In Compassion for the Absurd, I hope to find transcendent moments in the ridiculous and mundane scenarios of various lives, some real, some imagined. In focusing on the ordinary, the poems pull the background of life into the foreground and ask the reader to find art in the real rather than the ideal. By focusing on the often ignored marginalia of daily life, the poems bring the reader to a closer identification with the characters, an intimacy anchored by the revelation of the closeness between the reader's experience and the characters' stories. This experience may cause discomfort if not defamiliarization. Drawing on the work of Lefebvre, Gertrude Stein, Edgar Lee Masters and David Foster Wallace, I hope to find drama and meaning in the 'ordinary.' When writing about daily activities, the brick-a-brack of one's surroundings, I notice that each incident and object loses its mundanity as soon as it is written about. Mentioning the miniature slot machine in an uncle's house in a poem brings attention to both the slightly unusual quality of the object and the card counting abilities of the uncle. The object serves as a moment of augury and stands out from its surroundings. Similarly, in the poem The Observer, I find the sheer quantity of fish poured out of a net makes a harrowing death sound and that the man who measures the fish in the Alaskan cold performs a sort of memento mori every four hours. In short, the daily experience of each person consists mainly of repetition, but the repetition never lacks meaning. In fact, the greater the repetition of an activity over the longer span of time, the more consequence the activity contains. In the poem Clamming the main character's regular task of eating peanut butter, spoonful by spoonful, makes her body the object of portent and she is sinking long before her feet touch mud. Repetition though, does not necessarily lead to negative consequences. Our daily lives both chip away at our life energies and cultivate our particularities. In the space of one's home and comfortable movements, obsessions take root. Obsessions are quotidian in that we all have them and we often share them culturally and sub culturally. Within the characters of Compassion for the Absurd, the reader encounters a dollar collector and an uncle who grows multiple different kinds of potatoes and orders llama hair to make yarn. These habitual obsessions, some greater in scope than others, some shared by many people, are both bizarre and quotidian. I feel that these repeated actions and thoughts build the unique home cosmologies of people. Everyday life then functions as a tug of war between political/social/historical demands and the internal resistance of people who develop strange or restricted desires. Lefebvre explains this phenomenon saying "Even at its most degraded…the everyday harbors the possibility of its own transformation, it gives rise, in other words, to desires which cannot be satisfied within a weekly cycle of production/consumption (p.3 Lefebvre)." Every worker feels the expense of his/her life's time in the life of work, whether they work at a job or child rearing etc. The quotidian must then harbor the release of different desire. In Compassion for the Absurd, the idea of "portent" preoccupies the poems. The aforementioned tug-of-war between power and resistance ends, for all characters, in death. The objects that surround a person in life, pennies, guns, hair, and even dirt, carry portent as they remain after a person's death. The pennies of the poem "My Inheritance" transform after the death of a character. The profusion of these small objects of little worth, collected over countless transactions, stand in for the dead character's body. They act perhaps as an offering, like a toll to cross from life to death. At the very least, they offer mass to replace a great absence. The familiar looked upon so closely becomes strange and often menacing. Everyday life functions both on a macro and micro level. On the micro level, we can tease out ideas, indications of emotion, maybe even the coming fate of a particular character. But the larger forces upon even the smallest object open the functions of commerce, of politics, of creeds, and so