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"Have You Ever Had a Broken Heart?"
Have You Ever Had Broken Heart? is a collection of essays that interrogate memory, loss, and grief through the intersection of personal narrative, films, the actress Frances Farmer, and woman saints and mystics from the twelfth through seventeenth centuries who were punished for daring to speak to G-d. The essays engage with autotheory and include a myriad of forms, such as segmented, one sentence, and hybrid works. The films discussed range from the philosophical, such as Ingmar Bergman's Winter Light (1963), to Graeme Clifford's biopic, Frances (1982), to catechize the grief of the persona losing her mother and sister to a hit and run car wreck in June 2022. The persona traverses the realm of the mystics and saints, including Marguerite Porete, Sor Juana Inez De La Cruz, and Joan of Arc, examining their respective quests to experience the unseen and often silent divine, while questioning her longing for G-d, and simultaneously believing G-d cannot exist. Yet, within this confusion, she finds herself immersed in memories which carry the presence of her mother's love.
The Emergence of Arab Nation-State Nationalism as an Alternative to the Supranational Concept of Ummah
In this dissertation, I examine the political shift or reorientation of Arabs and Muslims from the supranational Ummah to the Western form of nation-state by attending to modern Arabic novel in the period between World War I and World War II. I explore the emergence of secularism in Arab national formation. One of my central arguments is that Arab nationalism is indeed a misleading phrase as it gives the impression of unity and coherence to a complex phenomenon that materialize in a number of trends as a form of struggle. In the first chapter, I defined the scope of my argument and the underlying structure and function of nationalism as a form of representation masked by nationalist ideologies. To investigate the reorientation of Arabs and Muslims from Ummah to adopting nation-state, I utilize Spivak's criticism of the system of representation along with Foucault's theorization of discourse. I argued along Edward Said that although the Western national discourse might have influenced the Arab nationalists, I do not believe they prevented them from consciously appropriating nationalism in a free creative way. I also explained that the Arab adoption of a secularist separatist nationalism was more an outcome than an effect in the dissolution of the supranational Ummah, since according to Hourani that "explicit Arab nationalism" did not emerge until the end of the nineteenth century. I wrote this dissertation with the hope that I could, to use Masood Raja's literary concepts, inundate the modern Arabic novel with "silenced knowledge" to not only prevent the untrained Western readers from reducing these works to a set of assumptions, prejudices, or preferences but also to shift the texts from being a point of arrival to a being a point departure.
Stories and "Burning Man"
Stories and a novel.
Shakespeare and Early Modern Trauma
Shakespeare references humoral medical theory and social definitions of gender throughout much of his work. His references to medical practices like purging, the siphoning of excessive emotional fluids to bring the body into balance, are more than allusions to medical theories. Shakespeare's works unveil and challenge early modern approaches to emotional experience, most particularly when it comes to traumatic experiences that overwhelm comprehension. In Titus Andronicus (1592), The Rape of Lucrece (1593), Hamlet (1603), King Lear (1608), and Macbeth (1606), Shakespeare invokes humoral theory to articulate the early modern traumatic experience and to criticize the efficacy of purging in representations of trauma. For Shakespeare, the siphoning of destabilized emotions, through metaphorical and rhetorical practices, has dangerous consequences for bodies coded as feminine.
"The Sometime Joy"
The work is a collection of poems entitled The Sometime Joy, comprising a mix of poems completed before and during my studies at UNT. The manuscript is my second completed full-length work after my first manuscript, the unpublished Night, Translated. The Sometime Joy shares many of the same themes with its predecessor, although stylistically the more recent work hews much more strongly toward the infusion of speculative and fantastical elements (just one example being the apocalyptic poem "Petal Storm"). The speculative components of the collection allow me to express and utilize the full range of my imagination, to use poetry to explore alternate existences and to create allegories, such as the "Market" series of poems, where capitalism is embodied as a chimerical beast that would fit in a horror film. The collection functions as my exploration of the intersections between folklore and pop culture, a series of meditations on the strangeness of human perspectives and how the relation between perceiver and the perceived alloys and transforms both. The collection also delves into horrific subjects varying from serried monsters (wendigos, the capitalist system, J. Edgar Hoover), the apocalypse, and the capacity of mundane humans to be cruel to each other, but also affirms the same imagination's potential to delight and sooth or poke fun. One of the central themes is embodiment and the human body and its components, seen through the "organ" sequence of poems that explore various human organs, as well as poems like the Market poems or "Hereby, Dragons" where concepts or abstractions are incarnated and embodied. Overall, the collection functions as an example of a contemporary poetry collection with an eclectic stylistic range and multiple linked sequences within the different sections.
Chicana Decolonial Feminism: An Interconnectedness of Being
Chicana decolonial feminism asks us to re envision a world that allows for various forms of beings, creating identities based on political coalitions, having an active compassion that translates into direct action that seeks to dismantle binaries that reinscribe colonialism. Chicana decolonial feminist thought actively seeks to dismantle sexism, to dismantle racism, to focus on personal experience as theory, to focus on the body as knowledge, reconceptualize knowledge, envision new ways of being, and writing that is accessible to all. I use two concepts active compassion and interconnectedness of being that are central to chicana decolonial feminism. Chicana feminist texts and newspaper articles from the 1970s are analyzed to demonstrate how chicana decolonial feminism is seen in these texts.
