Department of English

Some Years Ago, My Mother was Possessed is a poetry chapbook exploring a familial lineage of abuse through fictional exit interviews taken after points of emotional and physical trauma or abuse. Through surreal landscapes and speculative futures, the poems explore the remnants of abuse, and the fear of being possessed by her family’s history of motherhood.

Feed is a novel set in a fictional post-revolutionary Nebraska, at a time when the developments and progress of the revolution begins to come into question. The former revolutionaries must dive into an internet-like database, referred to as the Feed, in order to unearth memories critical to their survival.

“Death Conjunct Living” is a collection of flash essays that explores the interconnectedness between life and death—births, miscarriages, childhoods, funerals— as well as the term “empty stomach.” How a stomach can be empty of child or empty of food; how it can indicate a birth, a miscarriage, or an eating disorder. “Death Conjunct Living” is an exploration of the flash medium and how micro nonfiction can tackle macro themes.

Both research and lived experience indicate that intangible things such as myths and absences may acquire agency, becoming Latourian actants and causing changes in people’s thoughts, beliefs, and actions. This dissertation focuses on myths and absences located in Spain’s 20th century—specifically Francoist-generated political myths, the absences of those disappeared by the Franco regime, and the literary myths created by authors of historical fiction set during the Spanish Civil War, the resulting dictatorship, and the Transition to Democracy. The argument is made that these three actants— political myth, absence, and literary myth—have acted and interacted in the following sequence: the political myths put forth by the Francoists and presented as facts led to the complicity of many of the Spanish people in the extermination of those considered dangerous or undesirable to the regime; once released into the popular imagination, the political myths gained agency, spurring the bigoted beliefs and persecutory actions that led to the absences of the maligned people. The presence of these tragic absences in the lives of their surviving loved ones then gained agency, indelibly marking the survivors and causing grief, anger, and bewilderment as well as fear, humiliation, silence, and transgenerational trauma. The absences also caused the desire among contemporary writers of historical fiction, some of them descendants of the disappeared who grew up under the cloud of fear and silence perpetuated by those disappearances, to write alternate histories pointing out the absurdities and atrocities connected to the earlier political myths and the resulting absences of undesirables. These literary myths thus acquired their own agency, changing the thoughts, beliefs, and actions of readers who were able to finally see through the truths and tragedies that lay hidden for so long behind the hostile myths. In these chapters, eight historical fictions—five novels, two plays, one film—and one non-fiction account, described by its author as “a novel without fiction”—are analyzed for evidence of the presence and the agency of political myth, absence, and literary myth.

Hoops and Other Essays is a collection driven by form and lyricism threading themes of grief, fatherhood, joy and anxiety. I place myself within an American landscape spanning South Florida, Northern Alaska, and Montgomery County, Maryland. Anchored by non-linear structures, an exploration of trauma, and a delight for language, these essays depict the coming of age of a thirty-year-old man who seems to be still coming of age. Poop is a theme; Nature is a theme. Speaking aloud to no one is a character trait, and iguanas are a motif. Hoops and Other Essays pulls free the particulars of the universal struggle of trying to be okay when things hardly ever seem okay. The collection comments on the inevitably of dying shared among the living and the pleasure and pain that emerges from loving what has to end. The essays were written over the course of two years after the sudden loss of my brother which was quickly followed by the birth of my son. In the end, Hoops and Other Essays tries to unravel how one fits between the polar opposites of human existence, with the hope to uncover more likeness than difference in the way we enter and the way we leave it.

This thesis paper is an in-depth look at two of Cormac McCarthy’s novels: Blood Meridian and No Country for Old Men, and more specifically, the villains of each story seen from a level of violence paired with philosophy. The dialogue and actions of Judge Holden and Anton Chigurh hold precedent over the novels, storylines, and other characters so much that I place a greater importance on the philosophies and actionable scenes without emphasis from outside ideals or quasi-religious sects. By looking at dialogue and philosophy, previous comparisons to both works never hold the characteristics of each villain as the centerpiece for discussion. Without the reliance of outside precepts, the Judge and Chigurh function as essential placeholders in their novels. Aspects relating to violence become the result of actions proven by speech. Consequently, the Judge and Chigurh are greater than other villains that I explore in detail with this work. I can only hope this paper sheds light on the significance of both characters.

