English Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2766
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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 Are You Stek Mainard?: The Fragmented History of an Indie Rock Legend(2011) Jerome, Timothy Joseph; Norman, Howard; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Are You Stek Mainard?: The Fragmented History of an Indie Rock Legend is a biography of the singer/songwriter Stek Mainard. The text opens with Stek Mainard walking away from his music career at its peak, when mainstream success and fame are all but realized. The book's editor/writer, Timothy Jerome, is Stek's best friend, and this book his attempt to explain to the world why his best friend left his music career behind. Jerome combines stories from fans, bandmates, and critics with his own stories about him and Stek all in order to answer one big question: Why did Stek Mainard leave?Item PURELY COINCIDENTAL RESEMBLANCE TO PERSONS LIVING OR DEAD: WORRY AND FICTION IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN LIFE WRITING(2005-12-04) Eubanks, David; Leonardi, Susan J; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)At the end of the twentieth century and the opening of the twenty-first, American life writing remains both an unsettled form and an unsettling practice. This study addresses six representative texts that suggest a critique of life writing as they deploy self-conscious fictionalization, experiment, and suspicion of their own strategies. Three of the works under analysis signal a noteworthy change in contemporary U.S. life writing. As they interrogate the conventions of memoir and biography, they begin to insist on notions of self, history, and agency at odds with the poststructuralisms that shape their approaches to representing selves and histories. These instances of vexed life writing, having recognized and engaged the constructedness of experience, memory, and self, nevertheless struggle to operate as nonfiction. Dave Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Edmund Morris' Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan, and Maxine Hong Kingston's The Fifth Book of Peace are symptomatic instances of panic in contemporary American life writing. In each of these memoirs, the life writer supplements ostensibly nonfiction narratives with metacommentary and fiction but posits neither the fantasy of an authoritative master narrative nor the jouissance of having abandoned the same. Obliged to what each memoirist identifies as his or her local responsibilities, these texts struggle toward representing freighted experiences. I read these texts as uneasy heirs to three predecessors that adopt parallel methods to represent lives but make distinct arguments about life writing. Eggers' memoir echoes the form and epistemology of Mary McCarthy's Memories of a Catholic Girlhood. Morris' experimental presidential biography follows Gore Vidal's Lincoln: A Novel. The Fifth Book of Peace counters Kingston's own family memoir, China Men. As the contemporary examples of life writing adopt the postmodern forfeiture of stable representation, they do so under an anxiousness that McCarthy, Vidal, and the early Kingston evade. The presence of that worry in contemporary American life writing indicates the limits of this category of text and the native tension between postmodern indeterminacy and specifically obliged life writing.