Stay for the Heron: Essays
Hameline, Cassia Leigh. "Stay for the Heron: Essays." Doctor of Philosophy (English), May 2023, 146 pp., works cited, 27 titles. Stay for the Heron: Essays is an essay collection that explores truth, perception, and loss as it follows the writer's movement across landscapes that speak to a past she had, for so long, tried to run from. The essays in this collection seek to understand how we can write about difficult topics like abandonment, infidelity, and acts of self-destruction: do we get close to them? do we create distance? at what range are we able to relive the moments that caused us pain, or anger, or passion, or love and present them in written form for others to see? The collection challenges the narrative nonfiction form in preference for a more fluid, lyric, and hybrid genre that more accurately presents the material—at times fuzzy, difficult, confusing—at hand. Through its literary experimentations, such as fragmentation, lyricism, shifting points of view, and photography, the works here deconstruct what we consider "traditional" in the Essay genre and, instead, supports a shift towards a more contemporary tradition. The essays in Stay for the Heron explore the persona's geographical movement, paying close attention to the bodies of water she seeks out everywhere she goes, to find deeper meaning in the innate and earthly pulls we feel throughout life. From the sand-covered child watching her brother gut fish in awe, to the confused then sad then bitter teenager abandoned by her father, to the young woman whose lover's betrayals prompted her own self-destruction, and ultimately, to the woman who sought solitude for years before realizing she needed to come home; these essays interrogate perception, memory, and the concept that no one's truth is quite the same as another's. Despite their differences, though, there is space for …
"Her Terrible Splendor"
Her Terrible Splendor is a poetry collection that transports the Greek witch-goddess Circe from her mythical island of Aeaea to modern-day East Texas, where I was raised. By locating Circe in the Piney Woods, I heighten the strangeness that I identify with that setting and open up new contexts for considering Circe as a woman, as an enchanter, and as figure of retelling and revision. Circe appears in an array of roles—friend, lover, mentor, alter-ego, muse—as the poems view her through different lenses, including ekphrastic responses to visual art, rewritings of myths, and "portrait" poems that cast people from the human speaker's life as the goddess herself. A powerful mythic woman who works alone and creates a haven for strange creatures and lost humans, Circe offers a way for the manuscript to consider the complex, multifaceted process of coming of age as a woman, self-making as myth-making.
The World We Want to Leave Behind: White Supremacy in the Apocalyptic Genre's Past, Present, and Future
This dissertation examines the rise of the racialized apocalyptic genre from 1978 to 2019. The period chosen reflects the social shift of the American political right into a party that accepts white supremacy as a tenet. In the post-Civil Rights era, white Americans considered the issue of racism to be solved. With the historic Voting Rights Act and other major victories in the 1960s there was a moment when it seemed America may turn a corner. However, when Richard Nixon took office in 1969, he originated what would be a long process of positioning the American right against intellectualism, minorities, and progress. Nixon, and the development of the new southern strategy would reach decades into the future, utilizing coded language and pitting Americans against one another. Research examining the racialized elements of the American right from Nixon to contemporary times is well chronicled and vast.
Mapping the Feminist Movement in Pakistani Literature: Towards a Feminist Future
In this work, I examine and analyze women representation and themes in Pakistani literature in order to explore the emergence and development of feminist thought as reflected within it, from pre-independence to present day Pakistan. One of my central arguments is that the theorization of a workable feminism in the conflictual Pakistani state depends on understanding and accounting for the socio-political, religious, and economic milieu of the country under which women live. In the following chapters, I delineate the challenges feminism in Pakistan faces in conjunction with the analysis of selected literary works to highlight the way the figure of the woman emerges in public discourse. It is through this engagement, that I demonstrate, the complexity of Pakistani feminism and its negotiations with nationalism, religion, and patriarchy to create the basis for theorizing a workable Pakistani feminist politics. Following Dipesh Chakraborty's theorization of historicism in his book, Provincializing Europe, the basic premise of this dissertation is to explore the emergence of feminist thought in Pakistani literature while keeping the changing religio-political and socio-economic realities of the country at the forefront to establish an analysis grounded in worldliness of these texts. The goal of this exploration is to theorize a feminism which is workable within the realities of postcolonial Pakistan, and which does not fall into the trap of unproductive historicism leading to binarism.
"Molt"
Considered privileged by social standards, with two loving parents and a spot in an elite, all-girls private school in New Jersey, Charlie should be happy. But at Oak Crest College Preparatory, if you're not a straight-A student, you're dumb. If you're not a star athlete, you're invisible. And if you don't compete to be the best? Well, you might as well flunk out. Charlie is already failing math, and it's only October. Why not throw school—and maybe her whole life—away? Then, one day, Charlie finds a suicide note in the bathroom at school, and her world is turned upside down. As she goes through the process of trying to find out who wrote it, the note writer herself remains hidden to herself and everyone else. A perfectionist all her life, she strives to be everything her parents and teachers expect, but does not know what truly makes her happy. The pressure to fulfill expectation is starting to weigh on her, but no one, except Charlie, can know she is thinking of suicide.
