Furman, Andrew

Blood Drive and Other Stories is a collection of fictional works. It includes stories that take place in South Florida or are inspired by the landscape of it. The themes within each vary from the limits one is willing to go to enact small-town justice, the need to conserve consciousness, adapting to age, living with medication, and the desire to burn everything down.

“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.

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.

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.

The three novels of Henry James’s “major phase” have alienated many readers in James’s own time and today. I draw on the philosophical school of phenomenology, in particular the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and a recent extension by the philosopher Richard Kearney, to suggest that a lack of self-touch by characters in these novels has contributed in a significant but previously unnoticed way to many readers’ sense that these novels feel frustratingly intangible. I make a comparison to the instances of self-touch in other Edwardian novels to underline the difference. I suggest that James is putting forward a model of “middle-distance intimacy” in which intimates orbit each other at a fixed distance, neither coming closer nor moving further away. This kind of intimacy, for James, privileges the eye that sees from across the room over the hand that touches from up close. While this model of intimacy perplexed many readers in James’s time and later, it is a valuable exploration of a different yet—for some—no less satisfactory kind of emotional life.

The stories in Nameless in Z take place in the fictional city of Z, located on the northwestern coast of the US. The throughline of this collection tracks alternate versions of the same male narrator as he subconsciously pursues relationships in an attempt to supplant his own destructive addictions. The first half of this book dwells more in the relationship aspect, while the second half owns up to the consequences of the first half.
Each story involves the titular city tormenting the narrator in a way that physically and/or spiritually manifests his specific addiction. Speculative fiction elements hang around the fringes of each of these stories, typically through different forms of the supernatural. The purpose of this work is to give a voice to underrepresented aspects of addiction and to disentangle my own demons; the ones I’ve inherited as well as the ones I’ve created as a direct result.

The main desire behind this project was to construct a story that could be enjoyed by anyone of any age (for the most part). The author has been writing for over ten years at this point, and has always had an affinity for Young Adult literature. It was YA literature that made the author interested in becoming a writer in the first place. YA has the ability to help those who are too young to be considered “real adults” feel like there is someone out there that understands them and who takes them and their feelings into serious consideration. While, like any genre of literature out there, there are some more unsavory and less serious pieces of literature in this category, to always look down on it and say that it has no value or no place among other literature is ill mannered.
The story here depicts what life is like as a teenager, which many know and have experienced, but it shows how young people deal with all sorts of feelings and scenarios, ranging from small fights that won’t matter the next day with friends you may not remember in ten years, to life changing and world shattering events that you won’t ever forget, no matter how hard you may try.
The author of this piece wanted to portray a story where young people could feel heard and could relate, and where older generations could begin to understand that just because someone is young, doesn’t mean that what they feel isn’t real. The desire to reach the hearts of many is what lives in these pages and will continue to do so until that desire is met.
This project came about after almost two years, and while it is far from complete, it will be worked on until it can sit on its own and feel worthy of peoples eyes and fears.

As the title suggests, this is a collection of essays about addiction and recovery, told from my personal perspective. In recovery, we have a saying: “Once a pickle, you can’t go back to a cucumber.” That is, just because one stops using drugs, does not mean their addictive personality is somehow vanquished. Even though I have not used drugs or alcohol in over eight years, I still very much identify as a person who is in recovery from addiction and alcoholism. This collection is about my life as an addict and alcoholic, both before and after getting clean, and the transformation required to bridge these two very different existences.

The Dreams of Gods is a surreal-realist novel that follows a grieving man in the wake of his wife’s death through a strange conspiracy that seems to bend reality around him, forcing him on a curious odyssey of self-discovery, eventually leading to understanding as he learns how to come to terms with himself and the world around him. It is an exploration of the many faces of god and the universe, as well as humanity's place within it all. Inventive and energetic, the hairbrained plot takes the reader deep into a world that becomes more bizarre with each page, while fantastical characters pop in and out of the story in shocking and comical ways and nothing is quite what it seems.

This thesis/novel, The Marvelous Garden of Marcel Verdell, follows the fictional story of one local government bureaucrat, Jude Wintertour, into the irregular and viridescent town of Garden, wherein he encounters the titular gardener, Marcel Verdell, and, along with a host of other residents, confronts the oppressive, convoluted past, envisions a hopeful future, and lives with the consequences of the blindsight-choices of the present.