My theis is a collection of five stories, centered around the eponymous "What Is Visible," which title speaks for all of the work. Three are modern, hyperurban tales; one is set in 1850, and another is a road story. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. / Degree Awarded: Summer Semester, 2003. / Date of Defense: July 2, 2003. / Short Stories / Includes bibliographical references. / Robert Olen Butler, Professor Directing Thesis; Mark Winegardner, Committee Member; Janet Burroway, Committee Member.

Biblical literalism can be dangerous, especially when scriptural exegeses shape standards for social norms. According to the 2nd version of the biblical creation story of Adam and Eve for example, all of mankind must suffer for Genesis’s account of the choice of one woman. As many peoples have historically viewed this ancient story as fact, despite various changes, the ambiguous and often contradictory language of the text, and preconceptions stemming from philosophical interpretations, women have been regarded as inferior to man largely in part to Eve’s role in the story, or more specifically, man’s rationale of her role in the story. Similar to the role the Eve’s treatment plays in the description, man’s gift of “dominion” over nature has historically allowed for more destruction than stewardship. It is difficult to imagine, given the central role that trees play in not only the biblical creation, and The Fall, but also the redemption of mankind on the cross, that man’s subsequent and continual choice to dominate nature can have such little effect in comparison to the original sin. Using the events of the biblical Eden as a backstory for the plot of my 90,000 word novel, Fearest Enden, pivotal elements of the Edenic story were changed to paint Eve as hero rather than scapegoat. The novel follows Elias Hughes, a descendant of Eve who must rely on ancestrally endowed talents to stop the first earthly evil, Cain. Eve’s choice(s) are recognized as the main motif of Fearest Enden: sacrifice in the name of love and fear. As a secondary theme, as in Eden, the treatment of nature, and trees specifically has a direct impact on the spiritual and physical survival of the novel’s characters and their world. Part two of the thesis: Saviors, Scapegoats & Sacred Trees: A Critical Understanding & Reflection, examines more closely the underlying themes of the novel. Preceded by acknowledgements, an introduction to the title of Fearest Enden will analyze the central themes and clarify the novel’s title, meaning and history. The first critical argument focuses on Eve as savior and scapegoat. Examining both the ambiguity and literalism of early chapters in Genesis, I will argue that Eve was set up to fail because she was entered into a pact without her signature; that Adam was present when Eve spoke to the devil and that they partook of the fruit together; and that the only deceiving serpent(s) in this history, walked upright, contriving stories to defame Eve and women. I will argue that the choice, her choice, should have been defined a heroic sacrifice, making her the first and perhaps greatest human hero of all time and thus reversing, in a sense, the purported origins of original sin. The second argument is that fundamentalism and biblical literalism has led not only to man’s unjust ruling over women, but also over nature. The consequences of the latter must be both terrestrial and spiritual. Terrestrial, because the first and continued choice to take improper dominion over nature, like the original sin, is irreversible; spiritual, because trees play a central role in both the fall and redemption of the souls of mankind. Examining the sacredness as well as life-saving and life-ending properties of the trees in Eden and Golgotha, but also in a number of myths and stories from various cultures around the world, I will postulate the need to redefine “dominion” for the purpose of saving what earth man has left to steward. The final sections of the discussion will include influences, a conclusion, and bibliography.

Please note: creative writing theses are permanently embargoed in OpenBU. No public access is forecasted for these. To request private access, please click on the lock icon and filled out the appropriate web form. / A collection of poems / 2031-01-01T00:00:00Z

No description available.

Please note: creative writing theses are permanently embargoed in OpenBU. No public access is forecasted for these. To request private access, please click on the lock icon and filled out the appropriate web form. / Collection of short stories / 2031-01-01T00:00:00Z

Magister Artium - MA (English) / For a woman of her age, thirty-seven, freshly divorced, she has, to her mind, not solved the problem of her sex very well. So now her work in the escort business all those years ago will be used against her. This warning is in a note from her lawyers. She is sitting cross-legged, trying to warm up, in a book-sized patch of morning sunlight on her bunk, in a fetid cell meant for five but with thirty crammed in. She has earphones in, with twelve bass-heavy tunes on a continuous loop. It is hard for her sometimes to drum out the hum of the lovemaking, man-hating, babyyearning and fatal stabbings of the women around her - all day long. It is just like being free in the real world outside. The letter is typewritten, but has a handwritten salutation, "Dear Soraya," as if to convince her of its authenticity; and her existence.