The Construction of the Fringe Extraterrestrial of Postmodernity
This study focuses on the discourse that orders and creates a logic of the extraterrestrial during postmodernity, what I term "Fringe." Using Foucault's notion of discourse, I define and theorize Fringe and its formation during postmodernity, looking at the particular features of the historical moment post-1960 that contributed to the creation and regulation of a particular extraterrestrial. I then investigate historical conceptions of the extraterrestrial from Aquinas to Kant. This genealogy of the extraterrestrial reveals a rich history of the extraterrestrial and compares this history with Fringe. After this I discuss two precursors of Fringe discourse: the Society for Psychical Research and the writings of anomalous researcher Charles Fort. This investigation of pre-Fringe notions of the psychical in discourse shows how the SPR and Fort's work both created new ways of looking at and speaking about phenomena falling outside the purview of "normal science" and contributed to the formation of Fringe while also being distinguishable from it. Finally, I analyze two popular iterations of Fringe discourse—the ancient aliens hypothesis and the abduction narrative—as popularized in the works of Erich von Däniken and Whitley Strieber.
Cultures of Elite Theatre in the Elizabethan and Jacobean Masque: Four Incarnations
The early modern English masque is a hybrid form of entertainment that included music, dance, poetry, and visual spectacle, and for which there is no modern equivalent. This dissertation looks at four incarnations of the Elizabethan and Jacobean masque: the court masque, the masque embedded in the progress entertainment, the masque embedded in the commercial play, and the masque embedded in the commercial play performed at court. This study treats masques as a form of elite theatre (that is, theatre for, by, and about elite figures like monarchs and aristocrats) and follows them from the court to the countryside, through the commercial playhouse, and back again to the court in pursuit of a more nuanced picture of the hybridity and flexibility of early modern English performance culture.
"Dear Bone Mother"
This dissertation begins with a critical preface that examines the haunted present and its impact on writing for third and fourth generation Holocaust survivors. Then follows a collection of poetry and prose that examine themes of intergenerational trauma, experiences of the Shoah, grief, and chronic illness.
"Portal"
A collection of poems and critical introduction.
"Somehow Holier"
Somehow Holier ruminates playfully on the problem of suffering and our responses to it. These poems take as their subjects theology, history, art, my wife's struggle with chronic migraines, and gardening. "Res Gestae Variorum," a crown of sonnets at the center of the book, recounts the lives of would-be Christian saints, like the third-century theologian Origen, whose penchant for suffering obstructed them on the path to holiness. In "Mater Misericordiae" I flip through a calendar filled with famous depictions of Mary while my wife consults with a doctor. These poems blend humor and pathos, striving at once to laugh in the face of pain and account for its awful cost. Throughout, I'm in conversation with the poets who've influenced my voice as a writer: Charles Wright, Phillip Larkin, and Seamus Heaney.
"Louisiana Saturday Nights"
Louisiana Saturday Nights is a collection of poetry and accompanying critical introduction written for the doctorate in Literature and Creative Writing.
This Man is Your Friend: Knowing "Us" and "Them" in Ethnic American Literature of the Pacific Theater
This dissertation examines representations of the Pacific theater in World War II in ethnic American literature, with a focus on its rendition of US and Japanese racism and imperialism in the mid-twentieth century. Reading a range of African, Asian, Jewish, Mexican, and Native American literary writings, I investigate their modifications of the American master narrative that the Second World War was "good" and "necessary," a war fought against fascism and for democracy, justice, and freedom. Instead of such a simplistic and reductive view, ethnic American writers envision the Pacific theater as a race war between whites and persons of color and as a conflict between two imperialist nations, the United States and Japan. Ethnic Americans' racial double consciousness functions to resist an oversimplification of the Pacific theater. In these ethnic writers' work, American characters from diverse backgrounds create friendships with those of Asian nationalities, including Chinese, Filipinos, Koreans, and Japanese. These texts are necessary because ethnic Americans' experiences are underrepresented in the traditional WWII narrative of Western masculinity, originated by Ernest Hemingway and completed by President Truman and Douglas MacArthur. As opposed to the typical white American literary and cinematic treatment of the war as fought in the land of the diabolical and inscrutable enemy, ethnic American authors depict diverse experiences of both soldiers and civilians in the Pacific theater. While rendering Asia as a multifaceted but close and relatable place, they depart from both the Orientalist concept of Asia as a single entity and the Eurocentric production of WWII knowledge in the US.
Body Doubles: Materiality and Gender Non-Binarism in Victorian Supernatural Fiction
This dissertation is a study of supernatural doubles in Victorian literature. It argues that these doubles expand our understanding of gender variance in the Victorian period. The texts in this dissertation privilege gender non-binarism through their depictions of materiality, gender embodiment, and temporality.
