Furman, Andrew

This thesis is a novel that takes formal cues from works such as Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual. The work takes two separate forms in its chapters; the first being more traditional narrative chapters that follow a set of characters as they explore the surreal landscape of the titular Hotel, and the second are akin to flash fiction pieces that describe individual rooms in the Hotel. Together the narrative attempts to address issues of class and the way that capitalism subsumes people’s identities, as well as the potential of the natural world using leftist politics as a lens for this critique.

All My Sins is a collection of short fiction. The stories feature characters from Florida struggling with family, sexuality, masculinity, ethics, and themselves.

Locust, Emerge follows Hyatt Wrinkler, a twenty-nine year old do-nothing with growing anxieties about his world and his orientation in it. Though resistant to change, the landscape of his world is shifting around him, whether he's ready for that change or not. Over the course of a day, which the narrative follows him through the places he goes and people he comes into contact with, he must choose to either joining the world that has been spinning uninhibited during his self-imposed exile, or join it and endure the pain and frustrations that come with that admission.

Consider the Flowers of the Field is a novel-in-progress about four daughters who
are raised in deep-hollow Appalachia. When their parents finish rehab and prison stints,
they start their own church and force the girls to participate in the ministry. The story
follows the girls into adulthood and examines the ways each is affected by history,
environment, birth order, memory, secrets, and religion. One daughter renounces her
parents and God and spends her life in academia and social work, one takes up the
preaching mantle, one is the promiscuous, drug-addled antithesis of what her parents
stand for, and one daughter is born after her parents start their new life so she has no
concept of how things used to be. Consider the Flowers of the Field asks, “How do we
transcend, embrace, or reject the dogma of our youth?”

This thesis examines the schisms in the antebellum Baptist and Methodist Churches regarding slavery. It was these internal ruptures in both denominations that helped influence life in the slave community. The slave narratives of Henry Bibb, William Wells Brown, Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs reveal the impact the schisms had on master-slave relations and slave religious instruction. Moreover, the internal rupture in both denominations over the South‟s peculiar institution was instrumental in spawning a pro-slavery Christianity. This pro-slavery Christianity proved crucial in extending and strengthening white hegemony.

A central paradox in modernism is its disdain for mass culture, despite mass
culture 's undeniable presence in modernist literature. American authors writing
during the early twentieth century tried to establish themselves as "highbrow" by
leaving the U.S. and traveling to Europe. In doing so, they created a particular
aesthetic characterized by depictions of the transportation that facilitated this travel.
These depictions reveal modernism's dependence on mass culture, and more
importantly, create a space in which modernist authors can negotiate what was once
a choice between high or low culture, exile or tourist, and ultimately, modernism or
mass culture. Analyzing the car and train scenes in F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is
the Night and Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises reveals the hybrid spaces
made available to these authors through transportation.

This novel is the first-person account of Max Rosenbloom, who has difficulty forming
personal relationships, difficulty telling the truth. He enters a Work-Study program to
graduate from High School, landing a job as an apprentice in a taxidermy shop operated
by Richard, who becomes a strong influence in his life.
Themes explored include what is art and what is not art within the framework of the
modernization of taxidermy techniques. Another theme is how Max deals with death of
his father and death of the animals that Max mounts in the course of his taxidermy
training. Finally, a major theme is explored concerning the conflict within Max, who has
trouble telling the truth and makes a conscious decision to lie in order to further his
career.

This thesis argues that three models of trauma theory, which include traditional
trauma theory, postcolonial trauma theory, and cultural trauma theory, must be joined to
fully understand the trauma experienced by African Americans within the novels Song of
Solomon by Toni Morrison and The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead. By
implementing these three theories, we can see how each novel’s main character is
exploring and learning about African American trauma and better understand how an
adjustment of space and time creates the possibility for the implementation of trauma
theory.
Each novel presents a journey, and it is through this movement through space that
each character can serve as a witness to African American trauma. This is done in
Morrison’s text by condensing the geographical space of the American north and south into one town, which serves to pluralize African American culture. In Whitehead’s text,
American history is removed from its chronological place, which creates a duality that
instills Freud’s theory of the uncanny within both the character and the reader.

The novel Animalia is the representation of not just human relationships, but
also, of human beings’ relationships to other animals. While the story revolves around
a family, the narrative as a whole is meant to bring the reader into a microcosmic
ecosystem. Essentially, I am examining an ecosystem. An ecosystem, not in the
traditional sense, but an ecosystem nonetheless, because the narrative is a study of how
varying species of heterotrophs interact with one another for both physical and
emotional sustenance. Russell Water’s story is paramount, but the animals’ affect on
one another is what lies below the peak and forms the mountain (an unintentional
Hemingway reference). “It has often been observed that an object in a story does not
derive its density of existence from the number and length of descriptions devoted to it,
but from the complexity of its connections with the different characters” (Sartre 1210).
Essentially, through complex and multiple connections between the human species and
other species within Kingdom Animalia, I am attempting to develop an “ecosystem” that allows for narrative progression and the interconnection of relationships and
thematic elements which range from the capitalistic class system to natural selection.

Jeanette Winterson's novel Sexing the Cherry addresses literary genres in which women's voices have been silenced or marginalized, demonstrating John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill's claim that only when women have "lived in a different country from men and [have] never read any of their writings [will] they have a literature of their own" (207). This philosophy may be viewed in light of Edward Said's theory of colonization in which he argues that a people who colonize by violence maintain authority, while those people who are colonized are subject to "the paternalistic arrogance of imperialism" (Culture xviii). Winterson's desire to reclaim the authority of women illustrates her need for permission to narrate and to be "taken out of the Prism of [her] own experience" (Winterson, Into 17). As a result, she rewrites history, myth, fairy tale, and pornography, reversing the traditional gender roles and inverting the gender hierarchy. Women, in Sexing the Cherry maintain the authority and the Power to molest the now weaker sex, man.