on. There are several different methods that writers use to bring attention to this macro/micro quality. Some, like Gertrude Stein, use word repetition to cause this effect. In these poems, I use lists of objects, as in "My Inheritance" and "Favorite Uncle" to achieve this same effect. In using lists, I hope to break the sameness of routine and draw the reading into the specificity of a moment or an obsession. In Art as Technique, Viktor Shklovsky explains how this process is important "Habituatlization devours works, clothes, furniture, one's wife, and the fear of war…And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony" (Viktor Shklovsky, Art as Technique 1917). This examination leading to discovering newness in familiar areas should hopefully cause some discomfort and exhilaration. In addition to breaking down habitualization, Compassion for the Absurd hopes to capture some of the empathy for the strangeness of normalcy that the work of David Foster Wallace and Edgar Lee Masters expresses. Both writers focus on the small scale and show how a group of individuals bind together in strange philosophy. This process of focusing on individuals encourages the reader to approach the writing as if it is a mirror. The reader encounters other minds (especially if they are written well) at the level of thought. In being pulled into another mind, the reader immediately begins comparing their own mind to the written mind. In finding similarities and differences, the reader sees things about themselves they may or may not wish to see. I think that the "discomfort" stems from rejecting passive reception and comforting sameness. Wallace's writing, especially in the essay form, seeks to examine normal behaviors and events (fairs, cruises, playing tennis, watching TV) to explore the bizarre qualities and keen suffering of the human experience. Masters achieves a similar goal by writing the story of each person in a crowd to bring their unique story to bear on the town's collective character. Wallace, Stein, and Master's each bring the reader to discomfort through dismantling language, revealing the bizarre, and focusing on the individuals. In Compassion for the Absurd, I hope to achieve the discomfort of Stein, the empathy of Wallace, and the collective voice of Masters. By focusing on the flow of unexamined lives, and the activities that make up the personal life, I seek to find the strangeness or the inconsistency between ideal and real. The thesis will have three parts: Chickens and Dirt, The Ginger Process, and Pennies and the Dead: In Chickens and Dirt, each poem deals with the earth bound experience and people's relationships with animals. The relationship of the flow of home life seems inextricably connected to the symbolic image of the eggs and earth. In Egg Bound a women projects her frustrations with her absent husband on a preening parrot. While in Clamming, a woman sinks into the clay as the weight of her own person becomes too much to bear. The Ginger Process focuses about work life, necessity, and drudgery. The poems ponder the expense of hours in the lab, decoding the mangled text of students learning English, and the collector's obsessive plight. In the poem The Ginger Process a lab worker tries to find the human elements in the lab monkeys. And in Neepers, a dollar collector struggles to find the mistakes of dollar printings. The purpose of their work unclear, the characters hope to make meaningful discoveries. The final portion, Pennies and Dead, focuses on the remainders of life; what fills the apartments and houses of the dead and the work of clearing detritus. The dirt and disarray in "My Inheritance" test the characters' limits of patience and remaining love as they clean blackened fingerprints off walls. In looking at the standard process of cleaning up a life finished, the poems hope to find comfort and meaning in the last years of life. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Art. / Spring Semester, 2010. / March 31, 2010. / Thesis, Poetry / Includes bibliographical references. / James Kimbrell, Professor Co-Directing Thesis; Joann Gardner, Professor Co-Directing Thesis; Erin Belieu, Committee Member; Ralph Berry, Committee Member.

