Master of Arts (MA), Wright State University, 2007, English

Hank Fossett had the perfect life with his girlfriend, Liz: a steady job, a promising career as a local artist, a healthy relationship with a wonderful woman, all while living in the cosmopolitan city of Blophton. But Hank was just dumped and didn't see it coming. Now, after four years with his girlfriend, he's alone and must figure out how to get over the girl who broke his heart. turns to his friends to help him try to get Liz back. Instead, they help Hank get over Liz in a series of twelve steps crafted by Hank's old friend and war veteran, Chuck. Many of these steps are intuitive, such as feeling sorry for yourself and remembering the bad times. Other steps lead Hank back into the direction of his friends and then encourage him to make new friends. Eventually, with the help of his friend Cheryl, who introduces him to the world of online dating, Hank dates again. As Hank follows the steps to move on from his relationship, he begins to realize that his friends, and his father, have more serious problems: Chuck has Post Traumatic Stress Disorder from his time in Afghanistan, Cheryl is trying to get over being sexually assaulted, Hank's father, a physician, still blames himself from the death of Hank's grandfather. While Hank is moving on, another narrator fills in the past, moving backwards from days just before Hank was dumped to the very first time Hank and Liz met. In these passages, we learn that his relationship with Liz wasn't as solid as he thought it was. Hank accepts his mistakes and moves on from Liz as the twelve step program leads him in new directions in life he never expected to go.

Committee: Brady Allen (Advisor) Subjects: Literature, American

Master of Arts (MA), Wright State University, 2007, English

Evans, Theresa Marie. M.A., Department of English Language and Literatures, Wright State University, 2007. Down at the Bowl: A Novel. Novel set in late-1970s Cincinnati, on its traditionally conservative, Catholic west side. Karen is a sheltered seventeen-year-old girl, who gets a job bussing tables at a bowling alley restaurant. Unlike the friends she has struggled to fit in with throughout high school, Karen finds she is immediately welcomed into the group of teenagers who work there. She tries to become more street smart like her new friends, but finds herself jolted by their casual attitudes towards drinking, drugs, and sex. Along with the coming-of-age theme, the story addresses issues of homosexuality in a time when gays were just beginning to come out publicly. Karen struggles with her search for truth and love against the seventies' backdrop of social upheaval and economic insecurity. While the subjects are serious, the first-person narrator has a sense of humor and enduring hope that reflects the bittersweet and fleeting nature of teenage melodrama.

Committee: Erin Flanagan (Advisor) Subjects: Literature, American

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2001, Arts and Sciences : English and Comparative Literature

This dissertation, Hanging Big Mary and Other Poems, is a collection of original poems by the author, Juliana Gray Vice. The poems address a range of subject matters and themes, though they are bound by a strong sense of voice and Southern identity. Ecology, race, history and personal autobiography are among the subjects addressed. A range of poetic forms is also used, including blank verse, formal sonnets, and free verse. The dissertation also includes a critical paper, "Beholding Nothing: Wallace Stevens's Paradox of the Imagination in 'The Snow Man' and 'The Plain Sense of Things.'" This paper uses these two poems, written at opposite ends of Stevens's career, to illustrate Stevens's ongoing struggle with the paradox of using the metaphor of poetry to express a reality without metaphors, and the development of his ideas over the span of his career.

Committee: Andrew Hudgins (Advisor) Subjects: Literature, American

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2001, Arts and Sciences : English and Comparative Literature

This dissertation analyzes how contemporary African-American women writers transform the Euro-American Bildungsroman into a suitable vehicle to express the experiences and aspirations of Black girls. Writers such as Toni Morrison, Gwendolyn Brooks, Gayl Jones, Sapphire, Ntozake Shange, Thulani Davis, and Jacqueline Woodson use African-American cultural references, young women's issues, and orature to create contemporary African-American female Bildungsromane that accurately depict Black girls' lives. In the process, these writers reveal how "race," gender, and class as they exist in a racist society have complicated the maturation process of Black adolescents. Chapters One through Three explore specific issues that are important to the lives of young Black girls, silencing and sexual violence, western standards of beauty, and integration into an unwelcoming "white space" during the Civil Rights Era. Chapter Four compares and contrasts the depictions of young Black girls in novels written specifically for a young adult audience with those written for an adult audience. Ultimately, this literary study illustrates how young Black girls as depicted in the novels struggle to develop healthy cultural and individual identities despite the presence of racism and sexism in their lives.

