"Fence above the Sea" is a collection of prose poems written in sequences. Writing in the line of Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, and Lynn Hejinian, I experiment with language and challenge its convention. While Dickinson writes about "the landscape of the soul," I write about the landscape of the mind. While she appropriates and juxtaposes words in a strange fashion, I juxtapose fragments of sentences in a strange fashion. While she uses dashes to display silence, I discard punctuation, which is disruptive and limits the reader to a set reading of the sentence. Except for the period. Stein's writing is the epitome of Schklovsky's concept of ostranenie (defamiliarization). Like her poems in Tender Buttons, my poems present a multiplied perspective. On the moment. Like Stein, I write dialogical poems where there is a dialogue among words and between words and their meanings. Also, I expect a dialogue between words and readers, author and readers, text and readers. My prose poems focus on sentences "with a balance of their own. . . the balance of space completely not filled but created by something moving as moving is not as moving should be" (Stein, "Poetry and Grammar"). Repetitions are essential in everyday life, to the thought process, and thus in this collection. Like Stein, language poets are exponents from ostranenie, and the results are flatness of tone, experimentation with syntax, and decontextualization of words. I work within the same parameters. Also, I am making a political statement with this collection by asking the reader to be active and react to the text instead of being fed a poetry that is made a commodity for consumption. I particularly agree with Hejinian's aesthetics and poetics: "the 'open text' often emphasizes or foregrounds process. . . and thus resists the cultural tendencies that seek to identify and fix material and turn it into a product" (Hejinian, The Language of Inquiry). Each poem from "Fence above the Sea" is an experiment with the thought that each sentence is a story and that a poem is an open text which is the mind. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Summer Semester, 2003. / August 1, 2003. / A Collection Of Prose Poems / Includes bibliographical references. / David Kirby, Professor Directing Dissertation.

Contributing to the growing critical conversation on colonization and imperialism in the New World, this study examines how sixteenth and seventeenth century Spanish and English theater addressed, promoted, and at times challenged contemporary ideologies of colonization and notions of "civility" and "civilization." This study seeks to understand how Spanish and English society defined "civilization" during the colonization of the New World. An examination of the contemporary colonial discourse as well as the role of the theater in both Spain and England provides a background with which to analyze Lope de Vega's El Nuevo Mundo descubierto por Cristóbal Colón and Shakespeare's The Tempest. In addition to exploring how these individual playwrights addressed their nation's colonial discourse on the stage, this study analyzes Lope de Vega and Shakespeare's representations of New World Indians in order to understand how Spain and England interpreted "civility" and "civilization" during the colonization of the New World. By dramatizing New World Indians on the stage, Lope de Vega and Shakespeare exposed their audiences to the "Other" and attempted to inform and educate theater patrons about cultural difference. While each representation of the "Other" differs, the variances are reflective of the differences in Spanish and English culture and their definitions of "civility" and "civilization." This study examines how sixteenth and seventeenth century Spanish and English theater participated in the larger national debates of the colonial discourses that questioned how to assimilate and absorb cultural differences. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. / Fall Semester, 2005. / October 31, 2005. / Lope De Vega, Imperialism, Civilization, Colonization, New World, Shakespeare, Theater, Indians / Includes bibliographical references. / Daniel J. Vitkus, Professor Directing Thesis; Bruce Boehrer, Committee Member; David Darst, Committee Member.

