Dry Fire is a novel set in the southern United States in the late twentieth century. The novel chronicles the lives of several characters who enter the police academy at the same time, following them through a grueling training stage until each officer reaches solo status. The stress and danger involved in police situations is omnipresent. / Narrator and main character, Abigail Fitzpatrick, enters the police academy in her early thirties after having spent eight years as a paramedic. Issues of gender, privacy, and harassment plague Fitzpatrick throughout the novel as she attempts to integrate a traditionally fraternal order. Fitzpatrick's friendship with less competent and morally shaky Officer Sonny Morelli tests the limits of loyalty and professional integrity. The cost is steep for Fitzpatrick who must learn to balance these two values. In addition, Fitzpatrick is attempting to come to terms with a recent break-up. Her female lover, a police investigator, has moved out in the hope of obtaining a promotion to sergeant. Structurally, the novel is divided into four major sections. The first five chapters deal with training, where the action is forced by an outside agency--the academy. Tension and momentum build in chapters six through ten which deal with a concentrated fourteen-week training period on the streets. The circle of action and interaction expands to include Fitzpatrick's relationship with her trainers, with other officers, and with the public at large. Chapters eleven through fifteen pick up two years later. By now the characters have been firmly established and tension is further developed through personal interactions as friendship and ethics collide. In the final four chapters, the novel comes full circle when Fitzpatrick, now a seasoned officer, becomes a trainer of rookies. The struggles of other characters intensify, intersecting violently with Fitzpatrick's life, altering her perceptions and shaping who she becomes. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 57-04, Section: A, page: 1619. / Major Professor: Jerome Stern. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1996.

Organ Music is a comic novel of approximately 100,000 words about a playwright, Rosalind Lawson, and here attempt to escape from a fundamentalist-ridden north Florida town. When her husband, Henry, a folklorist, remarks that he would be willing to leave Ohumpka if Roz beat his salary, she accepts a job as a dialoguist for a new Atlanta-based soap. As her new job progresses, Roz finds her own life slowly turning to soap until she realizes that a person with a comic worldview cannot find happiness writing for a humorless medium any more than she can find happiness living in a humorless town. / The novel celebrates the Comic Spirit but also satirizes four dismal phenomena in our society: workaholism, soap opera, fundamentalism, and pornography. After four months on the soap, Roz is caught in a terrible tangle of the four, which have more in common, she discovers, than most people realize or would care to admit. Yet, it is this very tangle that enables her to escape from Ohumpka. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 50-10, Section: A, page: 3227. / Major Professors: Janet Burroway; Jerome Stern. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1989.

The purpose of my dissertation is discovery. Its premise is that one can write his way to consciousness of self as well as other. The beginning poems deal with the neurotic components of the writer's childhood, the middle section discloses a rebellion and stagnation and the last section attempts to shift the focus from self to other. Many of the poems employ dialogue and make use of characters who often reappear in subsequent poems which tends to give the collection a "storylike" quality and adds to its unity. Whereas the opening section gathers an emotional intensity, the final poems often show a finer understanding and compassion. In a psychological sense, the narrator progresses from the Oedipal conflict to marriage, from chaos to integration. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 49-09, Section: A, page: 2659. / Major Professor: Hunt Hawkins. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1988.

This study is an exploration of the role of women in William Faulkner's apprentice work, from his first national publication in 1919--the poem "L-Apres-midi d'un Faune"--until the completion of his first Yoknapatawpha novels Sartoris (originally Flags in the Dust) and The Sound and the Fury in 1928 (both published in 1929). Over the past fifty years, a massive amount of scholarship has accrued regarding Faulkner's women characters, but little on the female figures of his early work. However, Faulkner created a number of memorable and complex women characters in his apprentice period. In his poetry, the women are generally desirable, yet elusive and unattainable figures, with a few surprising exceptions. But in his short fiction and first two novels, Soldiers' Pay and Mosquitoes, Faulkner produced a variety of intriguing females who were not only prototypes for future characters but also well developed characterizations in their own right. Examples from the early short fiction of the New Orleans period include the independent country girl Juliet Bunden in "Adolescence" and the street-smart city girl in "Frankie and Johnnie." Margaret Powers in Soldiers' Pay is surely one of Faulkner's most remarkable characters, male or female, and in this novel he also created two recurring types--the slim flirtatious beauty Cecily Saunders and the earthy rural girl Emmy. In his final apprentice novel, Mosquitoes, Faulkner would provide an early rendering of the polar opposites of the epicene Diana-like figure and the lush fertility figure in Patricia Robyn and Jenny Steinbauer, who, while providing early appearances of these types, are nonetheless individualized, rather than stereotyped. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 51-09, Section: A, page: 3076. / Major Professor: Elisabeth Muhlenfeld. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1990.