Magister Artium - MA / This is a novella about homelessness, and the forms of exile, loss and displacement that it creates. Based in South Africa and Palestine/Israel, it is a story about four men who all find themselves alienated and marginalised and who, in their different ways, find themselves lost in their search for a place to belong. Reuben is the primary character. Estranged from the Jewish community into which he is born, he turns his back on apartheid South Africa, expecting to find an alternative home in Israel. But when he arrives there he encounters once again the same dark side of humankind that he thought he had left behind. He is not the first of his family to be driven from a place he calls home. His grandfather, Sam, who has already passed away by the time this story takes place, experienced homelessness after Nazism forced him to flee. The novella opens at the moment when Reuben takes his son Dov to Israel as a young child. But a growing estrangement between father and son emerges over time, as Dov is fiercely loyal to Israel while Reuben becomes bitterly disillusioned. They find themselves pitted against each other politically, until the pathology of Israeli militarism drives Dov to a breakdown. Following Dov's own eventual personal escape into exile, when he decides he must dissociate himself from the Israeli Defence Force, he calls out to his father to rescue him and take him home. Finally there is Haroom, a young Israeli Palestinian whom Reuben befriends, who has his own story of rootlessness and the absence of belonging. In Lost on the Way Home, the politics of oppression, discrimination, dispossession, and violent victimisation underpins each of the four men's individual stories. And despite their differences, all share the experience of being driven from their "homes", or the communities or places from which they originated. It is through their individual relationships that they reach out to each other to find a place to share and establish an alternative to the homes they have lost. In the end it is left to Reuben and Dov to struggle to find a way of finding each other when they set off together on a desert hike with no destination and only the goal of escaping their pasts.

Magister Artium - MA / Nobathembu lifts her hand and waves at her neighbour. She is watering spinach in her garden with a jug from a bucket. At age sixty-nine, her beauty shines. The sun is high on the echoes of Nyanga village – echoes of barking, the neighing of nearby donkeys, a truck against a slope. Two butterflies mate in her thorn tree. In their hearts the story begins. Their wings brighten and in their own time they disappear, following their peculiar rhythms.

<p> <i>Moving Pictures</i> is a body of poems accessing a place-based aesthetic through an ecstatic tone. A concrete image offers a resonant field of memory and imagined properties (as in Rilke&rsquo;s &ldquo;The Panther&rdquo; and Proust&rsquo;s &ldquo;magic lantern&rdquo; in <i>Swann&rsquo;s Way </i>), the tangible qualities of a house are given associative values, contingent qualities. This &ldquo;presence of place&rdquo; composes a place&rsquo;s physical properties and the impressions derived from the surrounding history, culture and mythos accrued. A &ldquo;tapestry&rdquo; that a speaker in narrative lyric performs in a poem seeks to realize as purposeful, felt design, positive or negative providence, a desire to locate the comfort in the predictable, assurance that there is a controlling will and determining voice in living physical experiences. That tapestry and the absence of it either is protective or revealing as a person might see an arrangement of planets at birth as a prophetic determinant of identity and causality, a method to determine identity and consolidate experience. A bright tension is often felt traveling to a distant country or returning home after a long time away. Thus, many of these poems deal with distance and light as allegory, the harshness of exposure, the hope for concealment. Darkness and absence suggest longing for concealment but also a capacity to accentuate light and presence. There is ultimately, the incommensurability between art and thought and act. Like trying to translate the Greek word logos as word. In poetry, the performance is persona, a character applying language as an imperfect lathe to shape knowledge and understanding. That knowledge is limited and poetry is a type of investigative tool. In this way, attention to syntax, lineation, and spatial construction are the needle and thread to stitch the narrative &ldquo;I&rdquo;.</p><p>

Please note: creative writing theses are permanently embargoed in OpenBU. No public access is forecasted for these. To request private access, please click on the lock icon and filled out the appropriate web form. / A collection of 35 original poems written by Kathleen Radigan during the school-year of September 2017-May 2018. / 2031-01-01T00:00:00Z