English Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2766
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Item How to Leave Your Life Behind: Stories(2024) Daschle, Edward Sebastian; Mitchell, Emily; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The stories in this collection, How to Leave Your Life Behind: Stories, feature characters seeking purpose and authenticity as they navigate queer worlds and queer identities. In the titular story, you learn how to disappear into a new life through the process of jumping off a building, a magical escape from a dull life that creates complications for international and personal relations. In “Thistle Land,” an old woman seeks to return to the portal fantasy world she explored in her childhood while navigating the emotional baggage of her mother and daughter who respectively saw her and see her as failing their high intellectual standards. And in “Who I Am Dead,” a dead boy making an existence for himself in the afterlife seeks to discover who he was when he was alive, and what knowledge of this past life might offer him, if anything. These stories alongside three others match purpose with aimlessness, authenticity with conflicting identities, and fantasy with reality. Throughout the collection, there is trauma and pain, but always with the acknowledgement that what they are experiencing is not all there was, is, or will be.Item The Vandal and Other Stories(2022) Wolfe, Kiera; Mitchell, Emily; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“The Vandal and Other Stories” is a collection that sprouts at the intersection of humor and earnestness, of connection and desperation. It features unlikely relationships – a man and his father’s God-anointed replacement, a woman and her emotional bodyguard, a washed-up actor and the surrogate baby he steals. It finds characters on planes, in DIY greenhouses, in vintage stores and asks them who they are at their least comfortable, who they’ll become at their strangest. These are stories of parenthood, obsession, queerness, and magic.Item Translating Grace: Postsecularity in Twentieth-Century American Fiction(2021) Gonch, William; Mallios, Peter; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The early twentieth century saw the rise of new, secular ways of imagining and understanding religion, especially through social sciences such as psychology and anthropology. TRANSLATING GRACE: POSTSECULARITY IN TWENTIETH CENTURY AMERICAN FICTION investigates creative responses to this secular imaginary by novelists invested in religion’s continuing power. For the four primary subjects of this study—Willa Cather, Zora Neale Hurston, Flannery O’Connor, and Marilynne Robinson—secular ways of imagining religion were at once challenges and opportunities. They foreclosed conventional expressions of religious ideas, experiences, and narratives, but they could be used creatively to reimagine religious stories and symbols, giving them fresh life and applying them to new challenges. I propose the metaphor of translation to understand the creative exchange between secular and religious writing. Literary translation is a creative activity that stretches the boundaries of a target language so that it may mean things that it has never meant before; similarly, writing of religion in this period is a translational attempt to stretch secular categories. Novelists jettison conventional religious narratives and symbols and invent new literary forms to make religious experiences and beliefs register for new readers. In doing so, they create new ways of experiencing and reckoning with religion. Translating Grace reassesses accounts of religion and literature by emphasizing the creative potential of religious writing. Previous studies of this period theorize a crucial break around 1960. Before that point, literature secularizes; artists look to art as a substitute for religion and treat religion’s fading as inevitable. After 1960 there is renewed interest in religious narratives, symbols, and practices, but it is “weak” religion, shorn of doctrinal and metaphysical claims. In contrast, I propose that “strong” religion persists as an important creative presence in 20th century literature. Whether strong or weak, religion becomes more self-conscious about its need to make itself comprehensible. Writers engage, sometimes subversively, sometimes playfully, with secular imaginaries. In this way, fiction drives a wider transformation of life within religious communities as they reimagine their place within a now-more-secular culture and world.Item This Is Not Your Home(2021) Grimes, Maiasia; Casey, Maud; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“This is Not Your Home” is a collection of three stories accompanied by the first fiftypages of a memoir to be titled “Holy Father”. These works collectively explore the lives of black women and their struggles to live well within their worlds. The stories are primarily domestic tales that explore the complex relationships that form between characters, their spaces, and their desires within a family unit, with the exception of the first “Ginger”. That story grew out of an impulse to engage with what writers do when they write, both in terms of the writing process but also with regards to what happens when we create and then go onto harm (for the sake of the story) our characters. In the memoir portion of “This is Not Your Home”, I take the questions I develop in