True War Stories: Lies, Truth, and Recovery in the Non/Fiction of Vietnam
This dissertation examines memoirs and non/fiction of the Vietnam War, written by combat veterans (Tim O'Brien, Tobias Wolff, Ron Kovic), and army nurses (Lynda Van Devanter and Joan Furey), and war correspondents (Micheal Herr), most of whom joined the antiwar movement, and used their own war wounds as incontrovertible evidence against it. Since these authors' traumatization compromised their memories of combat, their narratives feature literary devices reflective of post-traumatic stress disorder symptomatology (e.g. flashbacks, non-linear plots, repetition, disassociation). Their authenticity stems from the military jargon, lewd dialogue, and dark humor contained within. A mix of truth-telling and bullshitting paradoxically coexist in these texts; as trauma theories elucidate, improvisation (of details) does not diminish the integrity of a traumatic memory, or the memoir itself. In an era of Nixonian follies, whistleblowing became a high stakes endeavor for journalists and veterans. They exposed the military's standard operating procedures that violated the Geneva Conventions such as free-fire zones, wide-scale bombings, and chemical warfare (e.g. Napalm, Dioxin, Agent Orange). Desiring reformation, the Vietnam Veterans Against the War conducted their own Winter Soldier Investigation into the Mỹ Lai massacre, sending spokesperson John Kerry to testify during the Fulbright Hearings. Women served thanklessly in the war, yet were excluded from men's organizations and denied Veteran's Administration benefits for diseases contracted in Vietnam until Lynda Van Devanter published her memoir, Home Before Morning, then lobbied for women's rights. She inspired a collection of poetry, and a spinoff TV show, China Beach, though she was never credited for the latter.
In the Way of Family
A novel about intergenerational sexual violence.
A Well Dressed Menagerie: Defining and Teaching Courtliness with Animals and Clothing in the Lais of Marie de France
In this dissertation, I explore how the twelfth-century poet Marie de France combines animals and clothing to define and teach noble conduct in her Lais collection. I suggest that the nexus she creates between animals, dress, and virtue is chimeric but consistent, appearing differently in each narrative situation but recurring as a means of demonstrating moral conduct. My chapters explore three of her lais that combine beasts and attire to address the unique way Marie features the animal-clothing combination in each to teach distinctive lessons in virtuous behavior. My chapter on Guigemar argues that Marie uses the magical hind and the exchange of a knotted shirt and a belt to rework Ovidian anti-love themes to teach the value of being tightly bound in loyal love. Chapter 3 analyzes the eponymous knight's removal of his clothing as the mechanism that triggers his appearance as a werewolf in Marie's lai Bisclavret. I show that Bisclavret's werewolf form is like a sartorial skin under which his selfhood remains unaltered rather than a true transformation, and I argue that Marie uses the knight's appearance as a wolf so that the loyalty he demonstrates to his king and his homosocial community becomes voluntary and therefore serves as a model of noble conduct to the reader. Chapter 4 discusses Marie's use of the characters' relationships to animals and dress in her lai Lanval to assert the importance of a feminine contribution to leadership in society.
Revolutionaries and Prophets: Post-Oppositionality in Kathleen Alcalá's Sonoran Desert Trilogy
In this dissertation, I examine the Sonoran Desert trilogy by Kathleen Alcalá through the lens of post-oppositional theory as developed by AnaLouise Keating. Moving beyond the use of post-oppositional theory to analyze non-fiction works, I apply this theory instead to the fiction of Kathleen Alcalá—whose work appears in such anthologies as The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature. Alcalá, though well published, is underrepresented in contemporary literary criticism, as can be seen by the only eight entries under her name in the MLA International Bibliography. Therefore, I have chosen her most significant fiction work, her trilogy about the Sonoran Desert, as the perfect text upon which to map post-oppositional theory. Through analysis of her three novels, I show that her work is an ideal example of post-oppositionality in action and that her characters act as post-oppositional revolutionaries and prophets within the pages of the text. The first chapter outlines the parameters of the project. In Chapter 2, I argue that post-oppositionality can be seen in Alcalá through gender bending, looking at the characters of Membrillo and Manzana, Corey, and Rosalinda. In Chapter 3, I argue that the characters of Estela, La Señorita, and Magdalena are enacting post-oppositionality through their transcendence of traditional women's roles in sexuality. In Chapter 4, I argue that the female characters of the novels act as revolutionaries through their political and social agency—reaching out to other characters through such work as educating and writing. In Chapters 5 and 6, I feature my interviews with Alcalá and Keating, who were generous enough to speak with me over Zoom during lockdown. Finally, in the conclusion chapter, Chapter 7, I examine how post-oppositionality in the novels prepares the reader for post-oppositional action in reality. Throughout all of these chapters, I rely on other theories and historiographies such as gender theory …
Wrong Feast
A collection of poems with a preface.
Oklahoma History
Oklahoma History is a collection of poetry that examines the speaker's relationship to and critique of her home state, Oklahoma. The poems navigate race and gender as they intersect with local histories, culture, and religion, which complicates and often contradicts what the speaker is taught through childhood, adolescence, and into adulthood. The creative portion is accompanied by a critical preface which looks at how the poems and other writings of Oklahoma poet Joy Harjo impact the author's writing.