This novel concerns the belated coming of age of a thirty-three-year-old small-town rock-and-roll has-been. Charlie Irish is an almost-celebrity bass player for a band called the Third Rail, which breaks up on a tour of the East Coast. Alone and broke, he makes his way back to Far Rockaway, New York, where he must confront the meager prospects that await a home-town-boy who doesn't make good. / The plot has three major lines. The primary conflict is Charlie Irish's desire to form another band opposed by his growing awareness of the mediocrity of his musical abilities. The musicians he auditions are incompatible because of their lackadaisical attitude toward music or their apparent greed or their disagreement with Charlie Irish's musical aesthetics. / The secondary plot line concerns Charlie's failed attempt to rekindle a relationship with the woman who had been his high school lover. A third progression of events deals with Charlie Irish's avoidance of his mother, as he fears her power (that of motherly-induced guilt, primarily) to force him to give up his dream of a life as a musician. The clash of Charlie Irish's dream of playing music all of his life with his lack of true ability--he cannot write songs, he cannot sing, he is not an impressive or particularly adept bass player--is the focus of much of the book's thematic content. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 51-12, Section: A, page: 4123. / Major Professor: Jerome Stern. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1990.

In my study of three of Welty's works (The Golden Apples, The Robber Bridegroom, and Losing Battles) I examine the human relationships established by Welty through a reading which emphasizes character negotiation. Using a Kristevian lens, I examine the ways in which characters act as subjects in process/on trial in order to attempt to mediate the uncertain inner impulses as well as traditional family structures. My study articulates both the difficulty most Welty characters have in acknowledging the Kristevian dialectic of semiotic and symbolic, and the jouissance characters experience managing this negotiation process. / The Introduction discusses Welty's interest in human relationships and introduces readers to Kristevian theory and why it is applicable for a study of Welty's work. Chapter One and Two analyze four character types which I find to be apparent in the short story collection, The Golden Apples: the Electras, the sojourners, the characters who experience jouissance, and those who experience abjection. / Chapter Three examines the critical role the "times" play as characters in The Robber Bridegroom attempt to live as subjects in process/on trial. Characters in The Robber Bridegroom seem to respond to the changing times in the following three ways: (1) they understand that change is taking place and that they are of the past world and not the coming times; (2) they understand that change is occurring, but they incorrectly read their roles in the coming times and lose their identity, and (3) they understand how the world is changing and the roles will play in the coming time. / Chapter Four, the final chapter of the study, examines the battle between the family-defined community of Losing Battles and the state-defined community. Both communities vie to order the world for the characters in this novel. Characters must negotiate issues of family, class, and education as the family stories told at the reunion are rewritten by the addition of stories from the outer, state community. Only one character recognizes the semiotic qualities of life which surface most fully when the family talk ceases as nightfall descends. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 56-07, Section: A, page: 2685. / Major Professor: Anne Rowe. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1995.