The Second Knock is a compilation of poems composed between 2000 and 2006. It is written out of a sense of curiosity and in an attempt to know the world and the people in it. To see similarities and differences. To live in my imaginings and invite others in. It is written in an attempt to rescue readers from a false sense of the world and themselves, to save us from the popular media's reduction of language into a series of clichés. It hopes to subvert received ideas and imbue language with fresh denotative and connotative possibilities, ideally inventing its own language through the particular use and context of words. Many of the poems deal with the struggle to come to a language that reflects and communicates experience, although not necessarily my own. I communicate experiences, both real and imagined, in an attempt to make sense of the messy business of life, to bring chaos and confusion into order, even if that order is sometimes equally illogical or absurd. Consequentially, many of these poems often rely on absurdist and surrealist techniques; therefore, they depend heavily on figurative language and metaphor to ground them in reality. I attempt to combine the familiar and the strange in hopes of allowing readers to see the world in fresh, surprising ways. Despite my exploration and sometimes interrogation of language, the poems in this manuscript eventually come back to lived experience—both public and private, in our crucial moments and prolonged phases, in our rituals and ceremonies. The poems take as their subject not only language, creativity, and poetry itself, but also, of course, the usual suspects: frustration, loneliness, alienation, desire, joy, loss, despair. Nevertheless, this work is also a marriage of imagination and language—of imagined language and "languaged" imagination. In as much as they communicate with readers, my poems invite people to see the world as I do, providing a panoptical version of reality, one filtered, reflected, and refracted through imaginative possibilities. My intention is to provide readers with a wider sense of "the real" in a world where reality has become increasing difficult to define. I practice a "reading-into-writing" philosophy of composition, which means much of my work is directly inspired by other poems. I am indebted to poets such as Vasko Popa, Carlos Drummond De Andrade, and Zbigniew Herbert, whose work has often provided the spark for many of the poems in this collection. The works of their translators, particularly Charles Simic and Mark Strand and their anthology Another Republic: 17 European and South American Writers, have also been a strong influence on my writing. In fact, some of my poems might themselves be seen as translations, of my lived experience and especially of my experience reading poems. Thus, some of the work here has that feeling of translation, a tension or uneasiness within the syntax and diction. Throughout most of the dissertation, I take a minimalist approach to writing, avoiding what sometimes seems like dishonesty or mere ornamentation in other poems. By using poetic exercises of my own invention, I often riff, repeat, and imitate poems until something catches. I would like for the poems in this manuscript to reveal the kind of playful energy, that sense of humor and escape I often feel when writing them. When drafting a poem, I usually go on intuition and nerve, writing a kind of seat-of-your-pants poetry that often fails. Revision and deliberation, however, have helped shape some of these drafts into the poems in this collection. Nevertheless, trial and error play a large role in my creative process, and I see my workspace as a kind of laboratory, where under flickering bulb, I create poems out of the petri dish and test tube. Some of the poems here reflect this kind of experimentation, exploring the opportunities that arise from the accidental: cut-ups, homophonic translations, misread lines, generative exercises. While the dissertation's title implies luck, possibility, and a kind of blind optimism that is distinctly American, the sections titles often undercut this notion with the skepticism that I sometimes feel toward "experimentation." Ultimately, my poems call attention to words and letters themselves, from their sound and feel in the mouth to their look on the printed page. I see these poems as a celebration of language and hope to communicate my love for words and their appeal to our sense of sight, sound, drama and tension, and intellect. Above all, I hope these poems reveal a kind of kinship or communication with those that have come before them, and that they will somehow contribute, as do others, to the way we see, or will see, this place and time. I would like for my poems to converse with our culture in a way that at some times questions, subverts, and rebels against it, while at others aestheticizes and enhances it. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester, 2007. / March 30, 2007. / American, Creative Writing, Women / Includes bibliographical references. / David Kirby, Professor Directing Dissertation; Brenda Cappuccio, Outside Committee Member; Andrew Epstein, Committee Member; James Kimbrell, Committee Member.

There is nothing new under the sun in human experiences of inevitable disappointment, suffering, and pain derived from imperfect human nature and the reality of human life. This dissertation analyzes female characters that suffer from sorrow, pain, and tribulation in these novels by Edith Wharton: The Age of Innocence (1920), The House of Mirth (1905), The Custom of the Country (1913) and Twilight Sleep (1927). Female characters that I discuss belong to a group of upper-class in New York, ranged from post-Civil War era to post-World War I. I focus on how they cope with complications and endure unhappiness resulting from their limited positions in society and the inadequacy of their marriages. This dissertation aims to explore the social, cultural, and psychological conditions that lead Wharton's female characters toward a new consciousness and to examine how human psychology develops based on the principles of the analytical psychology of Carl Jung and his followers rather than the approach we associate with Sigmund Freud. As feminist scholars have pointed out, Freud's theory does not hold for girls because boys' and girls' Oedipal complexes are not symmetrical. A girl does not simply transfer her affection from mother to father and give up her tender feelings for her mother. Instead, the bond is more likely to be sustained, and the relation to her father is added to it. Girls often come to define themselves more in relation to others, rather than as separate and isolated. The impact of feminist scholarship since the 1970s has restored Wharton's works to the American canon. Having shifted from the external factors to the psychological domain, Wharton's unhappy female characters represent the oppression of what Jung identifies as the Feminine, not of women. The problem lies in the lack of relationship between a woman's ego and her archetypes—both Feminine and Masculine. This study demonstrates how the character's life is shaped by the suppression and distortion, and later, the implosive and explosive power of her evolving Feminine consciousness. Wharton's characters embody her philosophy that paradox is the essence of living, particularly the paradox in the human psyche. Although one longs for harmony, peace and resolution, experiences teach one that it is conflict and failure that stimulate one's growth and evolution to another stage in life. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Fall Semester, 2008. / October 29, 2008. / Jungian Psychology, Female Characters, Edith Wharton / Includes bibliographical references. / Dennis Moore, Professor Directing Dissertation; Jennifer Koslow, Outside Committee Member; Ralph Berry, Committee Member; Jerrilyn McGregory, Committee Member.