Some Names for Empty Space
Some Names for Empty Space is a collection of poems that considers how poetry and language operate to define human experience, reconciling the 'empty spaces' between the self and the abstracted variables of all things. The poems here often find their impetus in fatherhood and a parent's efforts to explain the world to a child.
The Ends of Smaller Worlds
The Ends of Smaller Worlds is a collection of short stories set in Indiana. The preface is about the representation of the information age using elements of dirty realism and Gothic fiction.
Queerness, Futurity, and Desire in American Literature: Improvising Identity in the Shadow of Empire
This dissertation deploys queer theory and temporality to investigate the ways in which American authors were writing about identity at the turn of the twentieth century. I provide a more expansive use of queer theory, and argue that queerness moves beyond sexual and gender identity to have intersectional implications. This is articulated in the phrase "queer textual libido" which connects queer theory with affect and temporal theories. Queerness reveals itself on both narrative and rhetorical levels, and can be used productively to show the complex navigation between individual and national identity formation.
Because You Previously Liked or Played
Because You Previously Liked or Played is a poetry manuscript that attempts to respond to the Trump administration in a new way unique to the medium of poetry. Trump is the central, all-pervading subject of this text, but the rise of web 2.0 and new media which normalizes a quick and unrelenting consumption of information is another essential focal point. The manuscript works both within and against the various political channels, discourses, and entanglements, within and against the various ways these mediums affect and are affected by Trump. Ultimately, the problems associated with our information age inform much of the manuscript's sense of loss, confusion, and questioning, but they also give shape to a spirit of cultural critique, amounting to a register that both speaks from within but looks from outside the Trump-Technology continuum. In order to achieve this effect, the manuscript approaches this Trump-Technology continuum and the ensuing political climate from a variety of contradictory emotions and responses to the reality we find ourselves in via a multitude of psychological frames, outlooks, and experiences, however uncomfortable, that this presidency has altered. And it does this through poetry's unique ability to provide the reader with an embodied and immediate experience, to elicit thereby some human response to reality and to get us to see anew what we no longer see or have been overexposed to, with the aim to render a sort of complete presentation of the fractured social sphere as it actually is. In that sense, the manuscript achieves a certain level of authenticity. Torn between the want to diminish or counteract the Trump administration and the admission of its power over us all, the manuscript provides no easy answers, coping mechanism, or singularly coherent narrative, but rather gives voice to the factors that contribute to our current cultural …
Where We Split
Nearly 30 years after its publication Gloria E. Anzaldúa's book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza remains more relevant than ever, particularly her discussion of borderlands as more than physical boundaries. In her book, she theorizes and explores how borders can possess psychic, social, and geopolitical qualities, and in order to articulate the nuances and challenges of border-culture, she invents a new language for underrepresented poets to discuss their poetics. The goal in crafting this essay is to reclaim Anzaldúa as an author worthy of consideration for her poetics. History and bloodlines are central to Anzaldúa's argument that poetry allows for language to transform violence, or historical and bloodline traumas, into one's own new myth-making. The capacity to redefine a border and make it borderless is discussed through the works of Natalie Scenter-Zapcio and Vanessa Angélica Villarreal's poems, in addition to a few key anthologies and my own collection, which seeks to sit in ambiguities and to reclaim and affirm histories. Ultimately, conversations about the poetics of Anzaldúa and her influence on other poets should expand our discussion of American poetics. Her focus on "psychic unrest" gives power to language over ambiguity and could be greatly useful to other poets beyond the border.
Postmodernity and Pakistani Postmodernist Literature
Though scholars have discussed postmodernism in Islam and South Asia before, they tend to (i) assume Muslims as a monolithic group, bypassing the diversity of different cultures and the interaction of these cultures with indigenous practices of Islam; (ii) study postmodernity synchronically, thereby eliding histor(ies) and the possibility of multiple temporalities; and (iii) compare postmodernity in non-Western countries with Western standards, and when these countries fail this test, declare them not-yet-postmodern, or even modern. Negligible and scant discussions of postmodernity that do take place inside Pakistan, most of which are published in newspaper articles, tend to focus on Western postmodernity and its evolution and contemporary position. There is no book-length discussion of postmodernity and postmodernist literary texts from Pakistan and its curious sociopolitical blend of Indo-Muslim and Anglo-Indian influences and interaction with the Islamic political foundations of the country. This project discusses postmodernity and postmodern literature in Pakistan. I argue that, because of a different political, cultural, and literary climate, postmodernity and postmodern literature in Pakistan are distinct from their Western counterparts. Because of technological advancement and neoliberal globalization, Pakistan experiences a different kind of postmodernity resulting in the production of a different kind of postmodern literature. I trace the historical employment of postmodern literary tropes from Indo-Islamic genres, i.e. dastan, to contextualize this conversation. Then I discuss experimental works of fiction like Sultana's Dream (1908), Bina Shah's Before She Sleeps (2018), and Soniah Kamal's Unmarriageable (2019). The last chapter explores the relationship of postmodernity, postmodern politics, and Pakistani and Muslim historiographic metafictional literary texts: The Satanic Verses (1988) and A Case of Exploding Mangoes (2008). Hence, the work is regional and national, as well as comparative and transnational.