Committee: Arlene Elder (Advisor) Subjects: Literature, American

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2001, Arts and Sciences : English and Comparative Literature

Burning Spring is a novel about an urban Appalachian family's close ties and buried secrets, where the crossed wires of desire can have supernatural consequences. With the restless longing of a bluegrass melody, each character strives to forge a new definition of self, only to find that the intersections of love and hate can go up in flames. In tender but realistic prose, the novel preserves the dignity of an uprooted Appalachian family that is losing its grip in a complex world while also acknowledging the mysterious bonds between mothers, daughters, and sisters utilizing the narrative techniques of magic realism. Ghosts from the past literally haunt the present and the central characters until they are able to come to grips with the demands of their own personal growth and those that they love. Ultimately, both the living and the dead are forced to realize that family devotion can mean the perseverance to hold on as well as the courage to let go.

Committee: Erin McGraw (Advisor) Subjects: Literature, American

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2000, Arts and Sciences : English and Comparative Literature

This dissertation explores the fiction written by Jewish American authors from 1896-1930. Drawing on Werner Sollors' ideas on the invention of ethnicity, and the work of historians like Gerald Sorin and Moses Rischin, this work argues that Jewish American writers of fiction from the first decades of the twentieth century participated in a re-invention of Jewish ethnicity for modern America. Writers such as Abraham Cahan, Anzia Yezierska, Sidney Nyburg, and Ludwig Lewisohn portray the discovery of new kinds of Jewish-ness for the modern world. All of these practices have their roots in one or another tradition within Judaism, but they would now serve as the central modes for a new Jewish ethnic identity. This literature helped define what being Jewish American meant at this period in history. Moreover, these re-inventions of Jewish ethnic identity have influenced all subsequent interpretations of American Jewishness to this day.

Committee: Stan Corkin (Advisor) Subjects: Literature, American

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2007, Arts and Sciences : English and Comparative Literature

Scarecrow is a dissertation in two parts. It begins with a book-length manuscript of original poetry that explores the uncanny process of inventing our many selves and the consequences of performing these selves under real or imagined scrutiny. The poems extend the lyric's introspective nature by suggesting that this continual process of invention and re-invention is never certain and creates only projections – various transparent approximations of whom the speakers think they should be. The speakers' endeavors to find something solid and immutable about themselves create the underlying tension in the manuscript. Because of the shifting nature of the self in this work, the poems rarely rely on the narrative I as a focal point and instead turn to unexpected juxtaposed topics and imagery largely taken from a palette of natural and scientific interests. From particle physics and M-theory to the contradictions that are California, the poems of Scarecrow operate under the belief that as we strive to discover the nature of the universe around us, we learn the nature of ourselves. Complementing the manuscript is a scholarly essay titled “Transgression and Transformation: Racial Negotiation in Elizabeth Bishop's ‘Brazil' Poems.” This essay investigates the poetic techniques Elizabeth Bishop devised in the “Brazil” section of her book Questions of Travel to scrutinize how racial identities were constructed and positioned in postcolonial Brazil.

Committee: Dr. Joanie Mackowski (Advisor) Subjects: Literature, American

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2007, Arts and Sciences : English and Comparative Literature

