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acase@tulane.edu / 1 / Bradley J. Mollmann

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Modern Languages and Linguistics, i.e. Dept. of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics. Thesis. 1969. Ph.D. / Vita. / Bibliography: leaves 290-294. / Ph.D.

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 33-06, Section: A, page: 2956. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1971.

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 35-02, Section: A, page: 1006. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1970.

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 26-10, page: 6054. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1965.

Set in New York City in the 1950's, Valentino's Hair is a short novel about a Puerto Rican barber, Facundo Nieves, and his lame young son Lupe. The focus of the novel is a series of confessional chapters in which the barber tells about a day in 1926 when he cut Rudolph Valentino's hair in an exclusive Manhattan hotel. In Rudolph Valentino, Facundo identifies a persona he envies, "a man who had probably made love to every woman he touched." However, the Valentino who Facundo Nieves meets is a disturbed, emotionally haggard, and philosophical man who carefully watches Facundo's fine hands work and comments that the barber is cutting away at the actor's life too, "time leaving me like moments falling to the floor." / When the screen idol dies a month later in a New York hospital, the barber at first feels guilty, sure that he has contributed in some way to Valentino's premature death. But after visiting a bruja, a neighborhood witch, the barber discovers something even more frightening: the hair is a powerful aphrodisiac. And so, Facundo embarks upon the ignoble cause of using the hair to seduce a young American woman whom he has lusted after, a woman who does not love him but who is helplessly drawn to Facundo through his use of the magical hair. The outcome of this relationship borders on horror. / The novel explores Lupe's relationship with his now aged father and his discovery of his father's secret practice of sympathetic magic, the environment of the barber's unique world, the various mythologies associated with hair, and Puerto Rican family and culture. But the barber's voice serves as the anchor, revealing psychological turmoil and inevitably leading to the conclusions that innocence can be lost in both the real and mystical world and that we are all morally corruptible and subject to temptation. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 51-12, Section: A, page: 4125. / Major Professor: Jerome H. Stern. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1990. / Set in New York City in the 1950's, Valentino's Hair is a short novel about a Puerto Rican barber, Facundo Nieves, and his lame young son Lupe. The focus of the novel is a series of confessional chapters in which the barber tells about a day in 1926 when he cut Rudolph Valentino's hair in an exclusive Manhattan hotel. In Rudolph Valentino, Facundo identifies a persona he envies, "a man who had probably made love to every woman he touched." However, the Valentino who Facundo Nieves meets is a disturbed, emotionally haggard, and philosophical man who carefully watches Facundo's fine hands work and comments that the barber is cutting away at the actor's life too, "time leaving me like moments falling to the floor." / When the screen idol dies a month later in a New York hospital, the barber at first feels guilty, sure that he has contributed in some way to Valentino's premature death. But after visiting a bruja, a neighborhood witch, the barber discovers something even more frightening: the hair is a powerful aphrodisiac. And so, Facundo embarks upon the ignoble cause of using the hair to seduce a young American woman whom he has lusted after, a woman who does not love him but who is helplessly drawn to Facundo through his use of the magical hair. The outcome of this relationship borders on horror. / The novel explores Lupe's relationship with his now aged father and his discovery of his father's secret practice of sympathetic magic, the environment of the barber's unique world, the various mythologies associated with hair, and Puerto Rican family and culture. But the barber's voice serves as the anchor, revealing psychological turmoil and inevitably leading to the conclusions that innocence can be lost in both the real and mystical world and that we are all morally corruptible and subject to temptation.

The primary focus of this collection of poems is on the natural world, and especially on its inherent processes of creative transformation. These transformations are seen as essential to the creation of the physical world, and are also metaphorically connected to the process of artistic creation. / The collection is divided into three sections. In each section, poems are linked through repeated images to a particular phase of progress toward higher and more subtle order. The first section, headed by the poem "Stones," centers on images of the world as unformed or inanimate, while suggesting forces at work that may lead to greater coherence. The second section, keynoted by the poem "Roots," concentrates on the complex interactions of life, growth, and mortality. The third section, beginning with the poem "Wings," introduces images that suggest the possibilities and difficulties of an order or consciousness capable of transcending the physical world. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 53-03, Section: A, page: 0798. / Major Professor: Van K. Brock. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1992. / The primary focus of this collection of poems is on the natural world, and especially on its inherent processes of creative transformation. These transformations are seen as essential to the creation of the physical world, and are also metaphorically connected to the process of artistic creation. / The collection is divided into three sections. In each section, poems are linked through repeated images to a particular phase of progress toward higher and more subtle order. The first section, headed by the poem "Stones," centers on images of the world as unformed or inanimate, while suggesting forces at work that may lead to greater coherence. The second section, keynoted by the poem "Roots," concentrates on the complex interactions of life, growth, and mortality. The third section, beginning with the poem "Wings," introduces images that suggest the possibilities and difficulties of an order or consciousness capable of transcending the physical world.

Princess of Oranges is a collection of ten stories set in 1970s Orlando, Florida. The stories render a world where adult dysfunction forces children to choose from a menu of the perilous and the precarious. The juvenilizing adults seem able only to live love as illness, triumph as a lie, self-awareness as self-destruction. The stories are about how the ill-equipped take on dilemmas of care and love. / The collection is thematically centered around the consciousness of Fay Kinney. At her youngest, Fay is nine, at her oldest, sixteen. Four stories trace her sexual and emotional initiations into the adult world via adolescent female modes of reconciling identity. Two stories show Fay simultaneously saving and destroying her brother as he assembles his escapes. / Four stories examine how women's relationships come of age as mothers and daughters and friends revise the ways see themselves and the way they tell their stories. In conflict with their husbands, friends, and each other, the girlfriends in "Winter Heat," the stepmother in "Lost Lake," the grandmother in "Greenie," and the mother and daughter in the title story struggle towards new, transcendent senses of self and place. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 53-03, Section: A, page: 0798. / Major Professor: Jerome Stern. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1992. / Princess of Oranges is a collection of ten stories set in 1970s Orlando, Florida. The stories render a world where adult dysfunction forces children to choose from a menu of the perilous and the precarious. The juvenilizing adults seem able only to live love as illness, triumph as a lie, self-awareness as self-destruction. The stories are about how the ill-equipped take on dilemmas of care and love. / The collection is thematically centered around the consciousness of Fay Kinney. At her youngest, Fay is nine, at her oldest, sixteen. Four stories trace her sexual and emotional initiations into the adult world via adolescent female modes of reconciling identity. Two stories show Fay simultaneously saving and destroying her brother as he assembles his escapes. / Four stories examine how women's relationships come of age as mothers and daughters and friends revise the ways see themselves and the way they tell their stories. In conflict with their husbands, friends, and each other, the girlfriends in "Winter Heat," the stepmother in "Lost Lake," the grandmother in "Greenie," and the mother and daughter in the title story struggle towards new, transcendent senses of self and place.

This collection includes poems which are often about how people perceive the world around them. Subject matter of the fifty poems varies from the natural world of whales, geese, and turtles to the relationships that exist between the growing up and the growing older, the living and the dead. Music is an important linking theme throughout these poems, and the language of music is employed to suggest further ranges of meaning. Poems look at present and past, the real and the more or less real, and the boundaries that exist and may be crossed in many of these cases. / Walking On the Belly of My Shadow is written in free verse, is primarily lyric in style, but contains a narrative voice which is often telling a specific story or bit of history. In some cases forms are employed in a variant mode, such as the near-sonnet, or in stanzas of tercets, quatrains, or cinquains. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 52-11, Section: A, page: 3924. / Major Professor: David Kirby. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1991.