Stalking Dickens: Predatory Disturbances in the Novels of Charles Dickens
Stalking in the nineteenth century was a dangerous, increasingly violent behavior pattern circulating in society. It was as much a criminal act then as now, and one the Victorian novel exposes as a problematic form of unwanted intrusion. The realist novel of this period alongside its more sensational counterparts not only depicts scenes of close surveillance, obsession, and harassment as harmful. It exposes the inability of social laws to regulate such conduct. I argue Charles Dickens is the most pivotal figure in observing how stalking emerged as not only a fictional motif, but as an inescapable, criminal behavior pattern. Throughout his work and its nuanced characters, Dickens reveals underlying truths about stalking and stalkers. Early books like Barnaby Rudge and The Old Curiosity Shop feature Gothic villains and predatory motifs adapted from prior literary genres. The works of his middle period foreground stalking in the context of the modern city and institutional power. In the final decade of his life, problems associated with unrequited love examine the pathological patterns of romantic obsession in modern stalker archetypes. Such an analysis and its transformative insight perceive crucial truths about unwanted intrusion, social attachment, and problem of predatory behavior.
Just Ask: A Memoir of My Father
In this memoir, I use the elements and conventions of creative nonfiction to examine particular strands of my experience for significance. Initiated as an inquiry into my father's suicide, this book quickly shifted focus, re-centering around my own development as an individual, a woman, and a writer. Both my father's suicide and the subsequent birth of my daughter serve as focal points for this inquiry, which I use to articulate and explore questions related to identity development, male-female relationships and gender roles, female sexuality, mental illness, trauma, loss, grief, and the inheritance of intergenerational traumas. In places, my investigation also broadens to consider the social, economic, and cultural contexts in which my story, and my family's story, have taken place. My goal in writing this book was to reclaim something of value from a series of personal and familial tragedies and triumphs. I believe that the act of using tragedy as raw material for a new creation is in itself an act of hope. By bearing witness—both to the events that have occurred, and to my personal experience of these events—I see myself as contributing to a larger human project. Every contribution to this project, whether technological innovation or philosophical revelation, shares a common goal: that of counterbalancing the brevity of our physical lives with the richness of our shared human experience.
Winter
Short novel in the fantasy genre centered around the son of a single mother in small-town Texas who becomes apprenticed to a witch to learn magic.
Resurrection Attempts: Essays
This dissertation is composed of a critical preface, "Reconciling Art and Account in the Creative Essay," and the essay collection Resurrection Attempts: Essays. The preface situates the following essay collection within the genre of contemporary creative nonfiction. Specifically, it argues that genre-bending or genre hybridity are inherent and unavoidable features of creative nonfiction writing and should be celebrated, rather than denied or lamented. It points to other writers who deliberately challenge the bounds of genre, and discusses some of the collection's innovations in form and other ways it offers experimentation, such as use of unusual or borrowed points of view, disruption of chronology, and adoption of elements from other genres of writing, including fiction, poetry, and academic. Ultimately, embracing the artistic side of creative nonfiction (as opposed to its "purely" journalistic side) allows for heightened intimacy with the reader, a much wider breadth of storytelling, and a more vulnerable—and therefore more truthful—interrogation of legacy and the human experience. Resurrection Attempts is a collection of essays exploring the writer's rural Texas childhood and the early and tragic losses of her parents, including the effect of those experiences on her adult life and performance of motherhood. The voices of the writer's sisters sometimes intertwine with hers, especially as she examines the converging and diverging lenses of their shared experience. She works throughout to "resurrect" her parents and even to resurrect earlier versions of other family members, including herself. The collection is particularly fascinated with dreams, drawing a parallel between the subconscious lives of the dreamer and their waking constructions of their memories and experiences.
Improvisation without Accompaniment and What Passes Here for Mountains
"Improvisation without Accompaniment" is a lyric investigation into the ways that an awareness of mutability and death can clarify or distort our experience of the world. The poems in this collection draw upon the speaker's small-town Texas upbringing to explore broader questions that arise as a consequence of his burgeoning awareness of mortality: What are the moral imperatives for an individual citizen in a larger political community? What are the bidirectional effects of our relationship with place and the environment? Given the painful transience of human experience, what does it mean to live a good life? The book is characterized by psychological poems that illustrate the mind's movement, poems that use syntactic variation and tonal shifts to indicate an openness to changes of heart and mind. "What Passes Here for Mountains," an in-progress poetry manuscript, is driven by a similar impulse to explore the precise ways that our beliefs and opinions affect our immediate experience. These newer poems address anxieties about climate change, the effects of childhood trauma on the adults those children become, and the obstacles to self-actualization.