This dissertation examines the role of documentary fiction within contemporary media culture. Through the authors' inclusion of documented historical events/personages and their critical mediation of these documents, the writers show an awareness of the mediated nature of historical knowledge—including a consciousness of their own act of novelistic mediation. As a result, I argue that contemporary documentary fiction, through its recognition of the inevitability of mediation and the challenges it brings to entrenched cultural notions, is best equipped to thrive in the media-saturated marketplace. In order to explore the variety of ways contemporary documentary fictions “navigate the media torrent,” I have paired the texts according to similarities in form and mode of mediation. Each chapter examines the authors' novelistic renderings of history against dominant nonfictional accounts in order to analyze the authors' mediations of and challenges to hegemonic conceptions of that history. Before moving to the pairs, however, I briefly examine the methodology of E.L. Doctorow's The March, ultimately dismissing it as outdated. The first dyad, then, includes Lewis Nordan's Wolf Whistle and Julia Alvarez's In the Time of the Butterflies, which emphasize the imaginative nature of memory in order to influence and even alter their communities' collective memory. In the second pairing, Rene Steinke's Holy Skirts and Charles Johnson's Dreamer utilize a fictional biography form to revise popular conceptions of their biographical subjects, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and Martin Luther King, Jr. respectively. Colson Whitehead's John Henry Days and Mark Winegardner's The Veracruz Blues challenge American mythology by representing their characters' searches for—and inability to find—Truth. The final pairing includes Christopher Sorrentino's Trance and William Vollmann's The Ice-Shirt. Sorrentino takes media distortion as his critical target, and Vollmann, with a grand encyclopedic s (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Dr. Thomas LeClair (Advisor) Subjects: Literature, American

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2007, Arts and Sciences : English and Comparative Literature

The Moment of Looking Down is a collection of poems crafted into book form over the course of my studies. The first and fourth sections focus on poems dealing with fidelity, mortality, and loss. The second section explores memory and perception through a series of poems that use a long, single-line stanza. The third section is a narrative sonnet sequence that follows the brief rise of a young jazz singer as she struggles to reconcile her understanding of herself with the perceptions of those listening to her. The dissertation concludes with the essay “Manmade: Masculinity in the Poetry of Tony Hoagland, Mark Halliday, and Rodney Jones,” which contends that these poets express the male body and male sexuality with a troubled awareness of the complicated political, cultural, and psychological position of American masculinity at the end of the twentieth century, and that their poetry moves beyond contemporary feminist and masculinity studies theorists by exploring new masculinities through directly accessible language.

Committee: Dr. Don Bogen (Advisor) Subjects: Literature, American

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2006, Arts and Sciences : English and Comparative Literature

My creative work focuses on the notion of belief – not religious belief, necessarily, but belief (mistaken or not) in our ability to control the circumstances that shape us: as Wallace Stevens wrote, “It is the belief and not the god that counts.” Thematically, my works feature the following characteristics: elements of the fantastic; dark humor; and working-class protagonists who seek to palliate some unnamable dissatisfaction in their lives and who seek this correction through obsessive behavior that might be either wonderfully healing or terribly misguided – the results are in the eye of the beholder. The tensions between the fantastic and the realistic, between blue-collar and academic concerns, between knowing and not-knowing, between what we internally perceive and the external truth – unresolved oppositions like these are what create the lasting effects of literature, and they are what I strive to cultivate in my writing. Such binaries constitute the mystery and meaning of fiction, and they are, to quote Flannery O'Connor, what “keeps the short story from being short.”

Committee: Dr. Brock Clarke (Advisor) Subjects: Literature, American

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2006, Arts and Sciences : English and Comparative Literature

This dissertation, Strange Houses, is a collection of original short stories by the author, Joseph Alex DeBonis. The stories engage notions about home, family, estrangement, and alienation. Since many of the stories deal with family and marital relations, homes feature prominently in the action and as settings. Often characters are estranged or exiled, and their obsessions with having normal families and/or stable lives drive them to construct elaborate fantasies in which they are included, loved, and part of something enduring that is larger than themselves. The dissertation also includes a critical paper, “A Butterfly, a Cannonball, and a Sneeze: Notions of Chaos Theory in Cormac McCarthy's All The Pretty Horses and Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49.” In this essay, I argue that the novel All The Pretty Horses grapples with a sense of freedom that is rife with ambiguity and demonstrates McCarthy's engagement with chaos theory. The essay shows how Thomas Pynchon, in The Crying of Lot 49, exhibits similar concerns with the dynamic interaction of order and disorder. Though Horses has realistic details and does not appear to engage chaos theory in as obvious a way as The Crying of Lot 49 does, McCarthy's novel can be profitably read through the lens of chaos theory.