my fiction and apply them to the peculiarities of my own life, chiefly asking “How can I examine the dynamics that formed within my own family as a way to gain insight on the world I live in and the lives we’ve lived?” Beyond the content, “Holy Father” formally tackles questions of narrative structure in memoir. Written in brief sections, the work shifts from first person direct address, to close third person narration, and back, from narrative to poetry as well, and attempts to experiment with the formal aspects of storytelling and their applications to memoir.Item The Favor of Another: Labor and Precarity in Contemporary Fiction(2019) Macintosh, John A.; Ray, Sangeeta; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The Favor of Another: Labor and Precarity in Contemporary Fiction examines how fiction since 1980 responds to changes to the composition of labor and of work itself. In particular, it is interested in the representation of service sector work in the novels of Stephanie Danler, Don DeLillo, Helen DeWitt, Mohsin Hamid, Jamaica Kincaid, Chang-rae Lee, Imbolo Mbue, Dinaw Mengestu, Bharati Mukherjee, Stewart O’Nan, and Merritt Tierce. The dissertation argues that these novelists develop aesthetic strategies to respond to issues including globalization, immaterial labor, entrepreneurial subjectivity, and financialization. Novels about domestic work register a push-pull dynamic of labor migration from the Global South and in doing so ascribe alternately too much or too little agency to domestic worker characters. The challenge of representing restaurant work leads to a strategy of formal and affective repetition to mimic the routine of interactive service. Novels critical of entrepreneurship either expose cliché as the underlying trope of innovation or reflect the failure of entrepreneurial discourse to account for workers at the bottom of the labor market. Although literary criticism about finance tends to insist on abstraction, reading financial novels for labor reveals the contradiction between that representation and reality. While the labor novel seems to have waned, the dissertation reconceives the genre by examining a range of formal responses to work in novels not often read together. Its analysis concludes that reading for labor not only reveals how fiction registers changes in political economy, but also revises our understanding of the contemporary novel more broadly. The novels studied also provide insight into interdisciplinary debates about social and economic precarity since the mid-1970s. Often defined in terms of degraded work and the retrenchment of the welfare state, theorists emphasize a neoliberal restructuring of the economy as the cause of precarity. The dissertation argues instead that precarity is inherent in capitalist economies and its reemergence is symptomatic of prolonged economic stagnation. Taking seriously the etymological overtones of precarious—the dependence on the favor of another—it argues that the end of precarity requires not nostalgia for a previous arrangement of labor, but a challenge to the wage system itself.Item Bay of Bengal(2017) Islam, Sabrina; Norman, Howard; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In “Bay of Bengal” Radhi returns home after several years. She is on a journey of self-discovery, imposed on her, in part, by her struggle with her work as a journalist. Each of the characters in this world are limited in some way. How do we manage to live fully in the presence of our individual, unique limitations of being human? A grandmother, incapable of not spreading gossip, is also capable of keeping a family secret from her vulnerable granddaughter. A mother who sends herself to exile to prove her anger, is also capable of unending love. Radhi, while capable of taking steps outside of her nature, is at times incapacitated by the limits of language. There are also moments of recollecting the past, admitting to the force of imagination, and acknowledging the power of youthful vulnerability. Though most of all, this is a story about a return to the heart.Item TIME WARPS AND ALTER-NARRATIVES: GAY AND LESBIAN ENGAGEMENTS WITH HISTORY IN BRITISH FICTION SINCE WORLD WAR II(2013) Clark, Damion Ray; Cohen, William A; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Contemporary British gay and lesbian authors engage with history through two distinct methods I call fixed moment/cultural critique and abstract moment/fantasy space. The fixed moment/cultural critique model focuses on a fixed historical moment, usually from the recent past. By focusing on this fixed moment, authors explicitly engage in critiques of the present that question society's homophobia and gay and lesbian people's participation in their own oppression. The abstract moment/fantasy space model uses moments from the distant past, often collapsing historical and narrative time and space to create a fantasy space for lesbians and gay men to reflect on their own cultures and identities and to create links with their literary and historical ancestries. Mary Renault's The Charioteer (1953) and Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty (2004), both demonstrate the vein of historical engagement in gay and lesbian British fiction that builds a political argument challenging heterosexual cultural and political definitions of homosexuality and detailing the effects of such definitions on gay people. They do this while rooting this discussion