Continental Drift, a novel set in an unnamed Latin American republic, centers around the relationship between a young American entrepreneur, Drew Junkins, and his fiancee, Xinia Pecado, a professor at the National University. Drew's plans to run a thriving macadamia farm are badly set back when he discovers that his partner, Joe Gallivan, is interested principally in high-stakes illegal activities. Xinia is trying to raise her two children while pursuing a fast-paced academic career. She is still traumatized by the disappointment of her marriage and by the circumstances of her husband's death eight years earlier, and her frustrations are compounded by the clash between her family values and Drew's lifestyle. For in immersing himself in the culture, he has adapted his North American outlook to the "machismo" of the country gentleman, and he has become obsessed with writing a recent national history. / This conflict intensifies while Drew is vacationing with Xinia's family in a remote area. Here he becomes acquainted with her brother-in-law, the new Attorney General, who is dedicated to eliminating just the sort of operation Joe is running. Shortly afterward, at a New Year's party, Drew, gnawed by guilt over his association with Joe and over his indifferent treatment of Xinia, succumbs to momentary sensual weakness. Xinia, confronted with the proof of what she always hoped was merely her own insecurities about Drew, breaks off the relationship. Drew realizes finally how much he has come to depend on her. His subsequent dive into self-abuse, coupled with a related tragedy in Xinia's family, provide him with stark self-knowledge. / The novel is in part about the threat to idealism on both sides of an inherently exploitative relationship. Though the literary style is essentially representational, there is the reflexive suggestion that the novel overlaps with the history Drew is writing. Thus the twin themes, the cultural and the personal, converge in an inevitable resolution. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 52-10, Section: A, page: 3596. / Major Professor: Janet Burroway. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1991.

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, some of the most forceful accounts of modernity have located the traumatic shocks of war, urbanization, and technological change at the heart of modern experience and modernist literature. SURPRISE ENCOUNTERS argues that a dominant framework of shock and rupture has obscured a nineteenth-century conception of surprise, which transformed models of mind and narrative on both sides of the Atlantic. I draw on Ralph Waldo Emerson's formulation of life as "a series of surprises" to distinguish a paradigm of surprise from Walter Benjamin's influential definition of modernity as a "series of shocks and collisions." For Emerson, the fact that we live in an uncertain universe of chance requires moment-by-moment exposure to contingency. The challenge, as he framed it, was to invent new forms of living and writing that allow the unexpected to amplify rather than deaden receptivity, to enrich rather than impoverish experience. "Surprise," one of Emerson's "lords of life," guided such American writers as Henry James, Gertrude Stein, and Nella Larsen, but also Benjamin's shock poets par excellence--Baudelaire and Proust. Each translates Emerson's central question--How do I live so that every moment is new?--into compositional terms, to ask: How do I write so that every sentence is new? Their widely various responses to the Emersonian call hinge on unexpected syntactical and scenic turns that reorient attention and restructure narrative form. My chapters locate surprise in Proust's and Baudelaire's techniques for collapsing timelessness with the ephemeral (modernist methods I trace back to Emerson's "method of nature"); in the lacunae that lodge between past and future tenses in James's scenes of recognition; in Stein's cultivation of fresh grammars of attention; and in Larsen's challenge to Anglo-American master plots that deadeningly dovetail with the deterministic logic of race and reproduction. Each writer's dedication to renewal--temporal, psychic, grammatical, narrative--reframes the present as an open site of experiential and experimental possibility. Beyond representing surprise, the writers of this study are dedicated to training new habits of attention to the unpredictable events that punctuate daily life. In this endeavor, they join psychologists William James and Silvan Tomkins in theorizing surprise as a sudden event that both arrests and spurs processes of feeling and thinking. The literary subject of each chapter is a theorist of emotion and modern experience who exercises a capacity to express as well as enact the aesthetic and psychic dimensions of surprise.

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 33-06, Section: A, page: 2956. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1971.

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 26-10, page: 6054. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1965.