Committee: Michael Griffith (Advisor) Subjects: Literature, American

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2006, Arts and Sciences : English and Comparative Literature

Nothing Fatal, a dissertation by Sarah Perrier, consists of two complementary pieces: a book length collection of poems and a scholarly essay. Both pieces are grounded in my interest in Romantic, feminist, and confessional poetic traditions at the start of the twenty-first century. The epigraph to this collection, “Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous,” is the bargain proposed by Frankenstein's monster when he asks for a mate. Like the monster, the speaker in these poems hopes to strike a deal that will stave off loneliness, or at least be incentive to virtue. And just as the monster's courting of his mate would surely be unconventional, the poems in Nothing Fatal also approach courtship unconventionally. These poems strive for the satisfaction that all creative work – including love – can provide. In these poems, conventional romantic roles (lover and beloved) bump up against and resist the roles provided for poets and readers by our literary Romantic legacy. The dissonance provided by these two partially compatible paradigms enables the poems in Nothing Fatal to grapple with questions of lyric sincerity. Introducing the manuscript is “What Do They Teach You in That School, Anyhow?: Redefining the Confessional Paradigm in Contemporary American Poetry,” an essay that reviews the reception of confessional poetry, and concludes that no balanced critical discussion of it has offered a clear delineation of its constituent parts, its value and role for contemporary writers and readers, or its relationship to other poetic traditions that emerged during the 1950s and 1960s. Rather, connotative meanings of “confessional poetry,” which have been mostly pejorative, have dwarfed the denotative ones. This unbalanced treatment of confessional writing has had particular consequences for the work of women poets writing in the wake of second-wave feminism, and so I also suggest that our current discussions of a confessional school of poetry should acknowledge how women wr (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Dr. Don Bogen (Advisor) Subjects: Literature, American

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2005, Arts and Sciences : English and Comparative Literature

This dissertation includes a creative section with a selection of original poetry, along with a critical section that focuses on the work of Anne Spencer, one of the most important female poets of the Harlem Renaissance. Spencer's poems appeared in the major anthologies and journals of the period, and she was a close friend to writers like James Weldon Johnson and Langston Hughes. Like many of the poets working in the Harlem Renaissance, she chose to employ rather than overturn existing and recognizable poetic structures, and she clearly saw herself as writing within a white male tradition. She proclaimed Robert Browning her favorite poet, and she wrote herself comfortably into the company of white men: “Chatterton, Shelley, Keats and I— / Ah, how poets sing and die!” Some critics explain this seeming contradiction as a separation of her art and her life and view her poetry as an escape from the more controversial political concerns that occupied her existence. Yet, her poetry constantly brings into play her own voice and concerns as a black woman. This essay reads Spencer within the white male context in which she herself envisioned her work, examining several of Spencer's poems alongside the poems of her beloved Browning and her contemporaries T.S. Eliot and W.B. Yeats. In placing her within the white male canon, I do not mean to suggest that Spencer denied her blackness or womanhood, for I believe she managed with incredible skill the mutually exclusive terms of black, woman, and poet, marking through the white tradition every time she picked up the pen. Rather, I hope to show how poets writing out of the same tradition, using similar forms and poetic conventions, produced very different results. Such differences can shed light not only on Spencer's artistic choices but upon the works of these white men as well.

Committee: Don Bogen (Advisor) Subjects: Literature, American

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2005, Arts and Sciences : English and Comparative Literature

This dissertation, Synonyms for Maybe, a collection of original poems by Allison E. Hammond, consists of three sections bound together by their exploration of language's ability or inability to render experience, shape memory, and structure reality. The poems engage a variety of forms, including sonnets, prose poems, ballads, and free verse. The dissertation also includes a critical paper, “Fishing the Waters of Tradition: Robert Hass's Poetic Inheritance.” This paper follows the development of Robert Hass's relationship to the Romantic literary tradition over his four volumes of original poetry.