This thesis examines the way in which Hip Hop affects language, communication, and the way it reshapes meaning. The poetics of Hip Hop document variations in slang and colloquialisms and other innovations in language. Through the textual analysis of select poems, this thesis demonstrates that the emcee has a unique understanding of poetic conventions, such as rhyme, metaphor, and simile, and uses them to produce a poetry that is carving its own niche in American Literature and popular culture. Furthermore, this thesis analyzes some of the various methods that Hip Hop uses to interact with language, including the freestyling, the freestyle battle, and writing rhymes. By exploring the interaction between the poet, the word, and the world, this thesis seeks to bring to light the many contributions that Hip Hop makes to poetics and how these contributions affect not just the Hip Hop community, but the world at large. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. / Fall Semester, 2006. / October 2, 2006. / Hip Hop Culture, Hip Hop, Poetics, Hip Hop Poetry / Includes bibliographical references. / Andrew Epstein, Professor Directing Thesis; Amit Rai, Committee Member; Christopher Shinn, Committee Member.

This thesis, "Genuine Spectacle: Sliding Positionality in the Work of Pauline E. Hopkins, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and Spike Lee," addresses the position of Hopkins's 1879 musical, Slaves' Escape; or the Underground Railroad, Hurston and Hughes's unproduced 1931 play, Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life, and Lee's 2000 film, Bamboozled within what scholar W. T. Lhamon has dubbed the "blackface lore cycle." Viewing these works within the context of this cycle, which swings from virulently racist caricatures of blackness to obsequious imitation and vice versa, allows for an analysis of the sliding cultural currency given to minstrel stereotypes from the late nineteenth century to the present. / A Thesis Submitted to the Department of English in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts. / Spring Semester, 2006. / January 18, 2006. / African American Film, African American Theater, 20th Century Film, Harlem Renaissance, 19th Century Theater, Colored American Magazine / Includes bibliographical references. / W. T. Lhamon, Professor Directing Thesis; Leigh Edwards, Committee Member; Tomeiko Ashford, Committee Member.

In the wake of the current storm over what constitutes truth – non-fiction – and what is "made up" – fictional – my fascination with the flexibility of memory is suddenly more than a little apropos. Current literary events notwithstanding, I grew up under a dark veil of depression, which seemingly "erased" my childhood. It wasn't until I delved into non-fictional/memoir writing that the memories came flooding back. What I've found is that much of the facts – dates, times, specific locations, who was there and who wasn't, etc. – are not of the greatest value. At least, not to the author digging up her past. It's the intangibles, the sensory remembrances, the feelings that bubble to the surface in the wake of the flood, that overtake the brain's internal photo album and video camera and create altered, but nonetheless true, histories. This is why I prefaced the first half of my novel with two non-fiction pieces – one of more accessible memories, easily referenced and validated, the other a stream-of-consciousness piece that is precisely how my mind unleashes the three heinous years spent at my Catholic elementary school. Neither are precisely correct; both are true. 2003 proved to be a year of survival, one in which I played witness to life and loss up-close and personal. I'd never been so close to death before –three deaths and one "fatal" accident survived – it overwhelmed my senses and left me feeling selfish, stupid and wrong. To lose focus on those who were either dying or struggling to live before my eyes, hand-in-hand – distracted by the television, a song in my head, when I could eat, wanting to leave and never come back – I couldn't understand how my mind would allow for such diversion. The random nature of our psyche, despite what's going on around us, was an issue I couldn't release, and so it came out in the form of Records, the first half of my novel. Mind, matter, truth, imaginations, hopes and how we keep them all – how our memories hold. Or don't. Trying to authenticate that which is long gone, or losing our grip on those last moments, images, scents, sounds that serve as our last reminders, our last recollections – this is the best of what my mind could render. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts. / Spring Semester, 2006. / April 5, 2006. / Rock/Heavy Metal Music, 1980s Pop-Culture, Memoir, Death Of A Loved One, Suicide, Childhood / Includes bibliographical references. / Virgil Suarez, Professor Directing Thesis; Douglas Fowler, Committee Member; Elizabeth Stuckey-French, Committee Member.