Set in New York City in the 1950's, Valentino's Hair is a short novel about a Puerto Rican barber, Facundo Nieves, and his lame young son Lupe. The focus of the novel is a series of confessional chapters in which the barber tells about a day in 1926 when he cut Rudolph Valentino's hair in an exclusive Manhattan hotel. In Rudolph Valentino, Facundo identifies a persona he envies, "a man who had probably made love to every woman he touched." However, the Valentino who Facundo Nieves meets is a disturbed, emotionally haggard, and philosophical man who carefully watches Facundo's fine hands work and comments that the barber is cutting away at the actor's life too, "time leaving me like moments falling to the floor." / When the screen idol dies a month later in a New York hospital, the barber at first feels guilty, sure that he has contributed in some way to Valentino's premature death. But after visiting a bruja, a neighborhood witch, the barber discovers something even more frightening: the hair is a powerful aphrodisiac. And so, Facundo embarks upon the ignoble cause of using the hair to seduce a young American woman whom he has lusted after, a woman who does not love him but who is helplessly drawn to Facundo through his use of the magical hair. The outcome of this relationship borders on horror. / The novel explores Lupe's relationship with his now aged father and his discovery of his father's secret practice of sympathetic magic, the environment of the barber's unique world, the various mythologies associated with hair, and Puerto Rican family and culture. But the barber's voice serves as the anchor, revealing psychological turmoil and inevitably leading to the conclusions that innocence can be lost in both the real and mystical world and that we are all morally corruptible and subject to temptation. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 51-12, Section: A, page: 4125. / Major Professor: Jerome H. Stern. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1990. / Set in New York City in the 1950's, Valentino's Hair is a short novel about a Puerto Rican barber, Facundo Nieves, and his lame young son Lupe. The focus of the novel is a series of confessional chapters in which the barber tells about a day in 1926 when he cut Rudolph Valentino's hair in an exclusive Manhattan hotel. In Rudolph Valentino, Facundo identifies a persona he envies, "a man who had probably made love to every woman he touched." However, the Valentino who Facundo Nieves meets is a disturbed, emotionally haggard, and philosophical man who carefully watches Facundo's fine hands work and comments that the barber is cutting away at the actor's life too, "time leaving me like moments falling to the floor." / When the screen idol dies a month later in a New York hospital, the barber at first feels guilty, sure that he has contributed in some way to Valentino's premature death. But after visiting a bruja, a neighborhood witch, the barber discovers something even more frightening: the hair is a powerful aphrodisiac. And so, Facundo embarks upon the ignoble cause of using the hair to seduce a young American woman whom he has lusted after, a woman who does not love him but who is helplessly drawn to Facundo through his use of the magical hair. The outcome of this relationship borders on horror. / The novel explores Lupe's relationship with his now aged father and his discovery of his father's secret practice of sympathetic magic, the environment of the barber's unique world, the various mythologies associated with hair, and Puerto Rican family and culture. But the barber's voice serves as the anchor, revealing psychological turmoil and inevitably leading to the conclusions that innocence can be lost in both the real and mystical world and that we are all morally corruptible and subject to temptation.

The primary focus of this collection of poems is on the natural world, and especially on its inherent processes of creative transformation. These transformations are seen as essential to the creation of the physical world, and are also metaphorically connected to the process of artistic creation. / The collection is divided into three sections. In each section, poems are linked through repeated images to a particular phase of progress toward higher and more subtle order. The first section, headed by the poem "Stones," centers on images of the world as unformed or inanimate, while suggesting forces at work that may lead to greater coherence. The second section, keynoted by the poem "Roots," concentrates on the complex interactions of life, growth, and mortality. The third section, beginning with the poem "Wings," introduces images that suggest the possibilities and difficulties of an order or consciousness capable of transcending the physical world. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 53-03, Section: A, page: 0798. / Major Professor: Van K. Brock. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1992. / The primary focus of this collection of poems is on the natural world, and especially on its inherent processes of creative transformation. These transformations are seen as essential to the creation of the physical world, and are also metaphorically connected to the process of artistic creation. / The collection is divided into three sections. In each section, poems are linked through repeated images to a particular phase of progress toward higher and more subtle order. The first section, headed by the poem "Stones," centers on images of the world as unformed or inanimate, while suggesting forces at work that may lead to greater coherence. The second section, keynoted by the poem "Roots," concentrates on the complex interactions of life, growth, and mortality. The third section, beginning with the poem "Wings," introduces images that suggest the possibilities and difficulties of an order or consciousness capable of transcending the physical world.