Committee: Dr. Don Bogen (Advisor) Subjects: Literature, American

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2005, Arts and Sciences : English and Comparative Literature

The creative component of my dissertation is a novel called Take A Picture which tells the story of sixty-seven year old Jack Hoskins, a childless widower and the owner of the last independent funeral home in the fictional town of Dove Point, Indiana. As a large corporation encroaches on Mr. Hoskins' business, he finds himself questioning the efficacy of his profession and searching for a different way to serve his community. His decision to begin photographing the dead has enormous repercussions for both his business and his personal life. Take A Picture , like all of my fiction, operates in the realistic tradition and has been inspired by the works of authors from Herman Melville to Richard Ford. The critical component of my dissertation is an essay titled “Unfathomable Me: The Privileged View of Nature in Melville's Moby-Dick.” My essay argues that Ishmael seeks an unimpeded, unmediated experience of the natural world, and this occurs most notably in the chapter, “The Grand Armada.” In this chapter, Ishmael looks down into the ocean depths and witnesses a pod of whales mating and nursing their young. At this moment, human beings become decentralized in the natural world, and Ishmael is able to see the whales as “subject” and not “object.” Much of nineteenth-century American literature—most notably the works of Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman—deals with this desire for first-hand knowledge of the natural world as well as an intense concern with recognizing oneself as a member of the larger human community.

Committee: Brock Clarke (Advisor) Subjects: Literature, American

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2005, Arts and Sciences : English and Comparative Literature

This dissertation consists of two components: a collection of short stories called Heaven and Earth and a scholarly essay on Alice Randall's The Wind Done Gone. The focus of both my critical and creative work has been on the formation and development of identity in terms of gender, class, culture and ethnicity. The title story of this collection follows two American women visiting East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall. During their travels, these characters confront not only their loyalty to each other but also American attitudes about class and nationality. Although my fiction works primarily in the realistic tradition, it simultaneously subverts traditional ideas about conventional morality, thus challenging social institutions and political ideologies that affect identity. For instance, many of my stories feature women who reject patriarchal assumptions about gender and culture. In “Sliders,” a young pregnant woman comes face to face with antiquated notions about gender while eating hamburgers with her grandmother. “Things in Common” explores how issues of class come to bear on the development of a lower middle-class teenage girl growing up in the rural Midwest. Conversely, a short story called “Gravy Train” explores the impact of wealth on an urban young woman's self-esteem. The collection's title, Heaven and Earth, like that of the title story, represents a meeting of the real and the ideal, a metaphor that can also be applied to the condition of the women in my fiction. While these characters suffer from both earthly tragedy and petty frustrations, they also experience moments of transcendence, that is, moments that keep them yearning for more of life despite its ongoing difficulties. The critical component of this dissertation explores these issues in an essay asserting the sociopolitical impact of The Wind Done Gone , Alice Randall's 2001 retelling of Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind . Randall's revisionist novel challenges the ideas of racia (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Brock Clarke (Advisor); James Schiff (Other); Michael Griffith (Other) Subjects: Literature, American

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2002, Arts and Sciences : English and Comparative Literature

This dissertation consists of two parts: Let's Do, a collection of original short stories, and a scholarly article entitled “The ‘Larger, Unfinished Story' of Contemporary African American Short Fiction.” The story collection, Let's Do, offers an evocative study in grief. A range of characters – including a teenage anorexic, a failed lawyer, a pregnant art teacher, and a retiree in the wilderness – fumble through and triumph over losses arising from divorce, encroachment, and abandonment.Through first, second, and third person narration, the author explores a number of responses to personal anguish: some characters recover through humor and irreverence, others hold fast to their siblings and children, and a few wound themselves or their loved ones with violence. Pushing the boundaries – sometimes tragically – of caretaking, discipline, legacy, and duty, the characters of Let's Do are poised to take steps into uncertain terrain. The article, “The ‘Larger, Unfinished Story' of Contemporary African American Short Fiction,” investigates the publication of short fiction by black writers at the end of the twentieth century. After identifying Prevailing “pathological” literary images of black life and the stylistic commonalities of anthologized stories, the author presents the work of several writers outside of the mainstream as a means of questioning their omission.The author concludes that myriad elements – including college curriculum, lack of family support, and low numbers of African American editors and agents – contribute to the dearth of published short stories by black American writers.