Every day I find images that evoke deep connections in me. These images occur when I see a woman jogging, read a marquee, or overhear a conversation at the grocery store, the coffee house, or post office. When I write I try to make sense of the connections. I attempt to unearth how and why they affect me. My poems are born from my desire to understand the connection inside the moments—those fleeting instances in which I perceive life's most banal and extraordinary forms. I write inside a revolving glass door of perception and growth, and at best, my poems demonstrate the cultivation of my poetic third ear—a susurration located in the darkest rivulets of my veins. DEVELOPMENT and POETIC THIRD EAR Anne Sexton said, "Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard," and this is how I construct my poems. My third ear is embedded inside my marrow's reddest folds. It is a phantom voice that haunts my perception. It is an elision in the back of my brain, an inner writing guide that cultivates my desire to write "good" narrative poems. Before entering the realm of my third ear, I wrote restrained, abstract, attempting-to-be lyric poems and I relied heavily on one-inch lines to carry the tension. I felt imprisoned as though I was trying to utilize a form and vocabulary unnatural to me. I was trying to write short, dense poems which amounted to nothing more than descriptive gestures. As a result, these poems did not enter my thesis because the style and form did not echo the development of my voice. During this same time, fear prevented me from experimenting with narrative poems, and it was rare for me to feel comfortable writing a poem longer than one page. Then I began listening to my third ear—a shallow reverberation of acute awareness. At the same time, I revisited the poets that made me want to write in the first place. I fell back in love in the Beat Poets, particularly the momentum and sorrow in Allen Ginsberg's "Kaddish." I studied Sharon Olds's complex constructions of the body and line enjambment. And I looked inward and I began rereading everything I'd ever written. Surprisingly, the poems I wrote as an undergraduate weren't bad, but they sounded like tangents and not poems. Nonetheless, these early attempts at poetry exuded a stark sense of rawness, of unconstrained vulnerability and an inherent desire to tell stories in a poetic form. "The Art of Female Shaving" is one of my earliest attempts to write narrative poems, and it marks the first time I understood what Robert Pinksy meant when he said, "The best feeling for a poet is just having written." This was the first moment when I unshackled myself from the "type of poems" I thought I should be writing, and instead began writing in a style and form natural to me. My third ear tells me when to "let out the story" and when to tighten. It shows me how to have faith in the poem's spiritual force. It is intuitive energy hidden in my body's darkest veins. CONSTRUCTION of SUBJECTS I write what I know: my experiences, memories, dreams, and my imaginative musing. I write from the desire to discover how and why my experiences create psychological and emotional detriment or strength. The poems "Death Guides Me Away from Materialism" and "Dreamscape: Buffalo-Skinned Girl Prophesy" turn toward the Tarot, astrology, and mythology to unearth these answers. In addition, a central rivulet in my work is the powerful element of water—a mutable force capable of great destruction and beauty, and its reciprocity with my poetic third ear. The speakers in my poems continually perform investigations into love, love lost, sorrow, familial relationships, and sex. My work might seem Confessional, and indeed, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton were some of my earliest influences, and while my poems might confess, this does not originate solely from autobiography but also from imagination and story. I am not a diarist, and if the speakers in my poems seem to seek closure, it is because she hasn't the courage to sit in the raw space of not-knowing. Lyn Hejinian's essay The Rejection of Closure posits poetic theories that I still grapple with during my writing process. She argues toward making the poetic line reach simultaneously toward the next line and outward into the world. In certain sections the essay seems to promote density inside the poem's subject content, but also to "reject closure." Hejinian's theories resonate with my poetic third ear, and somewhere along the way I started making a conscious effort to write more multilateral poems. These poems avoid linearity and choose instead to zigzag in and out of my experiences and into the world's gorges. If I've succeeded with this technique, then "Decay of Red Brick," "Ode to Tawdry and other Banished Words," and "At the Vaginal Curator," are the best examples. I write with the intention to "make sense" of a moment or internal feeling—an offering of my voice in its most primordial stage. I write with the hope that an image or phrase will touch my readers in his or her deepest, darkest vein. / A Thesis Submitted to the Department of English in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts. / Spring Semester, 2005. / March 21, 2005. / Creative Writing, Poems, Poetry / Includes bibliographical references. / James Kimbrell, Professor Directing Thesis; Barbara Hamby, Committee Member; David Kirby, Committee Member; Leigh Edwards, Committee Member.

Novel based on an Upstate New York Vineyard about a young couple's struggles with economic hardships, sexual identity, and the cyclical nature of love. / A Thesis Submitted to the Department of English in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts. / Summer Semester, 2004. / April 5, 2004. / Lakemont, LeBarge, Steve, Robert, Emily, Wine / Includes bibliographical references. / Virgil Suarez, Professor Directing Thesis; Elizabeth Stuckey-French, Committee Member; S. E. Gontarski, Committee Member.

