Parts of Women contains a scholarly preface that discusses the woman's body both in fiction and in the experience of being a woman writer. The preface is followed by five original short stories. "Parts of Women" is a three-part story composed of three first-person monologues. "Controlled Burn" involves a woman anthropologist who discovers asbestos in her office. "Tango Lessons" is about a middle-aged woman who's always in search of her true self. "Expatriates" concerns a man who enters the lives of his Hare Krishna neighbors, and "Rio" involves a word-struck man in his attempt to form a personal relationship.

This project consisted of a series of short stories which worked together creating a larger fictional piece in the form of a non-continuous narrative. This non-continuous narrative is in the tradition of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, and Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine. The stories in this type of fiction are connected by similar themes and settings, allowing the reader to participate directly in the creative process. The reader helps create the fiction by drawing his or her own conclusions about the characters and places from between the individual stories. By involving the reader more directly in the outcome, this type of narrative creates a more emotional response to the work. Each of the stories in this project were set in a town called Sand Beach, Michigan, and involved four generations of women in a single family. The major themes of the stories were mother/daughter relationships, healing, and redemption. Common images in the stories presented were, Lake Huron, the town of Sand Beach, and a rock in the local region bearing Native American petroglyphs Each of these images participated in the development of the common themes. / Department of English

An experimental novel, based on the critical theories of Jacques Lacan and Helena Cixous, which explores the exclusion of women from the cultural ideal, and their redefinition as cultural "others" in Western American Society. The novel incorporates three separate narratives: two first person narratives (Paula Tjunic and Kate Hargrove) and one third person narrative. The two first person narratives examine entire lifetimes. The third person narrative recounts one night in a bar. The first person narratives are written in opposing columns, and are designed in blocks and gaps so that each character can be heard separately, and the reader can interact with the text as a third cultural "other." A short examination of the theories of cultural "other" in relation to women in the American West, is included in the preface of the novel. / Master of Arts

by Lo Man-wa. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1994. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 87-102). / Chapter Chapter One --- Female Initiation in Comparative Perspectives --- p.1 / Chapter Chapter Two --- Rebellion Against Conventional Womanhood: Katherine Anne Porter and Virginia Woolf --- p.11 / Chapter Chapter Three --- Womanhood Redefined: Shen Congwen and Ding Ling --- p.34 / Chapter Chapter Four --- Contemporary Chinese Feminist Writers --- p.66 / Chapter Chapter Five --- Chinese Female Subjectivity Reconsidered --- p.77 / Notes --- p.84 / Works Cited --- p.87

Ernest Hemingway wrote to F. Scott Fitzgerald that “The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life — and one is as good as the other” (305). With that, I created a collection of short stories that analyzes my generation of women’s struggles. Framing the thesis are two stories involving three women, Lindsey, Jenny, and Sarah, “The Generation of Discontent” and “Revisions,” with the characters attempting to sort through love, success, and happiness in society. The piece “The Bachelor” has Amanda torn between her currently successful life and the glamour and sometimes infamy of being on ABC’s reality show The Bachelor. In “Eggs Kennedy Style,” the fine line between delusion and dreams becomes defined in both Nan and Kelley of being one of America’s royal Kennedy family. “Cops and Robbers” shows the inner turmoil of women who do not aspire to be mothers and feel guilty for their aspirations as well asthe resulting resentment when they have to give up their dreams. The ideas of taking your loved one for granted and life goals become the driving aspect of “Flat Tire” where story picks up in the middle of major fight between Nicole and Tommy stemming from him dropping the garter the night before at their friend’s wedding. “Almond Blossoms” between a flashback to Amsterdam with Sam’s Dutch fling Andric and present time suburban Ohio with her finance Kevin showing the conflict of being single compared to being settled. As Fitzgerald said, “An author ought to write for his generation” (ix) and I wrote based on my personal experiences as well as my friends’ tales and tribulations that tell of our generation’s struggle. Giving a voice to the high hopes and resulting discontent I feel is important which models the Modern writers like Fitzgerald’s Gatsby’s green lighted hope for Daisy. I hope to revive a bit of that Modern era in my time though our green light just might be the glow of The Bachelor from the television.

by Lau Kam Fung. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1994. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 106-114). / Chapter Chapter One --- The Self in Comparative Perspectives --- p.1 / Chapter Chapter Two --- Emergence of the New Chinese Self and Ideological Changes in Modern China --- p.18 / Chapter Chapter Three --- "Body, Self and Subjectivity in ffang Anyi's Love in a Small Town" --- p.44 / Chapter Chapter Four --- Re-assertion of Self and the New Woman in Zhang Jie's The Ark --- p.60 / Chapter Chapter Five --- "The Loss of Self in Zhang Xinxin's ""On the Same Horizon""" --- p.78 / Chapter Chapter Six --- Constructions of the Female Self in Contemporary Chinese Fiction --- p.93 / Notes --- p.102 / Works Cited --- p.106

Willa Cather (1873-1947) is nowadays regarded as one of the most important U.S. writers, and the volume of critical works, articles and dissertations devoted to her as a person and an artist is immense. One of the problematic relationship has always been, as can be seen from a number of critical essays and books, between Cather and U.S. feminists. The feminists would have liked to include Cather, as an feminist writer, into their group of the first-rate, woman-authored "female canon", however, such intent brought about an important question. Is it possible to regard Willa Cather as a feminist, considering her attacks on other women-writers, and her negative attitude towards the organized women's rights movement? This work's objective is to explore the background of Cather and organized women's rights movement's bizarre relationship, and answer the question above. To find out if Cather's work with its strong heroines empowered or weakened women in general, her novels and stories, rather then facts and assumption about her personal life, are used. The relevant parts of the plots from Cather's fiction are put into the historical perspective of the contemporary U.S. laws, showing that although Cather created exceptional woman characters, she let them deal with the same conditions and problems other...

MAAS / M. E. R. Mathivha Centre for Languages, Arts and Culture