy and absurdity. Finally, in Part Four, conventional-story-telling gives way to a more inclusive, freer style. In conclusion, I Stole a Briefcase encompasses different textures while maintaining continuity with a willingness to surprise.
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    Too Many Kates
    (2004-05-07) Singer, Katherine Anne; Plumly, Stanley; English Language and Literature
    The poems in this collection were written for the most part during the last two years of the Masters of Fine Arts program at the University of Maryland. They are arranged in five parts to signal the multiplicity of the "many Kates," with a longer poem, a six part elegy, as the collection's center. The elegy as well as many other poems in this collection attempt to think about the problem of autobiography as the emotional and narrative source of poems. Accordingly, the speakers in these poems often manufacture voicesmasksthat subtend or ironize the very experiences they narrate. Similarly, the poems attempt to mix high and low culture. This thesis represents a deepening of poems that rely heavily on voice, wit, narrative and whimsy with an attention to formal control, lyricism and emotional risk.