Sunshine is a graphic novel about the problem of memory. The protagonist, Geraldine, is trying to tell her life story, only to find that she cannot discern fact from fiction with certainty; she recalls dreams, lies, family secrets, incidents that are half-remembered or that have been embellished over time, and a close childhood friend who may or may not have existed. Geraldine is primarily occupied with one event, the year she spent in a preventorium, a type of tubercular hospital for children. Her memories from that year are so peculiar that she feels almost convinced she made them up. Preventoriums, now an all-but-forgotten chapter in the history of American medicine, existed from 1909 to 1970 and were designed to combine "the best elements of a school, sanatorium, and middle-class American home" (Connolly, 54). Children deemed at-risk for tuberculosis--typically the children of working-class or immigrant families--were sent to stay in these institutions. There they received nutritious food, fresh air, and instruction on proper hygiene. Their education also tended to include a heavy emphasis on middle-class Protestant values. My maternal grandfather, Chandler Franks, stayed in the Magee, Mississippi Preventorium in from 1929 to 1930. His stories from that period were the original inspiration for Sunshine. I have since interviewed and read memoirs by other former residents of the Magee facility. The events that take place in Sunshine, however, are fictional; for the most part, I have used interview material only to add verisimilitude and sensory detail. Neither Geraldine's home town of Green Pond, Florida, nor the Sea Haven Preventorium where she is sent, bears any resemblance to real places. Geraldine's struggle to reconstruct her past begins when she tries to start drawing her dreams in a journal. Several panels show Geraldine drawing events that occur later in the novel, complicating the reader's experience with the text. Some panels show only her hand holding a pencil, from the same perspective as if the reader were looking down at his or her own hand, putting the reader in Geraldine's position. Geraldine's story is sometimes humorous, sometimes horrific. The combination of humorous and gothic elements draws inspiration from the work of Kelly Link and more recently from Florida State University's "Cute & Creepy" exhibition. Link's stories are often funny and unnerving at the same time "The Specialist's Hat," my favorite in the collection, involves two young girls who are menaced by a grotesque, living hat that once belonged to a magician. The hat is both terrifying and ridiculous. Similarly, the works included in the "Cute & Creepy" show combine images of death and decay with elements such as cartoon animals, flowers, smiling children, and toys. Humor and horror are two sides of the same coin, both stemming from the irrational, and when both are present in the same work, each intensifies the other. The aesthetic of Sunshine combines the cute and the creepy. Geraldine confronts ghosts from her past--both literal and figurative--while also putting up with her sister's irksome obsession with self-help literature. The drawings, which I have rendered in soft graphite, are both gloomy and comical. Some graphic novels that inform my own project include Sloth by Gilbert Hernandez, Black Hole by Charles Burns, and Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi. All three feature stark, black and white drawings, each story makes heavy use of surreal imagery, childhood memories, and dream sequences. In Sloth, a teenager named Miguel Serra wills himself into a coma. When he wakes up, he struggles to rejoin the real world and becomes obsessed with investigating a haunted lemon orchard. Black Hole borrows tropes from black and white B horror movies to tell its story. In it, a sexually-transmitted plague is causing horrific mutations in teenagers all over America. They begin growing horns, tails, fur, or extra body parts. Those affected are forced to live in the woods, away from society--an apt metaphor for teenage alienation. Sloth and Black Hole helped inspire the writing of Sunshine because of their nuanced exploration of the unconscious. Persepolis, Satrapi's memoir of growing up in Iran during the Islamist Revolution, is a work of nonfiction, but it was still instrumental in shaping my original concept for Sunshine, since it takes the form of a memoir in places. I also admire Satrapi's drawing style, which recalls German expressionism. The graphic novel is the ideal genre for this story because of its liminality. Comics are neither a wholly visual nor wholly literary art form, but something in between; the boundaries between visual art and literature are blurred. As David Carrier writes in The Aesthetics of Comics, "We expect the world to fit our preconceived stable categories, and so what falls in between is easily felt, depending upon our temperament and politics, to be either exciting or menacing. Hence the fascination with, and fear of, cross-dressing, androgyny, people of `mixed-race,' comics, and other forms of in-betweenness" (70-71). In Sunshine, the instability of the art form mirrors the instability of the narration. The boundaries between fact and fiction, horror and humor, are blurred, and Geraldine's story happens in the margins, in the white space between panels. The graphic novel also offers a more complex mode of storytelling. Hélène Cixous writes, "I would like to write like a painter. I would like to write like painting" (104). Cixous refers to the immediacy offered by visual media. The viewer absorbs an image before having the chance to apply any other filters to it. Or, as Alain Robbe-Grillet explains, "In this future universe of the novel, gestures and objects will be there before being something" (21). In a graphic novel, images exist in the reader's mind before they signify anything else. As the reader takes the images together with the written text, the objects on the page begin to give way to ideas, but "only provisionally, and [they] will accept the tyranny of significations only in appearance--derisively, one might say--the better to show how alien they remain to man" (Robbe-Grillet, 22). I believe that the graphic novel is the perfect example of the "new novel" the Robbe-Grillet was searching for. It simultaneously creates a solid world of objects and people and an ephemeral world of ideas. By using this form, I hope to tell a story whose images will lodge in the reader's mind long after the novel has ended. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Summer Semester, 2012. / June 11, 2012. / Florida, graphic novel, preventorium, tuberculosis / Includes bibliographical references. / Diane K. Roberts, Professor Directing Dissertation; Adam Jolles, University Representative; Elaine Treharne, Committee Member; Elizabeth Stuckey-French, Committee Member.

