Lucidity is a novella set in the near future of a man living in a city in the United States as a successful businessman. The novella criticizes the idea of consumerism through Aurora, a character who believes that a drug is being introduced into the water and food supply by the corporate-backed government. Characters find advertising to be almost irresistible, experience strange cravings for things like cheap beer, and are generally preoccupied with the latest products. James Simmons, the protagonist of the novella, finds himself in the lap of luxury. He has a job that pays well, a penthouse apartment, a fast car, and women. Even though he has the material riches that society tells him he needs to be happy, he knows that something is missing, something is wrong with the world in which he lives. For reasons unknown to him at the time, James is fired from his job and sets out on a journey to discover why. Over the course of his journey, he is finally able to begin piecing together the nature of deeper questions about himself that he never had a chance to answer.

Oftentimes, the children of immigrants find themselves straddling two worlds. As Americanized minorities, we navigate torn psychological landscapes in which uneasy dichotomies are formed: living up to our parents' expectations, or fulfilling our own; embracing tradition, or birthing a new culture; admiring the lives of our family, but wanting different for ourselves. These tough decisions are further compounded by identifiers such as age, race, and gender. My creative thesis, a collection of fiction and nonfiction, examines these issues through three central characters. In fiction, they are the Latina sisters Mel and Nena; in nonfiction, it is myself. Through these stories, these young women struggle to feel a sense of belonging where they are, be it at home, work, or school; among friends or on their own; in places they choose, or in places where they are put. Each of these characters is forced to consider whether they will ever find a place to call home. They wonder whether that is a place to be found at all.

The Other in mainstream U.S. society—in this case, the Latino Other—faces oppressive forces in the journey to find belonging. Latinos are marked by stereotypes, regardless of whether such stereotypes have a factual foundation. Latinas specifically are labeled as submissive servants, maids, or nannies. On the other end of the spectrum, Latinas are exotic and enticing sexual beings that must satisfy white men’s fetishes and lechery. Through this thesis, I will explore what Latina women face as an Other that is paradoxically both rejected and desired and evokes aversion as well as awe. In this creative thesis, in creative nonfiction, poetry, and oral history interviews with Latinas in my life, I will survey and expose stereotypes of Latinas, with the goal of uplifting the voices of such women of color and helping bridge the gap of understanding between the “average American” and their “Othered” Latino neighbors. If the non-Latino American public becomes educated on topics such as xenophobia and anti-Latino discrimination, they may do their part to create a community that is more inclusive and welcomes the ethnic diversity that has always been present in America.

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The present study explored the interaction of reconstructive and reproductive memory processes in children’s recall for stories. Specifically, kindergartners, second-graders, and fourth-graders were compared on accuracy measures of both recall structure and content as a function of the form of the presented story and the recall instructions provided. Forty-six kindergartners, 45 second-graders, and 48 fourth-graders listened to four two-episode stories. In two of the stories, the episodes were presented separately (standard story form); in the remaining two stories, propositions from the first and second episodes alternated (interleaved story form). Following a distractor task, children were asked to retell the story either, 1) exactly as they heard it, 2) making a “good” story out of it, or 3) without specific instructions. Multiple measures of structural and content recall accuracy were obtained. The general findings contradict those of Mandler and DeForest (1979) in suggesting that older children adopt a non-schematic (reproductive) recall strategy with regard to story structure. Further, the results for the content accuracy measures show that second- and fourth-graders remember fewer presented words verbatim and produce more theme-relevant elaborations, substitutions, and inferences than younger children. Clearly both story structure and content must be considered in evaluating developmental trends in reconstructive and reproductive recall. / M.S.

No artist can be set apart from the developments and problems of his day, and so it was that Hamlin Garland, literary spokesman for the Midwestern farmers of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, was inevitably bound to portray his region with all of its economic, social, and political complexities. His work was destined to be influenced by the echoes of the Civil War, the immigration of both Americans and foreigners to a fertile, grain-producing country, and by all the problems of adjustment that faced this agrarian society.