Prose style criticism of literary nonfiction has faded from scholarly popularity since a boom in the 1980s. Recent literary criticism of nonfiction has focused on context while neglecting aesthetics, or left the work of style analysis to composition or rhetoric scholars. I examine the work of Joan Didion, David Foster Wallace, and two writers associated with the literary journal n+1, Keith Gessen and Elif Batuman, to demonstrate the way that prose style analysis is a meaningful critical approach that helps define changing nonfiction genres, including online genres. I read Didion's work across her oeuvre to demonstrate the way her prose style shifts subtly over time and between fiction and nonfiction, memoir and literary journalism. I trace the influence of David Foster Wallace's American postmodern forebears on his fictional and nonfictional prose styles, and follow that line of influence to the nonfiction writing of online genres. I conclude by discussing the way that young writers associated with the journal n+1 regard Wallace's influence on their work and the writing of their generation, and examine Gessen and Batuman's prose style on and offline to find the literary in some unlikely locations. / Thesis (Ph.D, English) -- Queen's University, 2013-11-30 22:27:36.61

The dissertation consists of a collection of personal essays about hunting and fishing. Because the essays are narratives and contain dialogue, characterization, description, themes, etc., they fall under the genre of creative nonfiction. The dissertation has two parts. Part I consists of an essay that discusses the author’s struggle to combine creative nonfiction with outdoor writing and also describes the author’s dilemma of writing about hunting, a topic that is often controversial at the university, while a graduate student. Part II of the dissertation consists of narratives that recount the author’s hunting and fishing experiences that occurred in North Texas and in the mountains of New Mexico. The essays discuss fishing for trout and hunting for deer, wild boars, quail, and duck. Three major themes are developed throughout the dissertation. The first theme describes the close relationship that exists between the author and his father. This closeness is partly due to the time that they have shared during decades of hunting and fishing together. The second theme discusses the ethics of hunting and especially focuses on which methods of hunting are ethical and which methods are not. The third theme explores the complex and sometimes unpleasant interactions that occur between sportsmen when they encounter each other while hunting and fishing. This theme explores the give and take attitude that must exist in order for sportsmen to get along. This attitude is necessary because no two outdoorsmen view the outdoors and hunting and fishing in quite the same way.

This inquiry focuses on creative nonfiction essay writing and its pedagogy, operating under the conceit that this category of literature possesses rich potential to render fruitful study of nonverbal communication. Creative Nonfiction pedagogy can be enriched and analysis of this genre broadened if somewhat familiar aspects of these texts are considered through the interdisciplinary lens of interpersonal and nonverbal communication. Through critical review of existing creative nonfiction pedagogy and close examination of the role of nonverbal communication in the essays of David Foster Wallace, this document aims to open possibilities through an interdisciplinary study of essay writing in order to contribute to the scholarship and knowledge available to professionals responsible for craft instruction, criticism and analysis of creative nonfiction literature.

The following is a collection of personal essays that re-create and reflect on select events that occurred in my life between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four.

The collection of essays is based on my experiences in professional football while working with the New Orleans VooDoo during the 2011 and 2012 seasons. The collection of stories encompasses my personal journey with football players, administrators, and owners during the two seasons I worked for the team. All the names of the characters have been changed.

This is a work of creative nonfiction that details the authors’ own experience with homelessness, relays the stories of homeless individuals he has encountered, challenges conventional notions of poverty and what it means to be home, and invites the reader to imagine herself into a day in the life of a destitute individual. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.F.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2018. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

This creative nonfiction dissertation is a series of braided narratives that chronicle the author's career as a trombonist in the John Smith Ensemble. As an amateur trombonist, the author is shocked to be hired as a professional musician for an orchestra that plays on PBS and at Carnegie Hall. She quickly realizes, however, that the job requires her to play the trombone quietly in front of an unplugged microphone while a CD recording of another, more talented trombonist is blasted out toward an unknowing audience. The job also requires the author to tour around America. The scenes of from this tour are braided with scenes wherein she reflects on her life as a professional fake musician and her past failed attempts at getting a job.

The Kingston Plains are nine-and-a-half square miles of stump prairie -- a field of stumps from a previously logged forest -- in the central Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Through a mix of personal essay and research, this nonfiction work explores the author's fascination with the area by examining its soil, forest ecology, lumber history, fire ecology, and potential symbolism for a different way of processing the world around us.

Follow the Bone is the author's exploration of what it means to live truthfully and authentically in an increasingly digitized and artificial world, through the author's growth as a woman and hunter in her native Oregon. With raw honesty, Lauren takes the reader through the years she spent post-college learning how to live outside of the structure of academia. As she struggles to balance the demands of a corporate job, a long-term relationship, and the pressure of social media, she brings the reader back to the places and the pursuit that save her. The reader is invited into a world of forests, mountains, trees and wild animals, where the author navigates the reality of being a meat eater with nuance and care. With vivid imagery and a gentle attention to detail, it becomes clear how deeply connected the author is to the world around her through the land, the people she loves and the animals she admires. Her growth as a person and her dedication to living a life of meaning is captured and reflected through her rich prose while she meditates on the outdoor experiences that defined her early twenties. Her stories become an entry point into an existence that lives and breathes close to the land and illustrate how participating fully in a habitat can change our understanding of what it means to be human, while also allowing for the necessity of living in a city. This book provides a narrative that doesn't feature a helpless woman finding herself in the outdoors through various mishaps and mistakes. Rather, it reflects how we all create our conception of self from what we inherit, and how women claiming their identity through the natural world can be a powerful force.

This manuscript tells the story of seven years as a whitewater raft guide on Brown’s Canyon in Colorado, one of the most rafted sections of river in the country. The title is a rafting term that means prepare for the worst. I’m interested in the rush of moving water, raptors overhead, the hardened rhythms of lava, navigating a raft by reading currents, care for each other.