Eleven: A Novel
Trauma novel refers to a work of fiction that discloses serious loss or intense fear on individuals and groups. The traumatic experience is repetitious, timeless, and unspeakable. Gayl Jones, Jesmyn Ward, Tayari Jones, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison are only a few authors who have written this type of novel. The traumatic events that occur in the books are rape, miscarriage of justice, and slavery, to name a few. The experienced trauma manifest as fragmented memory, silence, commitment phobia, intimate distance, and feelings of abandonment. In her book, Quiet As It's Kept: Shame, Trauma, and Race in the Novels of Toni Morrison, J. Brooks Bouson argues that the traumatic experience of slavery and "white racist practices" throughout history produced a "collective African-American experience" which appears in fiction and in the fabric of American culture (4) as intergenerational trauma. African American authors are reimaging history told primarily in first and third person limited, and even if the novel has an omniscient point of view, it can change to third person limited. They use point of view to adeptly navigate the effects of trauma on the psyche interweaving closeness and distance to manipulate the emotional, intellectual, and moral responses the author desires. In this essay, I argue that because of intergenerational trauma, African American novels tell a "collective or communal" story that has a profound effect on point of view and narrative or psychic distance.
Tigers Born in the Same Year: Novel and Critical Analysis
The dissertation consists of a critical analysis as well as the novel Tigers Born in the Same Year. The critical analysis interrogates the relationship between Asian American subject position in the United States, the history of Asian American literatures, and the conflict between inherited binary narratives and nuanced, specific story-telling. In order to move beyond such narratives as struggling with the label "model minority," wrestling between "Asian" and "American," and being "Asian enough," it is necessary to synthesize these literary and sociocultural inheritances with nuanced, specific lenses. From synthesis may arise a new space, one where rather than alienation and measuring up, there can be a sense of home. Tigers Born in the Same Year seeks language for social reckoning through personal discovery, representing a challenge to established narratives while recognizing the need to explore how they were built, the impacts they have, and what exists in the spaces beyond them. In Tigers Born in the Same Year, when 13-year Minyoung Walsh witnesses the molestation of her sister by their older brother, she must make one of three choices: stay silent, fight back, or shout. Based on these three possibilities, three lives are braided together in the novel. All three Mins must reckon with who they have become and why following the illness and passing of their father. Whether or not the Mins in these lives are ultimately able to find a sense of home will largely depend on how they have been able to reckon with themselves, and on building a selfhood through they can live, grow, and seek the choices that will lead them forward. All the while, a fourth Min wanders in an endless bardo, between lives, seeking that same sense of rest, of wholeness, of knowing she has come to the right end of her path.
Still House
Still House is a poetry manuscript that explores the relationship between traditional gender roles and traditional poetic forms. The poems in this collections seek to revise the role of the homemaker and interrogate whether it is okay to take comfort and pleasure in tasks that are often labeled as feminine (i.e. cooking, baking, decorating, organizing, shopping, choosing outfits) while rejecting other parts of the homemaker archetype, such as subservience to and dependence upon men. Limited gender roles, patriarchy, sexist comments, capitalism, toxic masculinity, the cis-hetero-white-male gaze, trauma, physical pain, illness—these all can make it feel like we are not fully in control and ownership of our bodies, like something is encroaching. The poems in Still House are invested in using the poetics of embodiment (a poetics centered around telling stories about the body through immersive sensory details) to reclaim the body from trauma, patriarchy, and chronic pain and illness.
Your Blues Ain't Like Mine: Voices from the Other Side of the Color Line
This dissertation examines intra-racial colorism in works by writers who began their careers during the Harlem Renaissance, but whose writings span almost a century. In these writings, colorism; which can be defined as a bias directed toward an individual that is based on skin tone, is portrayed an intra-racial practice that results from the internalization of racist ideals. The practice relies on a hierarchy that most often privileges those closest to the color line. However, these depictions also show that the preponderance of skin tones can sometimes determine who is targeted. For the purposes of this study it is called reverse colorism when the bias is directed by individuals darker in skin tone toward those who are lighter. Consequently, the careful descriptions of the shades and hues of black characters becomes more than aesthetics and can be seen as a coded reference to experiential differences. While Alain Locke hailed the start of the Harlem Renaissance to signal the rise of The New Negro, the writings featured by female writers in this dissertation advance a less optimistic reality for women, who had to contend with both inter- and intra-racial bias because of their skin tone. Colorism is identified as a particularly prevalent presence in the lives of black women, who also saw skin tone subjectively and viewed themselves as darker than their male counterparts.
The Last Karankawas: Stories
A collection of interconnected short stories set in diverse corners of Texas, converging on Galveston Island before and after Hurricane Ike.
Poor Things: Objects, Ownership, and the Underclasses in American Literature, 1868-1935
This dissertation explores both the production of underclass literature and the vibrancy of material between 1868-1935. During an era of rampant materialism, consumer capitalism, unchecked industrialism, and economic inequality in the United States, poor, working class Americans confronted their socioeconomic status by abandoning the linear framework of capitalism that draws only a straight line between market and consumer, and engaging in a more intimate relationship with local, material things – found, won, or inherited – that offered a sense of autonomy, belonging, and success. The physical seizure of property/power facilitated both men and women with the ability to recognize their own empowerment (both as individuals and as a community) and ultimately resist their marginalization by leveling access to opportunity and acquiring or creating personal assets that could be generationally transferred as affirmation of their family's power and control over circumstance. Reading into these personal possessions helps us understand the physical and psychological conflicts present amongst the underclasses as represented in American literature, and these conflicts give rise to new dynamics of belonging as invested in the transformative experience of ownership and exchange. If we can understand these discarded, poor, and foreign things and people as possessing dynamic and vibrant agency, then we will change the ethics of objectifying and ostracizing discarded, poor, and foreign humans, then and now.
