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Willing to overstep literary conventions in order to ensure that meaning and purpose reign over structure, cross-genre writing works to push boundaries of genre and tear down the walls of limitation. This cross-genre thesis aims to test literary restrictions of structure and style and, as literary endeavors often do, to rattle our existence. In this thesis, nonfiction and fiction work together to drive meaning to the surface of the page, meaning that is universal in the individual stories as well as in the human experience. Although some characters are fictional and some real, they often intersect, their journeys and discoveries merging into one. The many voices of this thesis, while diverse, speak to similar themes and meaning. The main character of "Silhouettes," a homosexual male who yearns to find his identity away from the place he once called home, experiences feelings of abandonment and loss. The narrator of "A Crimson Trail" longs to uncovers truths about her uncle's suicide and endures similar feelings of loss. "Abandoned Laurels" explores a complex mother-daughter relationship and wades through themes of mourning, regret, and shame. The remaining stories explore similar themes, including those of longing, death, and familial relationships. Shorter pieces are scattered amongst longer works and supplement themes developed in the thesis. Each section contributes to the characters' longing for identity, recovery, and understanding of the past. These related characters and their stories--both real and fictional--merge in a collective endeavor to sift through loss, explore the past, and, most importantly, find identity and hope in the future amidst the rubble of the present.

CONK is a collection that explores the absurdist irony located at the intersection between horror and humor. The events are predicated upon the characters' fundamental misunderstandings of the world around them, their doom arising from their inability to differentiate between the indecipherable and the incorrect ("Bird Kill"). Some are more reflexive, revolving around the difficulty of telling a story at all ("What a Story''), or exploring the dissolution of self that results from the act of artmaking (the eponymous "CONK"), or even indulging in the joy of said dissolution ("Celebration"). Other times, the pieces mix esoteric language and pop culture referents with the goal of defamiliarizing them ("Will That Be All?"). The resulting destabilization, this breakdown of heuristic methodology, creates situations that resist understanding and renders uncanny previously mundane images. / Master of Fine Arts / CONK is a collection of short fiction.

Submitted by Automa??o e Estat?stica (sst@bczm.ufrn.br) on 2016-03-02T22:26:31Z No. of bitstreams: 1 DiegoCesarLeandro_DISSERT.pdf: 2837747 bytes, checksum: 4424a133858de71d987d66fcde92addf (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Arlan Eloi Leite Silva (eloihistoriador@yahoo.com.br) on 2016-03-03T22:12:40Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 DiegoCesarLeandro_DISSERT.pdf: 2837747 bytes, checksum: 4424a133858de71d987d66fcde92addf (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-03-03T22:12:40Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 DiegoCesarLeandro_DISSERT.pdf: 2837747 bytes, checksum: 4424a133858de71d987d66fcde92addf (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014-12-04 / Coordena??o de Aperfei?oamento de Pessoal de N?vel Superior - CAPES / O Google Docs (GD) ? um editor online de textos por meio do qual m?ltiplos autores podem trabalhar s?ncrona ou assincronamente em um mesmo documento, o que pode auxiliar no desenvolvimento da habilidade de escrita em ingl?s (WEISSHEIMER; SOARES, 2012). Ao escrever colaborativamente, os aprendizes t?m mais oportunidades para perceber as lacunas na sua produ??o escrita, visto que s?o expostos a mais insumo lingu?stico por parte dos colegas coautores (WEISSHEIMER; BERGSLEITHNER; LEANDRO, 2012), e priorizam o processo de (re)constru??o textual, em detrimento da preocupa??o com o produto final (i.e., o texto pronto) (LEANDRO; WEISSHEIMER; COOPER, 2013). Ademais, no processo de aprendizagem de uma segunda l?ngua (L2), a produ??o de linguagem propicia a consolida??o de conhecimentos existentes e a cria??o de novos conhecimentos (SWAIN, 1985; 1993). Levando isto em considera??o, o presente estudo, de natureza quasi-experimental (NUNAN, 1992) e abordagem mista (D?RNYEI, 2007), objetiva investigar o impacto da escrita colaborativa mediada pela ferramenta GD no desenvolvimento da habilidade de escrita em L?ngua Inglesa (LI) e na percep??o de erros sint?ticos ou noticing (SCHMIDT, 1990). Trinta e quatro licenciandos em Letras/Ingl?s integraram o estudo, sendo 25 no grupo experimental e nove no grupo controle. Ambos os grupos passaram por um pr?-teste e por um p?s-teste para que pud?ssemos medir o noticing de estruturas sint?ticas. Os participantes do grupo experimental foram expostos a uma experi?ncia de aprendizagem h?brida, a qual consistiu em aulas presenciais de leitura e produ??o escrita em LI e na escrita colaborativa de tr?s narrativas completas contadas em 100 palavras, denominadas flash fiction (FF), fora de sala de aula, online por meio do GD, durante 11 semanas. O grupo controle teve igualmente aulas presenciais de leitura e produ??o escrita em LI, por?m n?o praticou nenhum tipo de escrita colaborativa. Analisamos a primeira e a ?ltima narrativa produzida pelos participantes do grupo experimental a fim de medir a acur?cia gramatical, operacionalizada como a quantidade de erros gramaticais a cada 100 palavras (SOUSA, 2014) e a densidade lexical, operacionalizada como a rela??o entre o n?mero de palavras produzidas com propriedades lexicais e o n?mero de palavras produzidas com propriedades gramaticais (WEISSHEIMER, 2007; MEHNERT, 1998). Adicionalmente, os participantes do grupo experimental responderam a um question?rio online sobre a experi?ncia h?brida a qual foram expostos. Os resultados quantitativos mostram que os participantes passaram a produzir textos com mais densidade lexical ap?s 11 semanas de interven??o pedag?gica. J? os resultados quantitativos do noticing e da acur?cia gramatical foram contr?rios ao esperado, por?m nos fornecem insights sobre o modelo de teste, no caso do noticing, e sobre a atitude ? positiva ? dos participantes em rela??o ? escrita colaborativa de FF. Os resultados qualitativos evidenciam a utilidade da escrita colaborativa mediada por tecnologia no processo de aprendizagem de L2. / Google Docs (GD) is an online word processor with which multiple authors can work on the same document, in a synchronous or asynchronous manner, which can help develop the ability of writing in English (WEISSHEIMER; SOARES, 2012). As they write collaboratively, learners find more opportunities to notice the gaps in their written production, since they are exposed to more input from the fellow co-authors (WEISSHEIMER; BERGSLEITHNER; LEANDRO, 2012) and prioritize the process of text (re)construction instead of the concern with the final product, i.e., the final version of the text (LEANDRO; WEISSHEIMER; COOPER, 2013). Moreover, when it comes to second language (L2) learning, producing language enables the consolidation of existing knowledge as well as the internalization of new knowledge (SWAIN, 1985; 1993). Taking this into consideration, this mixed-method (D?RNYEI, 2007) quasi-experimental (NUNAN, 1999) study aims at investigating the impact of collaborative writing through GD on the development of the writing skill in English and on the noticing of syntactic structures (SCHMIDT, 1990). Thirtyfour university students of English integrated the cohort of the study: twenty-five were assigned to the experimental group and nine were assigned to the control group. All learners went through a pre-test and a post-test so that we could measure their noticing of syntactic structures. Learners in the experimental group were exposed to a blended learning experience, in which they took reading and writing classes at the university and collaboratively wrote three pieces of flash fiction (a complete story told in a hundred words), outside the classroom, online through GD, during eleven weeks. Learners in the control group took reading and writing classes at the university but did not practice collaborative writing. The first and last stories produced by the learners in the experimental group were analysed in terms of grammatical accuracy, operationalized as the number of grammar errors per hundred words (SOUSA, 2014), and lexical density, which refers to the relationship between the number of words produced with lexical properties and the number of words produced with grammatical properties (WEISSHEIMER, 2007; MEHNERT, 1998). Additionally, learners in the experimental group answered an online questionnaire on the blended learning experience they were exposed to. The quantitative results showed that the collaborative task led to the production of more lexically dense texts over the 11 weeks. The noticing and grammatical accuracy results were different from what we expected; however, they provide us with insights on measurement issues, in the case of noticing, and on the participants? positive attitude towards collaborative writing with flash fiction. The qualitative results also shed light on the usefulness of computer-mediated collaborative writing in L2 learning.