My thesis consists of three essays: "Dennis," "Would You Take a Quick Look at This," and "Community Center." I also have included four short stories: "The British Are Coming," "Like Frankenstein," "Woman's World," and "Auto-Man." The final part of my thesis is a novel excerpt, "Domestic Studies." My intention in my short stories is to show the alienation people feel within society, especially women. The framework of my stories is one of disconnectedness and isolation within a declining society. My essays center on various subjects, loss of innocence being the one that stands out the strongest. I also have a humorous essay, "Will You Take a Quick Look at This," that is an example of ironic self-examination. My novel excerpt is actually the beginning of my novel. It sets the story up as one of domestic upheaval. It is part domestic humor, part farce. I believe I have achieved what I set out to do with this body of work. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts. / Fall Semester, 2007. / November 7, 2007. / Nonfiction, Fiction / Includes bibliographical references. / Virgil Suarez, Professor Directing Thesis; Elizabeth Stuckey-French, Committee Member; Ned Stuckey-French, Committee Member.

This study examines the development of a new hybridized genre by women writers in nineteenth-century France that I have named the novelogue. The term novelogue was chosen because it illustrates the creative combination of the novel and the travelogue. The novelogue exists in-between previously established and male-dominated genres of the nineteenth century, allowing its female users to discuss issues of nation and gender in an arena that is freer and more open to possibilities and the questioning disallowed in the established, canonical genres of the day. The novel aspect of the genre allows its writers to frame their work within the traditional story-telling mode; moreover, the novel is also somewhat a genre of (non-) choice for women writers. The travelogue element of the genre is also groundbreaking in that it showcases women travelers who, unlike most of their contemporaries, journeyed to distant places alone, without husband or chaperone. The uniqueness and liberating nature of this genre is found, therefore, in its hybridity. The three women I chose to study for this work span the nineteenth century and wrote texts that illustrated a powerful combination of their political and personal viewpoints. Germaine de Staël's Corinne ou l'Italie (1807), Flora Tristan's Pérégrinations d'une paria (1838), and Isabelle Eberhardt's Trimardeur (1922) are all examples of the novelogue. Each of these three writers portrays her own personal vision of utopian society through her novelogue. The goal, then, of this study is to analyze, through terms postcolonial theory, the way in which each of these writers used the novelogue to effect social change. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester, 2004. / December 10, 2003. / postcolonial and genre studies, 19th-century French literature, Germaine de Stael, Flora Tristan, Isabelle Eberhardt / Includes bibliographical references. / Aimée Boutin, Professor Directing Dissertation; David Kirby, Outside Committee Member; William Cloonan, Committee Member; Raymond Fleming, Committee Member; Jean Graham-Jones, Committee Member.

I always preferred fried chicken over hamburgers or hotdogs when I was a kid. And though that seems like a terrible way to begin an abstract about poetry, I have to admit that it sums up most of what I have learned about it. Poetry has always been about choices for me. I have never closed my eyes and pictured Mount Saint Helens and meditated only eating wafers and drinking river water just for a poem. Whey come around, I sit and write them or I don't, And if I don't I figure, like an important call, they'll call again. That's when I say, "Oh there you are!" And I either speak to them to me, or I don't. I am a moody person, so they have to catch me when I feel entertaining. There's no grand scheme to the craft. Everyone has their bag of tricks and like a really great magician; I won't go on boring readers with my vast and supreme knowledge about the subject. I can say that I suffered for most of these, and that makes it all the more worse for me to call this a book. I tried to compile poems here that seemed interested in each other. As a matchmaker, I think poems either have an attraction to each other or they don't. It has little to do with subject or lines or form and mostly to do with emotion and personality. Poems have a presence that is usually never supplied in the poem itself. Some people call this theme or focus. These poems seem to feel comfortable next to each other and that is why they are here.I didn't write this book with anything in mind or at any certain period of my life. I like to think that I have always been writing this book. I split this book into three sections because I felt that there were three versions of me in all my poems. The first section, "Morning Spaces," is an introduction to my present daily life while the second section, "Confession," deals more with my youth. The third section is about poetry itself. The title sums it up best, "She needs No Makeup." / A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. / Summer Semester, 2003. / April 2, 2003. / Poetry, Tallahassee / Includes bibliographical references. / David Kirby, Professor Directing Thesis; Andrew Epstein, Committee Member; James Kimbrell, Committee Member.

Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead and Gardens in the Dunes and Linda Hogan's Mean Spirit and Solar Storms forge a new borderland in literature, a fluid world where Native American traditions and Native American spirituality resonate, dynamically responding to the world in which the characters live. The borderland of these novels calls into question white culture's perception of nature, society, economics and history. Silko's and Hogan's works clearly express the necessity to blur boundaries, which are diametrically opposed to the American Indian view of the Earth as a living entity with a spirit, and the necessity to create a pull toward a new society. Yet this society is neither an assimilation to white culture nor a return to traditional tribalism. It is a vision for a new world, undefinable by the structures that bind Anglo-American ideas and philosophy. This vision commands dissolution of the current economic and class system, sensitivity to and responsibility for the environment, and a respect for basic human rights. The vision encompasses an awareness of individual spirituality, a connection to community and an acknowledgement of the divinity of all life. Ecofeminist philosophy, the pull toward a union with the earth and equality for all living beings, unifies these novels and forms a basis for analyzing them in a literary and social context. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. / Spring Semester, 2004. / February 24, 2004. / Ecofeminism, Native American Literature, Spirituality, Marxism / Includes bibliographical references. / Dennis Moore, Professor Directing Thesis; Leigh Edwards, Committee Member; Maxine Montgomery, Committee Member.

Studies of Catholic American literature have preferred analyses of authors whose work demonstrates a reverence to the faith they openly acknowledged. However, with the exception of Paul Giles's American Catholic Arts and Fictions, most studies have ignored the Catholic influence in works of nonpracticing Catholics. This neglect limits the scope and undermines the complexity of Catholic American fiction to works by the religious, about the religious. In this study, I will examine non-practicing Catholic authors whose Catholicism has received little or no attention in order to explore traces of their former faith in their work and expand the definition of Catholic American literature. The culture of the 1960s radically changed America forever, and three events in particular altered the Catholic American identity: the reforms of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), the assassination of President John F. Kennedy (1963), and the pronouncement of Humanae Vitae (1968). Since concerns over the body were at the heart of these three moments in history, I will use that as the means to explore the Catholic sensibility in the selected texts. Furthermore, these events led to a questioning of Catholicism and of faith in general: its capabilities, its right to power, and its effectiveness. In this study, I examine four novels by three non-practicing "Catholics"—-John Kennedy Toole, Cormac McCarthy, and Don DeLillo—-all of whom were born and raised Catholic prior to these events, but begin writing during or after they occurred. John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces addresses "Vatican II," subtly expressing frustration and grief towards the loss of a steady worldview. Cormac McCarthy's Child of God purposefully rejects a Catholic view of God's presence in the world, yet forces the reader to not judge Lester Ballard in a manner that is reminiscent of Christ's teachings. Between Mao II (1991) and Falling Man (2007), Don DeLillo shifts in his view of how religion functions in the postmodern world, from skepticism to a guarded optimism. By exploring the Catholic subtexts in these novels, I challenge notions of secularity in contemporary American literature, including postmodern fiction. I will also show how authors traditionally excluded from scholarship on Catholic American literature have a rightful place next to the likes of Flannery O'Connor, Thomas Merton and Walker Percy. This addition, in turn, will add to the understanding of the complex, yet integral contribution Catholic writers, practicing and nonpracticing alike, have made to the American literary tradition. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. / Summer Semester, 2008. / April 21, 2008. / Sexuality, Corporeality, Humor, John Kennedy Toole, Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo, Catholicism, Grotesque, Vatican II / Includes bibliographical references. / Andrew Epstein, Professor Directing Thesis; Timothy Parrish, Committee Member; Christopher Shinn, Committee Member; Elaine Treharne, Committee Member.

Like most teenagers, Morris fears divorce; he fears his parents won't get one. Morris hates his mother. Margaret dominates and dictates every aspect of her family's lives and Morris can't take it anymore. What's worse is his girlfriend's behavior is strikingly similar to Margaret's. Morris must act quickly to save his identity and freewill, or he'll suffer a fate similar to his father, Randy. After brainstorming with his best friend, Morris decides sabotaging Randy's job is the only way Margaret would leave. After several failed attempts, Randy is actually fired and Margaret, as expected, leaves. Morris takes advantage of this time to convince Randy that they're better off without her. But in the end, he comes to realize he's made a huge mistake. He learns that marriages come in all forms and work in different ways. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts. / Fall Semester, 2008. / April 22, 2008. / The Three, Screenplay / Includes bibliographical references. / Robert Olen Butler, Professor Directing Thesis; David Kirby, Committee Member; Elizabeth Stuckey-French, Committee Member.