The Fabian Strategy is a short, dystopian novel following Henry Byrne as he attempts to rebuild his life after a tragic war and the decine of American civilization. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a Master of Fine Arts. / Fall Semester, 2011. / October 24, 2011. / Includes bibliographical references. / Diane Roberts, Professor Directing Thesis; Dan Vitkus, Committee Member; Ned Stuckey-French, Committee Member.

Kin is the story of a young girl who learns she can't depend on her parents--or anyone else--for stability. This piece follows her journey as she deals with one tragicomic event after another and, in the process, develops a thicker shell. The story takes place in a small Alabama town--the perfect place for my main character to sort out her identity as a woman, a Southerner, and a part of the world at large. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester, 2012. / February 24, 2012. / childhood, family / Includes bibliographical references. / Elizabeth Stuckey-French, Professor Directing Dissertation; Tricia Young, University Representative; Maxine Montgomery, Committee Member; David Kirby, Committee Member.

Several of the stories in this collection were inspired by the Lindbergh kidnapping. What most interests me was the public hysteria over the kidnapping, and the astonishing number of people who attempted to insinuate themselves into the case. For this reason, I prefer to write from the perspective of marginal characters with no connection to the Lindbergh kidnapping except those they create themselves. "Cutting the Night in Half" is about a sickly teenage boy, who, even though he worships Lindbergh--or perhaps because of it--mails fake ransom notes. I have also included an epistolary story about the 1874 kidnapping of Charley Ross, widely considered the first child kidnapped for ransom in the United States. While this story is not about the Lindbergh kidnapping, it provides context to understanding the reaction of both the family and the public, and also the hysteria that developed around the case. My interest in the Lindbergh kidnapping fits a larger pattern in my fiction, which is how obsession functions in people's lives--how characters use an interest or hobby to give their lives structure or meaning. I'm also interested in exploring subcultures, microcosms, and communities, particularly those that tend toward the circumscribed and claustrophobic. For example, "A Habit of Elopement" is a about a live-in caregiver for the developmentally disabled. Beyond exploring the disabled world, the story also asks readers to re-evaluate their assumptions about the "normal world." / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester, 2012. / March 30, 2012. / lindbergh kidnapping / Includes bibliographical references. / Mark Winegardner, Professor Directing Dissertation; Edward Gray, University Representative; Elizabeth Stuckey-French, Committee Member; Robert Olen Butler, Committee Member.

Brett Kroska presents a collection of six stories, each set in the Pahatawa valley in North Dakota, a community known for its strange, isolated persons. / A Thesis submitted to the English of Department in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master in Fine Arts. / Spring Semester, 2012. / March 12, 2012. / Includes bibliographical references. / Elizabeth Stuckey-French, Professor Directing Thesis; Mark Winegardner, Committee Member; Erin Belieu, Committee Member.

ABSTRACT This Heart Goes Bang Bang is broken into three sections, all of which explore classical references, much as poetry has done before, but in the context of my experiences and using a modern lens. I like a lot of things. In theorizing about this work, I am unable to pinpoint any specific school of poetry my manuscript resembles. I still hesitate to say "new poetry" and would prefer to think of it as the inspiration of a wide array of many things I've connected with. My poems are largely female identity poems, but also deal with anxiety and self-consciousness about being able to explain myself. My style and form are organic, part of me, not an aesthetic choice or a stylistic pose. I have to write this way and I love it, I've embraced it. It is in the alchemy of the poetic line where writers turn bleakness into something transformative that provides much of the framework for my poetry. I claim full responsibility for "the speaker" in This Heart Goes Bang Bang. The resemblance is uncanny. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts. / Fall Semester, 2011. / June 23, 2011. / Includes bibliographical references. / Barbara Hamby, Professor Directing Thesis; Andrew Epstein, Committee Member; David Kirby, Committee Member.