The critical history of the texts written by Henry Miller is full of controversy and conflicting assertions as critics rarely agree on any constant interpretations of his work, or life. Some regard him as a playful buffoon without craft or ability while others believe he is one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. There are those who characterize his writing as obscene smut but and those who read it as unfailingly romantic. His work fits into traditional literary molds as well as post-modern categorizations—and this list continues for each varied analysis. However, there has been one claim about Miller's work that has received almost unanimous support: that his writing depicts only negative representations of women. He has been accused of objectifying or vilifying women in his texts, of lacking any understanding of femininity or of women's experiences, and of maintaining only masculine, sexist interests. In short, he has been deemed a misogynist. The majority of critics accept these assumptions, but this is the one claim that deserves the most challenge. There have been a few attempts to counter the charges of misogyny, but they have mainly been counter-productive. That is why the aim of this thesis is to address these unfortunate assertions and provide a new perspective of his writing that reveals the positive manifestations of femininity in it. The entirety of this analysis is based upon Hélène Cixous' theory of écriture féminine, which I have applied to Henry Miller's Tropics trilogy in the hopes of enlightening audiences about the true revolutionary nature of his work. / A Thesis Submitted to the Department of English in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts. / Summer Semester, 2005. / June 28, 2005. / Gender Theory, Feminist Criticism, Feminism, Post-Gender / Includes bibliographical references. / S. E. Gontarski, Professor Directing Thesis; Leigh Edwards, Committee Member; John Fenstermaker, Committee Member.

To complete my Master of Arts degree I am submitting Part One of my novel-in-progress Horse Show Circuit. This first section presents the novel's set up of characters, setting, and situation. The novel is written in the tradition of journey-type stories, going back as far as Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales to the more recent works of Kerouac's On The Road and Ellis' Less Than Zero. Other influences include the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, how they explored specific social worlds and the dynamic that existed within that particular echelon. In my novel, the setting includes competition within the world of equestrian show jumping. Certain elements, such as the horse murders, are grounded in historical facts from the 1980s. / A Thesis Submitted to the Department of English in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts. / Fall Semester, 2004. / November 2, 2004. / Novel / Includes bibliographical references. / Virgil Suárez, Professor Directing Thesis; Elizabeth Stuckey-French, Committee Member; John Fenstermaker, Committee Member.

Set during the Reagan era, Unlikely Heroes is a post-Vietnam, baby boomer novel dealing with oil and the environment, academia and violence, the military and the media. In it, Kelsey Mueller, a young female photographer from the oil fields of California, is an unlikely journalism professor at a ninety-five percent male military college in rural Massachusetts. As faculty adviser to the student newspaper she is befriended by a group of misfit students, unlikely heroes, as she battles first the student editor then her entire chain-of-command in order to improve the newspaper and her classes before she is terminated for not fitting in. / A Dissertation Submitted to the Department of English in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Fall Semester, 2004. / September 21, 2004. / Nicaragua, Ciluzzi, John, Tobey, Vietnam, Mass Mil, Institute, Turner, Lori, World War Two, World War II / Includes bibliographical references. / Virgil Suarez, Professor Directing Dissertation; Patricia N. Stanley, Outside Committee Member; Eric C. Walker, Committee Member; Elizabeth Stuckey-French, Committee Member.

This study addresses the work of James McNab McCrimmon and his significance to the discipline of composition studies. James McCrimmon has attracted the attention of composition historians and theorists largely because he is the founding author of Writing with a Purpose, one of the longest running first-year writing textbooks in United States history. With some notable exceptions, a majority researchers describe McCrimmon as an advocate for current-traditional rhetoric and, therefore, as a detriment to progress in composition pedagogy. Although some of McCrimmon's work appears to support this thesis, a close inspection of McCrimmon's textbooks, articles, and speeches reveals his consistency, not with current-traditional rhetoric, but with expressivist pedagogy. Therefore, this study provides an alternative narrative to existing accounts of McCrimmon's work and shows, among other things, McCrimmon's concept of student agency and the right of students to their own ideas, his emphasis on writing assignments that rely on personal experience, his promotion of writing as a meaning-making activity, and his subjective stance toward the rules of usage. These concepts grow out of his commitment to expressivist principles and are present to some degree in all of his work. Thus, this study offers a revised explanation of McCrimmon's relationship to composition studies and the significance of his role in the development of the profession. / A Dissertation Submitted to the Department of English in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Fall Semester, 2002. / October 11, 2002. / Composition Studies, James Mccrimmon / Includes bibliographical references. / Wendy Bishop, Professor Directing Dissertation; Pamela S. Carroll, Outside Committee Member; Joseph McElrath, Committee Member; Bonnie Braendlin, Committee Member.