Princess of Oranges is a collection of ten stories set in 1970s Orlando, Florida. The stories render a world where adult dysfunction forces children to choose from a menu of the perilous and the precarious. The juvenilizing adults seem able only to live love as illness, triumph as a lie, self-awareness as self-destruction. The stories are about how the ill-equipped take on dilemmas of care and love. / The collection is thematically centered around the consciousness of Fay Kinney. At her youngest, Fay is nine, at her oldest, sixteen. Four stories trace her sexual and emotional initiations into the adult world via adolescent female modes of reconciling identity. Two stories show Fay simultaneously saving and destroying her brother as he assembles his escapes. / Four stories examine how women's relationships come of age as mothers and daughters and friends revise the ways see themselves and the way they tell their stories. In conflict with their husbands, friends, and each other, the girlfriends in "Winter Heat," the stepmother in "Lost Lake," the grandmother in "Greenie," and the mother and daughter in the title story struggle towards new, transcendent senses of self and place. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 53-03, Section: A, page: 0798. / Major Professor: Jerome Stern. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1992. / Princess of Oranges is a collection of ten stories set in 1970s Orlando, Florida. The stories render a world where adult dysfunction forces children to choose from a menu of the perilous and the precarious. The juvenilizing adults seem able only to live love as illness, triumph as a lie, self-awareness as self-destruction. The stories are about how the ill-equipped take on dilemmas of care and love. / The collection is thematically centered around the consciousness of Fay Kinney. At her youngest, Fay is nine, at her oldest, sixteen. Four stories trace her sexual and emotional initiations into the adult world via adolescent female modes of reconciling identity. Two stories show Fay simultaneously saving and destroying her brother as he assembles his escapes. / Four stories examine how women's relationships come of age as mothers and daughters and friends revise the ways see themselves and the way they tell their stories. In conflict with their husbands, friends, and each other, the girlfriends in "Winter Heat," the stepmother in "Lost Lake," the grandmother in "Greenie," and the mother and daughter in the title story struggle towards new, transcendent senses of self and place.

This collection includes poems which are often about how people perceive the world around them. Subject matter of the fifty poems varies from the natural world of whales, geese, and turtles to the relationships that exist between the growing up and the growing older, the living and the dead. Music is an important linking theme throughout these poems, and the language of music is employed to suggest further ranges of meaning. Poems look at present and past, the real and the more or less real, and the boundaries that exist and may be crossed in many of these cases. / Walking On the Belly of My Shadow is written in free verse, is primarily lyric in style, but contains a narrative voice which is often telling a specific story or bit of history. In some cases forms are employed in a variant mode, such as the near-sonnet, or in stanzas of tercets, quatrains, or cinquains. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 52-11, Section: A, page: 3924. / Major Professor: David Kirby. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1991.

This study examines grotesque forms in postmodern American literature and the various modes which reflect postmodern concerns. To do so, it describes the origins of the term "grotesque" and discusses the range and breadth of its applications, a complicating factor in its definition. In a variety of contemporary American works, this study discovers a strain of affirmation not uncharacteristic of the general postmodern jubilance and celebration of the same openness and irrationality which drove the moderns to despair. Although these works invoke a similar sense of helplessness amidst precarious chance, they simultaneously restore human dignity by demonstrating a sense of adaptation combined with individuation. In particular, this study analyzes works by Tennessee Williams, Ken Kesey, Joseph Heller, Tom Robbins, Richard Brautigan, John Irving, Raymond Carver, and Sam Shepard, contrasting them to the earlier works of Sherwood Anderson, Nathanael West, and Flannery O'Connor. The later grotesques evidence patterns of healing and communion effected by moments of shared nourishment, sensory experience, or insight; shared imagination or forms of creation; and even shared conflict. These grotesques that are both humorous and poignant, painful and joyous, function in a manner simultaneously realistic and fantastic to disturb and please. This trend, evident in American literature of the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, moves the corpus of the period to create new modes of coping and understanding. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 53-03, Section: A, page: 0809. / Major Professor: W. T. Lhamon, Jr. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1992.

The primary focus of this collection of poems is on the natural world, and especially on its inherent processes of creative transformation. These transformations are seen as essential to the creation of the physical world, and are also metaphorically connected to the process of artistic creation. / The collection is divided into three sections. In each section, poems are linked through repeated images to a particular phase of progress toward higher and more subtle order. The first section, headed by the poem "Stones," centers on images of the world as unformed or inanimate, while suggesting forces at work that may lead to greater coherence. The second section, keynoted by the poem "Roots," concentrates on the complex interactions of life, growth, and mortality. The third section, beginning with the poem "Wings," introduces images that suggest the possibilities and difficulties of an order or consciousness capable of transcending the physical world. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 53-03, Section: A, page: 0798. / Major Professor: Van K. Brock. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1992.