in a specific near past iconic historical British moment: World War II for Renault, and the height of Margaret Thatcher's rule in the 1980s for Hollinghurst. The second vein of historical engagement is one that holds as its purpose gay and lesbian cultural fantasy. Neil Bartlett's Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall (1990) and Who Was That Man?: A Present for Mr Oscar Wilde (1988) and the Sarah Waters' Tipping the Velvet (1998) explore authorial engagement with the more distant past as a means of examining the present and creating possible futures. The past in these works is not one sharply defined locus; rather it is broadly defined periods that the authors seek to collapse with the present. In the Coda, I turn to the films of Derek Jarman and Isaac Julien, and the plays of Alexi Kaye Campbell and Jackie Kay to see how the fixed moment/cultural critique and abstract moment/fantasy space models apply to contemporary British art mediums outside of narrative fiction.Item Beyond Vérité(2013) Rowser, Anna L.; Casey, Maud; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Beyond Vérité is a collection of fictional short stories exploring what happens when characters' perceptions of truth get shaken up. Landscape plays a central role in this collection, from the deceptively dangerous beauty of Yosemite, to a reserve in Madagascar where the surreal becomes possible, to the Mojave Desert where it can be difficult to determine reality from illusion--or fact and fiction, as in the "Hole Card," a retelling of the legend of Death Valley Scotty. In each story, the landscape is harsh yet indifferent and reflects the characters' current struggle, from Bryan's relationship with his mother in "Ranger Danger," to a zoo curator's more recently lost son in "Keeper," to Lindsay's compulsive fixation in "Beyond Vérité," to Meg's pervasive guilt in "Why They Call It Death Valley."Item Brave New Narratives: Postrace Identity and the African American Literary Tradition(2012) Williams, Laura Camille; Washington, Mary Helen; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study examines late twentieth&ndashcentury and millennial black middle&ndashclass fiction, often described as the New Black Aesthetic (NBA), as a vital and expansive aspect of literary studies and racial discourse. I focus on fictional depictions to analyze the narration of race in a so&ndashcalled postrace era. The novels in my study have in common protagonists who are writers that resemble their NBA authors. As imagined writers creating narratives in texts, these protagonists show how narratives make race. Because they exhibit the unique position that the NBA occupies in a post&ndashCivil Rights U.S., the protagonists featured here provide both counter&ndashnarratives and dominant narratives of race. The term &ldquopostrace&rdquo dominates current discourse about race in the U.S., often to imply a class arrival and an advance beyond racial constructs. I argue that NBA fiction characterizes the post&ndashCivil Rights black middle class as not moving past race, but rather inexorably engaging and confronting race in tandem with gender, class, sexual orientation, and/or nationality. Black middle&ndashclass protagonists in NBA fiction occupy a transient social position in which they experience figurative returns to the past. I call these returns &ldquopostrace moments&rdquo&mdashnarrative moments that connect contemporary protagonists to collective memories and political histories of race and other forms of social identity. My introduction historicizes twentieth&ndashcentury constructs of blackness and postraciality in African American literature. In Chapter One I argue that fiction is the ideal form for examining the narration of race. I show how the protagonist of Trey Ellis's Platitudes narrates himself both in and out of heteronormative definitions of social identity. Chapter Two illustrates how Percival Everett's Erasure allows the author and protagonist to disappear into multiple narratives and counter&ndashnarratives of identity and authorship. In Chapter Three I argue that the protagonist of Danzy Senna's Symptomatic narrates herself in relation to a foil to challenge and confirm conventional tropes. And, in Chapter Four, I show how the protagonist of Andrea Lee's Lost Hearts in Italy narrates black femininity both on the periphery and at the center of empire. My conclusion shows how the NBA and postrace identity can expand literary studies.Item Sangam, A Confluence(2012) Desai, Aditya; Norman, Howard; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Sangam, Sanskrit for "confluence," is a novel set across three storylines, all connected by a single ghazal poem, the evolution of which spans the lives and times of three men. In medieval India, Sufi poet Amir Khusrow arrives at the ruins of an ancient Hindu Temple, seeking inspiration and revival for his work; centuries later, at the turn of India's independence from Britain, young lawyer Jayant finds his idealism tested in against the nation's messy beginnings; in the present day, a young Indian-American disc jockey navigates the night club scene, hoping to become the modern music star. The novel is meant to mimic how music is sampled, re-appropriated, and remixed over time. In the same way songs are matched by a DJ for beats and melody, so too are the themes and emotional arcs of each man's story line meant to echo one another, and resonate as a whole.