This thesis is a work of literary journalism that explores the distinct boundaries in style that partition how a writer reports objective facts and reveals subjective experience. In brief, it is a genre-breaking prose composition that weds objective and subjective narratives in an organic, but necessary harmony. As a subject, it explores the author?s experiences at two National Boy Scout Jamborees, held in the summers of 1997 and 2010.
The thesis fuses two unique narrative modes into a hybrid form that exhibits entirely new qualities and values. It alternates between first-person and third-person points of view to create an uncomfortable, yet necessary tension, suggesting that the story?s accuracy is dependent upon two different perspectives. The thesis relies upon an unreliable narrator, whose story is reappraised by a credible third-person narrator.
This thesis should be read as an agonizing reappraisal that examines American society at the turn of the millennia and during the first decade of the twenty-first century. Several American authors, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Lowell, and Norman Mailer, have periodically explored this retrospective mode. While it is not a canonical genre, the agonizing reappraisal allows the author to comment on the past and present simultaneously. In this thesis, the effect is achieved by pairing two unique narratives that are separated by more than a decade in time.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:tamu.edu/oai:repository.tamu.edu:1969.1/ETD-TAMU-2012-08-11407 |
| Date | 2012 August 1900 |
| Creators | Loesser, Ernest |
| Contributors | Christensen, Paul |
| Source Sets | Texas A and M University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | thesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
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