Finding Elvis: Stories - a creative dissertation - is a collection of ten short stories divided into two parts: Bad Jews and Song of Songs. The five stories comprising the first section of the manuscript - Bad Jews - follow, in part, the Jewish-American literary tradition, and they explore common themes found in the hallmark texts of this tradition, namely religious and cultural identity, alienation, anti-Semitism, memory, and familial history. This section of the manuscript explores and chronicles the varying degrees of the Jewish-American experience, however miniscule or disjointed that experience may be. The five stories in the second section - Song of Songs - deal with different women as they navigate issues of love, relationships, and their identities within the framework of their - at times surreal - worlds. These stories attempt to accomplish something Philip Roth successfully achieves in all of his work: capturing the humanity of the characters - whether or not they're Jewish - thus creating texts that touch on the emotional and cultural truth of each protagonist - of, in my case, American women. Some of the stories within this manuscript experiment with form, structure, or voice. Additionally, within almost every story, the main character's search for identity is paramount. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Fall Semester, 2011. / September 26, 2011. / Jewish, magical realism, short stories, women / Includes bibliographical references. / Julianna Baggott, Professor Directing Dissertation; Martin Kavka, University Representative; Robert Olen Butler, Committee Member; Elizabeth Stuckey-French, Committee Member.

"Mormon Boy" is Seth Brady Tucker's first published poetry collection, originally published by Elixir Press in 2012. This collection is representative of five years of Seth's work, and most of the poems within the collection have been published in major journals, reviews, and anthologies. Seth's poetry is representative of the long tradition of modern and post-modern war poetry, and the collection is meant to be read as a longer semi-fictional narrative. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Summer Semester, 2012. / June 4, 2012. / american, creative writing, english, literature, poetry, war poetry / Includes bibliographical references. / David Kirby, Professor Directing Dissertation; John Mayer, University Representative; Mark Winegardner, Committee Member; Julianna Baggott, Committee Member.

Contemporary novel about Midwestern America and current morass / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester, 2012. / March 16, 2012. / Includes bibliographical references. / Elizabeth Stuckey-French, Professor Directing Dissertation; Neil Jumonville, University Representative; Barry Faulk, Committee Member; Ned Stuckey-French, Committee Member.

"The Subtle Art: Poison in Victorian Literature" rethinks how nineteenth-century crime fiction responds to cultural perceptions about the progress of Victorian science. To this end, this project examines how authors use the poisoner--a figure who adapted empiric methodology for murderous ends--in order to explore criminal applications of cutting-edge science. Indeed, poison rapidly became labeled as the "Crime of the Age" precisely because it represented both scientific innovation and the potential for scientific abuse. The duality of poison is evocative of Jacques Derrida's work on the pharmakon, a Greek word which simultaneously means both "remedy" and "poison." Derrida's theory is useful for understanding how the Victorians employed poison in their literary discourses because poison, like the pharmakon, has a slippery hybridity that collapses binary distinctions. In literature, poison acts as disrupting force that reveals deep anxieties about the scope of scientific influence in everyday life. Derrida, of course, uses the idea of the pharmakon to discuss Western culture's suspicion of "dangerous" writing. Since "poison" was often used as a metaphor for dangerous texts, this dissertation also uses poisonous works to reexamine the nature of Victorian writing, particularly in relation to generic change. My analysis therefore focuses on critically ignored works from authors such as George Eliot, Charles Dickens, and Ellen Wood in order to reassess these authors' relationship to science as well as their contributions to generic innovations in crime fiction. Thus, while revealing how authors used the poisoner to challenge the growing power and prestige of nineteenth-century science, my project also provides an alternate history of the development of Victorian crime fiction. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Summer Semester, 2012. / April 23, 2012. / Crime, Nineteenth-Century, Poison, Science, Victorian / Includes bibliographical references. / Barry Faulk, Professor Directing Dissertation; Frederick Davis, University Representative; Meegan Kennedy Hanson, Committee Member; Eric Walker, Committee Member.