Lexical obsolescence is a topic whose study spans centuries, and yet it is not well-understood. Variously termed lexical mortality, lexical death, and lexical loss, among other names, the phenomenon has been described as both a product and a process, but the scholarship on how and why expressions go out of use has, until recently, been sporadic and sparse. The last few years have seen attempts to situate obsolescence among other processes of language change, but these have mostly focused on obsolescing constructions in modern languages. The present study, by contrast, investigates words that went obsolete in Late Middle English, suggesting a methodological approach designed to overcome the challenge of finding that which is no longer there, namely the consultation of a comprehensive online historical dictionary, and proposing an explanatory framework within the tradition of onomasiology and semasiology that positions obsolescence as a diachronic result of the habitual and contextually driven corporate deselection of linguistic constructions.

In William Faulkner’s the Sound and the Fury, many scholars have debated about Caddy as Eve, the functionality of hermeneutic structure in relation to narrative function, and the use of Edenic scenery as a metaphor for Quentin Compsons’ world coming to an end. However, there is yet to be an analysis of Faulkner’s text in relation to trauma and ecocriticism and its influence on later Pat Conroy’s The Prince of Tides. It is through the female and the aquatic bodies that widen the interpretation of Faulkner’s exploration of Southern male identity in relation to trauma, water, and memory its reflection onto the Southern environment. In Conroy’s text, he mirrors the way in which trauma is explored through the idea of water and the Faulknerian narrative technique, the stream of consciousness, which is activated only with the remembrance of the sister and her social ruin. Faulkner and Conroy delve into the South and communicate it as a site of decay, ruin, and a liminal space that inevitably exposes one to trauma. The men within Faulkner’s and Conroy’s texts must sift through their memories, both present and past, to define and identify the wound that disrupts their psyche [and its consequences]. This thesis aims to unpack Faulkner’s utilization of the female, terrestrial, and aquatic bodies as spaces that communicate male trauma. This thesis aims to suggest that, as an echo of Faulkner, Conroy’s text expands and further adapts the canon of Southern literature that takes an ecological approach to explore trauma in the form of water and the female body. This analysis aims to propose that the construction of Faulkner’s Southern ecology and its intersection between ecocriticism and trauma studies in relation to water influenced this approach and framework for Pat Conroy’s The Prince of Tides.

I Would Rather Talk About Persimmons aims to understand the roots of trauma, addiction, and lineage. A discovery of what it means to be half American, half Albanian. A discovery of loving the people in our lives no matter how imperfect, no matter how painful no matter the sacrifice. The work seeks to understand the existence of joy and pain in the ways they work together and by doing so we see that emotions of the human experience are not linear, rather chaotic.

This dissertation is an anthropological lyric, a work that utilizes various modes of writing to examine and reveal the present-day predicament of the African-American woman. By engaging with transatlantic diaspora studies and Black feminist scholarship, particularly Zora Neale Hurston’s literary and linguistic contributions, herstory is bridged with the contemporary moment, allowing for an intricate and intimate dialogue between my ancestors and me. Providing a space for nontraditional voices exposes the divergent and intersecting conflicts that have and continue to arise for the descendants of slaves.
American culture is founded on war capitalism and an Africanist presence (a liberal modernity). Black women experience alarmingly high rates of discrimination, repression, oppression, and exploitation; fittingly, this work explores how haunting and trauma impact our livelihood and identity formation and functioning. Racial, monopolistic, and militaristic violences are exposed through the (re)telling of our stories, because the aftermath of colonial conquest and settlement most directly impacts our personhood. These stories portray the dynamic ways we have suffered and thrived in the face of imperialistic rule. Finally, this project aims to recompense my ancestors and me by reprinting our agencies through new forms of language.
This lyric becomes a form of feminist knowledge production that questions hegemonic epistemologies by applying various narrations. An intersubjective and reflexive account of truth grapples with linguistic hegemony and other forms of identity politics. Diasporic subjects “speak for themselves,” acting to revoke the systems and events, past and present, that strive to maintain their liminal group status.