Thesis (Ph. D.)--Indiana University of Pennsylvania. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.F.A.)--University of North Carolina at Wilmington, 2007.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 400-423). Also available on microfiche.

<p> <b>This thesis</b> explores &ldquo;the sixth extinction,&rdquo; as a contemporary poetic of loss. Animals and their voices are interpreted as &ldquo;a language of loss.&rdquo; It portrays decrease in biodiversity, contemporary environmental circumstances, and the mass dying out of species as the elegies of our time. It draws on ecological science as well as literary and contemporary art references. </p><p> Death is a taboo in Western societies even though loss and pain are a part of existing and are linked to beauty and happiness. This thesis is about the quality of mourning that enables us to bear witness beyond our own baselines. Homer may be distant, but the vitality of narrating mourning, positioning of human among nonhuman, seems a suitable literary reference to make a leap into our bleak future, while searching for and insisting on beauty. </p><p> We lack a language that pronounces the contemporary environmental depth and fault lines: disunity. Consequences of environmental fragmentation inflict unprecedented cultural fragmentation, and are perceived as irreconcilable. In addressing macro ecology, I pay homage to other ways of speaking; setting out to test H&eacute;l&egrave;ne Cixous&rsquo; motion for &ldquo;a language that heals more than it separates.&rdquo; </p><p> <b>The chapters</b> are comprised of bilingual prose poetry, echoing an interbreeding of language, exploring possibilities in our human behavior for practicing a radical being. They address chronological references we rely on to create or &ldquo;describe&rdquo; a sense of meaning to our doings, in a broader sense working with the issues of the Cartesian split, voices to which we ascribe many of our environmental faults and failures. </p><p> American indigenous storytelling is used as inspiration for nonlinear narratives. Walter Benjamin&rsquo;s &ldquo;mystic of language&rdquo; also inspired this work. Parts of Benjamin&rsquo;s writing on mimetic behavior are applied to various time-issues within the environmental crisis, embodying a perception of what mass extinction will entail, through representative animal figures, able to shape-shift and embody mourning. </p><p> <b>The handbook</b> mimics the concept of a special language of obituaries, aiming to pay homage to the thinking of Martin Heidegger&rsquo;s &ldquo;thingness&rdquo; as well as Ludwig Wittgenstein and Walter Benjamin&rsquo;s discussions of the naming of things: the innate power of the relation between objects and their given names.</p>

This thesis is a collection of six short stories and a novella. These works follow sons, fathers, loners, and families as they must confront what haunts them. In "Brainbarn," a boy whose parents left him at a young age tries to rid himself of the memory of killing a horse by forcing himself on his cousin. In "Scavengers," a father guides his family of disparate parts on a hike in attempt to bring them together, but he instead comes face to face with what he actually wants his family to be like. In "Haruspices," shepherds disrupt an ancient burial practice with dire consequences. "Cenotaph" is about a son who, after his father dies, learns how to properly bury his father, and the memory of his father, through beekeeping. "Wands" is about two cousins who struggle over a lost fiddle. And "Dispatches from a Future Norwegian Futurist" follows a single survivor of a future plague whose job is to dispose of the bodies until he learns he is soon to be replaced in this position by a thing called Prometheus. The novella, entitled The Re-Enactors, follows a father and son--Brinkley and Drift--who, six months after the mother's sudden death from an antique Civil War weapon accident, find themselves riding on top of a train through South Carolina. Through the course of leaping off the train, hiking through a swamp, and confronting a violent mob in the countryside, Brinkley and Drift also confront each other concerning the mother's mysterious death and how they themselves must keep their family together.

In 1985, 66 school districts filed a suit against the Kentucky Department of Education accusing the system of inequitable spending practices. In 1990, the Supreme Court declared the entire educational program unconstitutional, resulting in the Kentucky Education Reform Act or KERA. This new reform movement brought a plethora of changes to school districts across the state including its mode of assessment. KERA introduced new avenues of measuring student progress using writing as the main vehicle to assess content and communication skills. Unfortunately, the majority of Kentucky's high schools showed little improvement in this tested area with only 34% of high schools reaching proficiency in the past twenty years of KERA's existence. In 2009, Kentucky passed into law Senate Bill 1, voiding the previous assessment but increasing the focus on on-demand writing for five grades rather than the three required by KERA. Preempting this new reform was the adoption of the Common Core Standards, which also includes a focus on writing. This consistent attention to writing assessment, and data identifying writing as a major weakness across the Commonwealth, prompted the impetus to examine four schools that achieve high scores in on-demand writing assessment. This qualitative investigation employed a case study design to research these four sites, which represented four different geographic locations in the state. Data sources included observations, interviews, document analysis, and fieldnotes to explore these schools through an interpretivist lens. The collected data were entered into qualitative research software to enable collective coding resulting in distinct categories and resulting themes. Three themes evolved in this cross-case analysis: curriculum, learning culture, and motivation. Teachers from these schools use similar classroom strategies and the learning environments reflect corresponding characteristics. Each school addressed student motivation differently, but the analogous perception of inducing intrinsic and extrinsic student engagement in writing occurred in all four schools. The implications of these results could be overwhelmingly positive as schools seek suggestions to improve writing scores. The findings from this investigation are relevant to the time and may serve as an impetus to improve writing instruction.

"Carried by Stones" is a collection of prose written during the 2014-2015 school year. It includes the short stories "Alebrije" and "The Tapes" as well as the novel excerpt "Near Winter." / 2031-01-01T00:00:00Z

This thesis is comprised of three short stories and a novel excerpt. “Olympio and Yan” tells the story of a love-struck construction worker; “The Money in the Pantry” depicts a widow who wants her sons to make peace; “The Roaches in Singapore” portrays two schoolchildren who catch cockroaches for money. Finally, "Ernai" is part of a novel about a mistress from China who runs into trouble and is forced to make a new life for herself. / 2031-01-01T00:00:00Z

Look-See: poems / 2031-01-01T00:00:00Z

This thesis includes one story and chapters from a novel-in-progress / 2031-01-01T00:00:00Z