This is a collection of short stories. They take place in America.

This is an original collection of poems, with an accompanying afterword that discusses poetics, grief, history, tradition, biography, ambulation, process, note-taking, note-keeping, experience, love, and thanks.

Modern critics and biographers often cite the need for a new study of Hawthorne and his wife, for a study of sex and sex symbolism in Hawthorne, and for a study of the love element in general in his works. Such aspects of his fiction have been all but totally overlooked by earlier critics who confined their comments largely to the sin and isolation of the characters. This paper cannot hope to satisfy any one of these needs, but does undertake to look at Hawthorne's treatment of the remedial effects of heterosexual love in lives where such love operates, and of the disaster which ensues in lives where it is excluded.

A basic premise of this paper is Hemingway's definition of bullfighting as a tragic art form. Americans have been so conditioned to view any sort of contest as sport that it is virtually impossible for us to consider the bullfight in other terms. Once accepted as tragedy, however, the implications of the bullfight as an influence upon Hemingway become manifold. It must be understood that this paper is not meant to imply that the bullfight is the only influence, or even the most paramount, for it is to be recognized that any artist derives from many sources, both external and psychic. I will show that Hemingway was subjected to an intense association with the bullfight at an age and a period in his life when he would have been greatly impressed by the things he found there. To be an afficianado conveys more than interest. It has the connotation of passionate devotion. Becoming so concerned that one cannot talk to another on a lower plane. Hemingway was an afficianado. He probably holds the Anglo-Saxon record for watching bullfights-- some fifteen hundred over a period of ten years.

The purpose of the present study is to ascertain the principles of poetry to which Robinson adhers, to determine his position in relation to the imagists, and to discuss in some detail the technical qualities of his shorter poems.

For Hawthorne pride is the root evil, for it is a voluntary separation by which man sets himself aloof from conmunication with himself, his fellow men, and God. Pride is an attitude which takes possession of him first as he allows himself to become blinded to his own faults and inadequacies, next as he ignores the virtues and claims of his fellow men, and eventually as he develops the bigoted idea that since he is superior to the rest of tho human race, he must make himself a place on the Godly level. He is now completely isolated from humanity by his own choice, from God by the incongruity of his presumptive claims, and from himself by the absence or any further self-comnunication on the basis of honest humility.

Eudora Welty's brief photographic career offers valuable insight into the development of her literary voice. She discovers many of the distinguishing characters of her fiction during the 1930s while traveling through Mississippi writing articles for the Works Progress Administration and taking pictures of the people and places she encountered. Analyzing the connections between her first collection of photographs, One Time, One Place: Mississippi during the Depression: A Snapshot Album, and her first collection of short stories, A Curtain of Green, and Other Stories, reveals the writer's sympathetic attitude towards her characters, the prominence of place in her fiction, and her use of time in the telling of a story.

The works of Philip K. Dick act as an ideal template for readers to explore what it means to be human in a technologically dominated world. Dick’s emphasis on the usage of androids and artificial intelligence as literary monsters allows for a posthuman reading of the traditional literary monster, notably in how their uncanny nature and behavior helps reveal the synthetic tendencies of humanity. In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, “Imposter,” and “I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon,” each narrative incorporates artificial intelligence and androids acting as others to reveal the machine-like qualities of Dick’s human characters. This approach ultimately reveals Dick’s greater commentary on the nature of humanity’s tendencies to fall into machine-like patterns and expectations within the historical world. By asking questions of what it means to be human through posthuman monsters, Dick challenges the traditional definition of what it means to be both human and alive.

Food is a universal human necessity, yet food often serves more than a biological purpose as it informs individual and communal identities, and even facilitates memory. This thesis explores personal memory, the development of identity, and an almost reverential connection to nature in several food poems by Li-Young Lee in Rose (1986) and Behind My Eyes (2008). Born in 1957, Lee has been writing poetry since he was young, studying under Gerald Stern in the late 1970s, and he is known for writing sublime, transcendent yet incredibly accessible and expressive poetry. This thesis gives an overview of food studies and establishes food in Lee’s poems — principally fruit, shared meals, and lonely meals — as the central image, signifier, or as Roland Barthes might call it, the myth that allows the speaker of these poems to metaphorically fulfill the aphorism, “you are what you eat.”

Since the end of World War II, the possibility of fascism and totalitarianism as a global threat continues to proliferate in American art and literature to the point that many individuals paradoxically desire the very things that seek to control them. Postmodern literature often portrays fascism and totalitarianism as it exists under contemporary capitalist systems as a multiplicity of discreet machines operating within objects of desire. These objects are complicated by the 24-hour news cycle and the popularity of solitary, on-demand entertainment that in turn mediates the desires and fears of a population through strict control of information. This thesis examines works by George Saunders, Don DeLillo, and David Foster Wallace through a post-structural lens and seeks to explore the moments in these novels where desire and fascism intersect to create an endless, self-replicating form of control that is often too discreet to notice.