Committee: Brock Clarke (Advisor) Subjects: Literature, American

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2007, English

As the large numbers of children's books published in early America indicate, child readers played a major role in the spread of literacy and the rise of print culture in the new nation. Even more strikingly, the most popular American literary texts, from Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Temple to Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, were primarily addressed to a child audience. Even texts that were not originally addressed to children, such as Washington Irving's “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, quickly became the province of young readers, leading to later arguments that, in the words of D.H. Lawrence, “the old-fashioned American classics” are “children's books.” Yet, while much work has been done on particular kinds of early American readers, such as the female reader, the child reader has often been overlooked by critics perhaps eager to counter age-old claims that American literature, and hence the study of it, is “childish.” My dissertation tells the story of how and why children came to be central figures in the formation of the American reading public, focusing on key historical moments in which the figure of the child reader instigated larger shifts in the cultural understanding of literature and citizenship. In particular, I argue that children's reading practices played a crucial role in narratives about the origins, activities, and limitations of American citizenship, suggesting that the ideal American citizen and reader was, first and foremost, a child.

Committee: Jared Gardner (Advisor) Subjects: Literature, American

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2007, English

This dissertation traces the cultural history of American automobility as revealed in narrative back to its inception in order to shed light on the construction of America's automobile geography. Examining multiple genres of narrative I argue that narratives representing road travel established new relationships to national space so that the civil and industrial infrastructures that make automobility possible could be built. The construction of America's highway infrastructure depended upon the production of narrative rhetoric that formulates new possibilities of relating to and experiencing America's physical space. Thus, building on Mikhail Bakhtin's idea of the chronotope of the open road, and defining narrative broadly, I analyze poetry, novels, travel memoir, prescriptive travel writing, and promotional literature to show how narratives about road travel propelled sweeping changes in the production of national space in the early century. Chapter one traces the beginning of automobility in America to the Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago and analyzes geographic narratives in architect Louis Sullivan's Transportation Building, Colonel Albert Pope's rhetoric of the Good Roads Movement, and Frederick Jackson Turner's “Frontier Thesis” of American institutions. Chapter two demonstrates the spectrum of nineteenth-century conceptions of geography reflected in Walt Whitman's romantic worldview and outlines the points on which Whitman became a touchstone for the national geographic concepts of later American road writers. Chapter three analyzes numerous promotional texts that depict road travel to demonstrate how promotional literature popularized automobility for a reluctant, reactionary nation. Chapter four examines prescriptive travel books by Effie Gladding Price, Emily Post, and A. L. Westgard, revealing the fantasies and desires with which these texts imbue automobility such that it can be represented as more rewarding than alternative modes of travel. Chapt (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Brian McHale (Advisor) Subjects: Literature, American

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2006, English

Representations of the frontier through the early twentieth century have been subject to two sets of critical criteria: the conventional aesthetic expectations of the particular genres and forms in which westerns are produced, and the popular cultural demand for imitative “authenticity” or faithfulness to the “real west.” “In the Flesh” probes how literary history is bound up with the history of performance westerns that establish the criteria of “authenticity” that text westerns seek to fulfill. The dissertation demonstrates how the impulse to verify western authenticity is part of a post-Civil War American nationalism that locates the frontier as the paradigmatic American socio-topography. It argues that westerns produced in a variety of media sought to distance themselves from their status as art forms subject to the critical standards of particular genres and to represent themselves as faithful transcriptions of popular frontier history. The primary signifier of historicity in all these forms is the technical ability to represent authentic bodies capable of performing that history. Postbellum westerns, in short, seek to show their audiences history embodied “in the flesh” of western performers. “In the Flesh” is therefore divided into two sections: the first analyzes performance westerns, including stage drama, Wild West, and film, that place bodies on display for the immediate appraisal of audiences. Section two examines text westerns, including dime novels and Owen Wister's “The Virginian,” that are constrained to appropriate the conventions of performance to “display” in writing the bodies of their “authentic” western characters.

Committee: Chadwick Allen (Advisor) Subjects: Literature, American