Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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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 give thesis/dissertation in DRUM
More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.
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Item American Hospitality: The Politics of Conditionality in Twentieth-Century U.S. Fiction(2020) Gleich, Lewis S; Mallios, Peter L; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)American Hospitality rereads the canon of American literature by focusing attention on the centrality of hospitality to the twentieth-century American literary imagination. It argues that twentieth-century U.S. authors employ scenes of hospitality (scenes of welcoming and withholding, of invitation and rejection, of accommodation and imposition) and figures of hospitality (hosts and guests, strangers and trespassers, homes and thresholds, gifts and reciprocations) for three specific purposes: first, to reproduce dominant American discourses of hospitality; second, to critique these same discourses; and third, to model an alternative ethics of hospitality. Faced with the closing of the western frontier, rapid increases in immigration, the growing need to provide assistance to large segments of the population, an escalating call to secure and police the national borders, and the widespread demand to make public accommodations in all parts of the country more hospitable to racialized others, U.S. authors during the twentieth century utilized discourses of hospitality to reflect on the effects that sweeping historical changes were having on the nation’s ability to remain hospitable to peoples both inside and outside its borders. In examining discourses of hospitality in twentieth-century U.S. fiction, American Hospitality makes three principal contributions to scholarship. First, it opens the canon of American literature to reconstruction by tracing the central importance of scenes of hospitality across a wide range of twentieth-century American texts and genres, from highly canonical texts like Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! to less canonical texts like Zitkala-Ša’s Old Indian Legends and Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris’s The Crown of Columbus. Second, it expands on existing work on the subject of American exceptionalism by showing how American exceptionalist narratives rely heavily on scenes and figures of hospitality to justify and disavow acts of exclusion, dispossession, exploitation, and violence. Third, it lays the foundation for theorizing an alternative ethics of American hospitality. Modeled by the texts featured in American Hospitality, this alternative ethics, which I term affirmative hospitality, has four core principles: recognition of the conditional nature of all hospitality exchanges, affirmation of the singularity of the individual, accommodation, and deliberation.Item Stranger Years(2015) Kusumaatmadja, Kendisan; Norman, Howard; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Stranger Years is a collection of three short stories and a novel-in-progress that examines both familiar and imagined landscapes. In "Thief," two children witness a man beaten to death in Jakarta. In "Soap," a former soap opera actress finds herself in a loveless marriage. A girl escapes a country in turmoil in "My Brother Across the Ocean." And, finally, in Stranger Years, a man finds himself teetering between the decision to stay in a strange country or to return home and confront his past.Item 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.Item Terminus and Other Stories(2013) Hennessee, Alison Emilia; Casey, Maud; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This collection of short fiction includes four stories. Though the situations and characters in each are unrelated, the collection as a whole treats recurring thematic interests: individual and shared origins; tension between loving one's home and needing to leave it; childhood and parenthood; and the American South. The stories are ordered to create a chronological arc from wild uncertainty of childhood to the measured acceptance of late middle age.Item Ghost Arm(2013) Wyss, Allison; Casey, Maud; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Ghost Arm is the beginning of a novel-in-progress about a woman who has lost her left arm. She has a phantom limb, but the phantom is an actual ghost who acts on his own and gets into trouble.Item Game Fiction(2010) Rhody, Jason Christopher; Kirschenbaum, Matthew; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)"Game Fiction" provides a framework for understanding the relationship between narrative and computer games and is defined as a genre of game that draws upon and uses narrative strategies to create, maintain, and lead a user through a fictional environment. Competitive, ergodic, progressive (and often episodic), game fictions' primary goal must include the actualization of predetermined events. Building on existing game and new media scholarship and drawing from theories of narrative, cinema, and literature, my project details the formal materiality that undergirds game fiction and shapes its themes. In doing so, I challenge the critiques of narrativism levied at those scholars who see a relationship between computer games and narrative forms, while also detailing the ways that computational media alter and reform narratological preconceptions. My study proposes a methodology for discussing game fiction through a series of `close playings,' and while not intended to be chronological or comprehensive, provides a model for understanding narrative and genre in this growing field. Chapter one, "Defining Game Fiction," locates video games within the larger context of computer-mediated narrative design, and interrogates the power structure of reader to author, consumer to producer, and media object to its user. I articulate a framework for approaching computer games that acknowledges a debt to previous print, cinematic, and ludological forms, while taking into account computer games' unique ergodic and computational status. Chapter two, "Paper Prototypes," examines the principles of game fiction in three analogue forms: the choice book, the board game, and the tabletop role-playing game. My third chapter, "Playing the Interface," theorizes the act of narrative communication within the ludic, multimodal context of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. Chapter four, "Data, Set," posits the game quest as analogous to the database query in Adventure and StarCraft. Much like data exists in a database, requiring only the proper query for access, narrative exists in game fiction, shaped by quests through fictional settings. Chapter five, "The Game Loop," argues that the grammar of user input within the game loop shapes the player's relationship to the character and, in MediEvil, the subsequent themes of redemption.Item The Things We Know(2010) Green, David Robert; Casey, Maud; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The Things We Know is a collection of six short stories that revolve around the basic reality of white, male, suburban rage: what it means to feel culpable, responsible, and, ultimately, ineffective. The collection's protagonists, all but one of which is revealed through the first-person, range from the pre-adolescent to the middle-aged and offer up, rather than answers to the questions that plague this state of being, glimpses into the mind of the storyteller himself, examining what is revealed, what is known, and, perhaps most importantly, what is utterly unknowable.Item 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.