Given That the Body Was Made
A collection of poems that explores notions of disability, family, and belief, with a preface that meditates on questions related to the ethical ramifications of various approaches to the making of poetry and art that takes up the suffering of others as subject matter.
Union: A Novel
Union is a novel about a Super AI that takes over all human technology.
Brazos
Brazos is a collection of poetry that comments on and critiques life in a small town in Texas. These poems situate the speaker both in this town and in spaces removed from the town, but the work always grapples with questions of how the speaker identifies himself via the relationship to that space. The creative portion is accompanied by a critical introduction that looks at the intersections of poetry and the lyric essay.
Rearranging an Infinite Universe: Literary Misprision and Manipulations of Space and Time, 1750-1850
This project explores the intersection of literature and science from the mid-eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century in the context of this shift in conceptions of space and time. Confronted with the rapid and immense expansion of space and time, eighteenth and nineteenth-century philosophers and authors sought to locate humans' relative position in the vast void. Furthermore, their attempts to spatially and temporally map the universe led to changes in perceptions of the relationship between the exterior world and the interior self. In this dissertation I focus on a few important textual monuments that serve as landmarks on this journey. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the intersection of literary and scientific texts transformed perceptions of space and time. These transformations then led to further advancements in the way scientific knowledge was articulated. Imagination became central to scientific writing at the same time it came to dominate literary writing. My project explores these intersecting influences among literature, astronomy, cosmology, and geology, on the perceptions of expanding space and time.
Lollardy and Eschatology: English Literature c. 1380-1430
In this dissertation, I examine the various ways in which medieval authors used the term "lollard" to mean something other than "Wycliffite." In the case of William Langland's Piers Plowman, I trace the usage of the lollard-trope through the C-text and link it to Langland's dependence on the Parable of the Wheat and the Tares. Regarding Chaucer's Parson's Tale, I establish the orthodoxy of the tale's speaker by comparing his tale to contemporaneous texts of varying orthodoxy, and I link the Parson's being referred to as a "lollard" to the eschatological message of his tale. In the chapter on The Book of Margery Kempe, I examine that the overemphasis on Margery's potential Wycliffism causes everyone in The Book to overlook her heretical views on universal salvation. Finally, in comparing some of John Lydgate's minor poems with the macaronic sermons of Oxford, MS Bodley 649, I establish the orthodox character of late-medieval English anti-Wycliffism that these disparate works share. In all, this dissertation points up the eschatological character of the lollard-trope and looks at the various ends to which medieval authors deployed it.
Jeff Pickell: New and Selected
A collection of prose.
"Let It Run"
Let It Run is the story of Oakley Isom, a neurotic, disturbed young woman stuck in a small town of two thousand people where she lives with her father, Waldemyre, a fly-fishing guide. Oakley works at the local newspaper as the editor of the "What's Biting?" section, something the fishermen live by. Oakley also works nights at a therapeutic boarding school for troubled youth. Entrenched in a world of self-loathing and obsessive thoughts, Oakley spends her time dreaming of a way out of Victor, Idaho. When a murder in the small town pulls Oakley into its eddy, she attempts to escape into her own compulsive thoughts, and the friendship of a striking young therapist at the boarding school. Unusual events continue to unfold, reeling Oakley in, and she must face a reality far more disturbing than a killer on the loose. Cosmic bottom line, the dissertation novel is about the issues of human identity, and if memory is fixed or dynamic, unified or multiple—and how readers deal with loss, guilt, and regret.
Constructing Taiwan: Taiwanese Literature and National Identity
In this work, I trace and reconstruct Taiwan's nation-formation as it is reflected in literary texts produced primarily during the country's two periods of colonial rule, Japanese (1895-1945) and Kuomintang or Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) (1945-1987). One of my central arguments is that the idea of a Taiwanese nation has historically emerged from the interstices of several official and formal nationalisms: Japanese, Chinese, and later Taiwanese. In the following chapters, I argue that the concepts of Taiwan and Taiwanese have been formed and enriched over time in response to the pressures exerted by the state's, colonial or otherwise, pedagogical nation-building discourses. It is through an engagement with these various discourses that the idea of a Taiwanese nation has come to be gradually defined, negotiated, and reinvented by Taiwanese intellectuals of various ethnic backgrounds. I, therefore, focus on authors whose works actively respond to and engage with the state's official nationalism. Following Homi Bhabha's explication in his famous essay "DissemiNation," the basic premise of this dissertation is that the nation, as a narrated space, is not simply shaped by the homogenizing and historicist discourse of nationalism but is realized through people's diverse lived experience. Thus, in reading Taiwanese literature, it is my intention to locate the scraps, patches, and rags of daily life represented in a select number of texts that signal the repeating and reproductive energy of a national life and culture.
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