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Sweat Stones is a story collection and a novel excerpt. All of its parts are set in the American South, and are concerned with the intersection between class and geography. The majority of the characters are a part of underrepresented portions of their local population—they are trapped within cycles of poverty, in turns longing for escape and wearing their mixed brands of anguish like badges. The longer stories have firm roots in Realism, while the shorter ones, which serve as breaks between the collection’s major sections, are tinged with degrees of Absurdism or Magical Realism. Through these stories I hope to have translated what can be translated about a place—its rhythms and personalities, the images and logics that distinguish it from anywhere else. It’s a kind of language-made hallucination. As the characters buckle under the weight of their rigors, their stories push against the limits of plausibility. Most share these stylistic concerns, especially those written in first-person. But even when the voice and tone shift into what seems like a different narrative realm, what holds them together are the dire situations of the characters. A poor family suffers the death of a child and the father has to leave them for work. A marginalized group of stage riggers use up all of their energy for nothing. A man feeds into his self-loathing as a series of capricious relationships unravel. Sweat Stones, which takes its name from the flat slates that heat the contemplative atmosphere of a sweat lodge, is a reflection on the mutual burdens borne of laborious life. It’s a gesture of solidarity for a particular kind of struggle, in which I have participated in one form or another. Along the way I met the people, grew up around the places that would become the subjects of this fiction.

This collection of prose-poems and flash fiction, together with a few short stories, shows how romantic relationships colour our perspectives on the world. The collection has echoes throughout of speakers' voices, theme, imagery and tone. There is a narrative logic too, but working on a subtle level of echo and resonance

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Mirrors and Vanities is a multi-modal collection which showcases the diversity of working in long and short storytelling forms. Featured in this thesis are fiction, nonfiction, graphic narrative, and screenplay. Using unconventional approaches to storytelling in order to achieve emotional resonance with the audience while maintaining high standards for craft, these stories and essays explore the costs inherent to the subtle nuances of interpersonal relationships. The fiction focuses on the complications of characters keeping secrets. A husband discovers the truth behind his wife’s miscarriage. A girl visits her fiancé in purgatory. A boy crosses a line and loses his best friend. Meanwhile, the nonfiction centers on self-discovery and gender roles associated with power struggles. A schizophrenic threatens to ruin my mother’s wedding. I rediscover my relationship with my father through food writing. Sword-work teaches me to fail and succeed at making martial art. The title work of the thesis is a collaged story highlighting the tribulations of a physicist fixated on recovering his lost love by manipulating the multiverse. The multi-modal format implicates the nebulosity of physics theories and how different aspects of the narrative can be presented in various formats to best suit the nature of the storytelling. Through the interactions of characters in mundane and extraordinary circumstances, the works in this thesis examine the consequences of choice, the contrast between reality and expectation, coming of age, and the Truth of narrative.