This poetry collection has evolved from the poet's experiences, both personal and academic. The style of these poems is free verse, with generally straightforward diction and syntax. The dissertation is organized into six sections reflecting the topics of the poems, as follows: / I. Modern woman. Without ever consciously intending to take any certain topic, gender, angle or soapbox as the center of my poetry, nonetheless many of these poems reflect the issues and concerns of being a woman in the second half of the twentieth century. The selections deal with this theme in ways ranging from the humorously ironic "1994: Snow White Meets Barbie" to the more serious women's health issue in "One Woman in Seven." / II. Roots. This section focuses on members of the poet's family and on growing up as an "Army brat" in the 1950s. / III. Guises. In these poems the perspective ranges from fictional characters whose story the poet has retold in her own terms ("Cassandra Speaks of Sexual Harassment") to other personalities, male and female, invented and real. / IV. Lessons. As a career teacher, the poet records memorable students ("Sarah Starving") and lessons both imparted and learned ("Do I Need to Know That?"). / V. Journeys. In Part V, the poet undertakes several journeys, ranging from flirtations in Italy ("Heat in Pompeii") to explorations at the bottom of the sea ("Barracuda"). In each case, for both speaker and reader, the journey is more than one in physical space. / VI. Couplings. These poems deal with the weaving and unraveling of relationships, the problem of how to connect one's individual and idiosyncratic consciousness with another's, for however brief a time. The section includes "Chunnel" and "Devolution of Domesticity." / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 57-01, Section: A, page: 0221. / Major Professor: Van K. Brock. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1995.

A collection of short stories, Proud Flesh explores what meanings lie at the ecstatic heart of women's experience, particularly in terms of women's multi-layered and multiple relationships. As in l'ecriture feminine, the author attempts to "write the body," drawing on the premise that women experience life and relationships primarily from within the locus of their bodies and that these libidinal experiences mirror and create their emotional and intellectual wisdom to form a whole response. / Characters deal constantly in a world of relationships with husbands, lovers, parents or friends. For each one, the character usually finds her meaning, another face of her self-knowledge, in the places where the relationship has shredded itself to the point of disintegration. The protagonists are women who encounter and finally confront their emotional wounds in a physical way. By embracing illuminations of their particular truth, they begin to recognize the potential for healing and for integration. How each character heals herself relies on her openness and vulnerability to another and ultimately to herself. / The characters in these stories deal with religious dilemmas, within a religious context, or with their notion of goodness in the world. These characters are primarily concerned with what it means to love freely and loyally. They come to understand the healing that such recognition can bring and they usually see that what their bodies tell them is the closest thing they have to what God says. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 51-12, Section: A, page: 4119. / Major Professor: Sheila Ortiz Taylor. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1990.

A Southern rite of passage novel that takes place in Venable, Georgia, during the summer of 1962, "On Grant's Nose" depicts the struggle of fifteen year old Marley Mason as she attempts to come to terms with the memories of her past and the frustrations of her present. Five years before the novel begins, Marley's mother left her and her younger brother, Huey, and went to Atlanta. Two weeks later she was killed accidentally. Marley believes that her mother would have returned, but her family holds firmly to their condemnation of a woman who abandoned her husband and two small children. Marley learns to weave her own fabric of memory. She learns that truth is, at best, an individual fabrication based on a need for memory. The truth is never absolute and is always malleable. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 50-06, Section: A, page: 1655. / Co-Directors: Janet Burroway; Sheila Ortiz Taylor. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1989.

A collection of poetry, divided into three sections. The poems in all three sections are in free verse and the tone varies throughout. / The first section explores family relationships and the speaker's affiliations with family and herself. In these poems, the speaker gradually comes to terms with family members and with portions of her history. Many of these poems are rooted in class and place. The speaker's family is working class, and this is reflected in some of the "tugboat" poems; hence the title of the dissertation. Staten Island, New York, particularly the 1960s Staten Island of the speaker's childhood, was more reflective of rural New Jersey and upstate New York than the more suburban borough it has now become. It is the milieu for much of this work. / In the second section, the focus is on "the other"--historical, political, and other, characters--who are mainly unknown to the speaker and are analyzed or celebrated here. These figures include Mary Magdalene as well as Breyten Breytenbach. Also incorporated here are "Things Said While Dead: The Virginia Woolf Letters," which are poems written in, what I imagine to be, Woolf's voice, if Woolf had composed poetry. In them, Woolf speaks to the important figures in her life: her husband, Leonard Woolf, her friend and lover, Vita Sackville-West, and her sister, Vanessa. These poems, which are both resolutions and explanations, have been influenced by current research on the sexual abuse perpetrated on Woolf and information on her sexual and emotional lives. / Section three chronicles the speaker's relationship to her partners and to herself as a woman and artist. Issues are resolved here and the speaker celebrates her revelations. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 51-04, Section: A, page: 1228. / Major Professor: Van K. Brock. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1990.