Thesis -- Departmental honors in English. / Short stories and an essay: The notion of home : an exploration of domestic setting in contemporary fiction. Bibliography: ℓ. 176-177.

Thesis (doctoral) - Technische Universität, Darmstadt, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references, glossary and index.

Blackland Prairie contains a scholarly preface, “Cross Timbers,” that discusses the emerging role of place as a narrative agent in contemporary fiction. The preface is followed by six original short stories. “Parts” depicts the growth of a boy's power over his family. “A Movie House to Make Us All Rich” involves the sacrifice of familial values by the son of Italian immigrants in the early 20th century. “The Place on Chenango Street” is about a man who views his world in monetary terms. “The Nine Ideas For A Happier Whole” explores the self-help industry and personal guru age. “All The Stupid Things I Said” is about a long-separated couple meeting for very different reasons. “Flooded Timber” concerns a couple who discover hidden reasons for their relationship's longevity.

Photocopy of typescript. / Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

This collection of essays includes a preference that investigates the role and importance of setting and character in a nonfiction narrative. The preface assesses the writings of four great authors, examining how each author use setting and characterization to further the purpose of their story. This collection focuses on four different issues that the author has wrestled with for two decades. While “Desperado” is an investigation into the problems within her own family, “Being Black Me” highlights the authors struggle against the racial inequality her hometown. “Voices In The Dark”, the author analyze how the abuse she suffered as a child has influenced her life and contributed to a drinking problem that is explored in a later essay “Alors On Danse”.

This dissertation explores how the descriptive backgrounds of the Victorian novel helped to shape the emerging concept of environment in the nineteenth century. Thomas Carlyle introduced “environment” into English in 1827, spurring writers, scientists, and social thinkers to forge a diverse conceptual lexicon for describing the relationship between organisms and their material surroundings. Comte developed the idea of a singular organic “medium” that supports and nourishes all living beings, while Darwin imagined the plural “conditions of existence” as a chaotic field of competitive struggle. Whereas Zola’s “milieu” exerted destructive pressure on the individual, Spencer claimed that “environment” was in fact constitutive of life itself. This project argues that novelists turned to vivid description as a means of materializing these competing environmental discourses, and exploring their social and affective implications. From the noxious fogs of Bleak House, to Mary Mitford’s concern for the sufferings of uprooted vegetables, novelists gave detailed attention to the exchanges between individual bodies and the physical world. Each of my four chapters examines how a Victorian writer used a distinct type of description to explore an environmental concept: Mitford’s botanical detail and natural theology’s idea of correspondence between body and world; Eliot’s weather and Comte’s organic medium; Hardy’s architecture and Spencer’s theory of environment; and Stevenson’s islands and the discourse of circumstance. Whereas recent critical re-evaluations of description often prize its detachability from narrative, this dissertation thus argues that description was central to the Victorian novel’s ability to represent interactions between individuals and their surroundings. Through close analysis of the descriptive surrounds of nineteenth-century realist fiction (weather, atmosphere, landscape, architecture), this project shows how the novel’s described backgrounds shape and participate in plot in surprising ways, functioning not merely as static pictorial backgrounds to narrative, but rather as dynamic participants in it. The Victorian novel, this dissertation ultimately shows, places interactions between characters and their environments at the center, rather than the periphery, of its drama.

This essay examines the interstices between geography and history in English Canadian poetry by analyzing the production of space through poetic imagery. It introduces two terms, "garrison temporality" and "geologic temporality," to demonstrate how poets created divisions in the Canadian landscape temporally, demarcating these divisions according to their understanding of the perceived spaces' historicity. In early Canadian poetry, poets tended to distinguish colonized spaces from uncolonized spaces by designating them as either historical or ahistorical. This was achieved, more specifically, by appropriating civil, or garrison, spaces into a narrative of English expansion which traced its historical lineage back to European antiquity. The space outside the garrison's perimeter was deemed to exist out of time, providing yet another justification for further colonization. Later generations of Canadian poets contested the ahistorical designations created by this narrative, as well as the division they draw between urban and non-urban spaces, by appealing to geologic time. Geologic temporality functions not so much as a viable explanatory model for the narration of history as it does a poetic device for contesting the centrality of Europe and of urban centers in assessing contemporary Canada's place in time. This essay traces the shift in attitudes towards time and space from Charles G.D. Roberts' "Tantramar Revisited" (1886) to Dale Zieroth's "Baptism" (1981).

This study traces spatial and temporal disturbances in the modem short story structure. Edgar Allan Poe's "indefinitiveness" and Kenneth Burke's "actualization" serve as historical foundations for this investigation, which leads to contemporary frameworks proposed by such theorists as Gerard Genette, Umberto Eco, Wolfgang Iser, Paul Ricoeur, Peter Brooks, James Phelan, and Susan Sniader Lanser. In particular, I explore how effect operates as a predominant concern of short fiction. Short fiction is a rhetorical interaction encumbered by spatial and temporal constraints, and its narrative teleology is necessarily disrupted by rhetorical techniques. Narrative's boundaries are purposefully violated, its tempo twisted and contorted, exposing a purposeful tension in the rhetorical engagement of author, text and reader. Instabilities crafted within the text disrupt time-space expectations of readers.Importantly, effect is perceived as a rhetorical device within short fiction, and so in this study the text serves as a site of transference privileging equally writer and reader. Conditions of possibility and understanding are invested in the text by the author through techniques of spatial disruption and temporal discontinuity, and then reinvested in the reader by the narrative through the text's generation of uncertainty. Short fiction serves as an invitation by the author for the reader to construct explanations; devices work to disrupt the time-space constraints of the genre, establishing as they do a narrative contract between author and reader that is resolved in and from the text.Burke considers this to be shaping prose fiction to the author's purposes, an act which "involves desires and their appeasements" - and one which purposefully aims for a particular effect. But what are the limits of purposefulness in short fiction? I examine both textual effect and reader affect, relying particularly on Iser and Eco, and turn to Brooks in conclusion to summarize the role of desire in and from the text, and to Phelan to critique the place of rhetoric in establishing and maintaining that desire. My analysis discloses that time-space disruption, employed as a rhetorical strategy by short story writers, serves to heighten rather than threaten the mediated engagement of writer/text/reader in short fiction, producing a measured effect. / Department of English

Zugl.: Hannover, Univ., Diss., 2005

Thesis (Ph. D.)--York University, 2003. Graduate Programme in English. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 326-348). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/yorku/fullcit?pNQ82819.