Theses and Dissertations

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https://hdl.handle.net/10217/100417

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A small tally of future regrets
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2018) Pipe, Meghan, author; Levy, EJ, advisor; Doenges, Judy, committee member; Alexander, Ruth, committee member
These eight short stories, told mainly but not exclusively from the perspectives of young women, portray work and relationships at a moment of cultural shift, at the start of the twenty-first century in America, when women are increasingly enfranchised, educated, and no longer defined by or economically dependent on relationships with men. In these stories, relationships among women—mothers and daughters, sisters, friends—take center stage as economies and gender norms change, while men are often relegated to a supporting role. As traditional scripts fail in this uncertain, often perilous world, these characters must look for new ones, even as they recognize the comforts of history and of structures that endure, from Granada's Alhambra to a still-working Long Island grist mill. Troubling the boundary between autobiography and fiction, these stories are told in a confessional, intimate voice in the tradition of Amy Hempel and Lorrie Moore, delighting in the tension between fact and fiction in a moment of transformation.
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Choose your own Nick: a collection of stories
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2018) Seyedbagheri, Mir-Yashar, author; Doenges, Judy, advisor; Levy, EJ, committee member; Alexander, Ruth, committee member
The six stories in Mir-Yashar Seyedbagheri's thesis, "Choose Your Own Nick" explore character development through the prism of one character in a plethora of what if scenarios. The stories seek to develop an understanding of how particular environments impact character's decisions. In six different stories, the same character reacts differently, with a myriad of consequences. In "Secret Love" a young man grapples with the ramifications of his sister's death. In "Operation Hero Nick," a character fakes his own death to get money for his struggling sister. And in the title story, "Choose Your Own Nick," an MFA fiction student tries to examine his life through incarnations of himself. These stories ultimately illustrate that circumstances can have a detrimental impact with significant emotional impact on those who are successful and those who are struggling in life.
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Dive
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2019) Shively, Christa, author; Cooperman, Matthew, advisor; Dungy, Camille, committee member; Alexander, Ruth, committee member
This manuscript investigates the ways in which themes such as motherhood, family history, American history, illness, addiction, ecology, war and manual labor might all be threaded together. The desire was to incorporate all of these areas of research and interest into a project that explores how these things are intertwined and part of the same body. The connections we have to others in life, as well as the connection we have with our own identity always intersects at the body. Dive a compilation of documents (found, inherited and created), poems inspired by World War II, and recorded interviews with family. There are also the oral stories, which are another kind of inheritance passed down through generations. These poems retell the stories, but also recognize the other kinds of family histories that get passed from one generation to the next, such as hereditary illnesses, addiction and national traumas (i.e. Columbine and 9/11.) The body is ultimately the place where private and public grief intersects.
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Escape in the clouds: and other stories
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2010) Schnee, Jeremy, author; Becker, Leslee, advisor; Doenges, Judy, committee member; Alexander, Ruth, committee member
This stories collected in this thesis explore the bounds of the imagination, the limits and depths of emotion, the barriers of thought, the shapes of character, and attempt to capture human experience in realistic and magical forms, as well as blending the real, surreal, and everything in between.
Open Access
Fairy tale motifs in Mary E. Wilkins Freeman's Pembroke
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2014) McMahon-Antic, Seane, author; Ronda, Bruce, advisor; Gollapudi, Aparna, committee member; Alexander, Ruth, committee member
This thesis examines Mary E. Wilkins Freeman's second novel PEMBROKE (1894) and argues that the novel is rife with archetypal fairy tale features. An American writer whose career spanned the second half of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth century, Mary Wilkins Freeman is commonly identified by literary scholars as a local color realist and proto-feminist writer. However, as this thesis will demonstrate, PEMBROKE is more accurately understood as an amalgamation of literary traditions. One important and until now unexplored aspect of the novel is its correspondence to fairy tale male and female characterization, plot movement, two-dimensionality, and marriage-resolution.
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Idle time
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2012) Cain, Thomas, author; Doenges, Judy, advisor; Schwartz, Steven, committee member; Alexander, Ruth, committee member
These stories are a collection of interpretations of the neurotic individual's ability to function within an increasingly structured and permanent society. No longer facing life and death struggles for survival, man's question of self identity has been increasingly reliant upon outside influences to determine who he is and what he will stand for when confronted by an unanswerable conflict. For the person coping with a neurosis, this experience is compounded not on a grandiose scale of major events in life such as graduations, weddings, births, affairs and funerals, but events composed of daily activities which most members of our society can easily find solutions to without due regard. However, for the neurotic to match daily difficulties with their particular neurosis adds a level of complexity to the daily grind of living. These stories attempt to show these added difficulties.
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In the eternal shade
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2015) Johnson, Bryan C., author; Becker, Leslee, advisor; Levy, E. J., committee member; Alexander, Ruth, committee member
This is a novella concerning modern disillusionment, gender roles, and interpersonal relationships. Leon, Cheryl, and Alex are a family that lives outside of a small Indiana town, near a small stand of trees. Leon is working on a graphic novel based on the journal of great-great-great-grandfather, Cheryl is a trained veterinarian who is working at a job below her qualifications, and Alex is an eight-year-old girl with an imagination that is just starting to butt up against the real world.
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Naming myself
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2017) Stoneburner, Sarahbeth, author; Levy, EJ, advisor; Alexander, Ruth, committee member; Fletcher, Harrison, committee member
Naming Myself is a collection of twelve nonfiction essays and short memoirs unified by a theme of identity: particularly what is means to name yourself, and name past experiences to claim authority in one's life. The elements of identity explored include the quest for individuality by means of finding a suitable name; finding an identity compromised of two faith traditions; naming sexual violence; mental health; memorializing my father, and naming as an act of awakening by claiming the title of "feminist."
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Not so dreadful here and an·ni·ver·sa·ry: a five-year fragmentation
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2019) Borgard, Mikey, author; Doenges, Judy, advisor; Fletcher, Harrison, advisor; Levy, E. J., committee member; Alexander, Ruth, committee member
Not so Dreadful Here is a novel of interstices, a meditation on the failure of language in the aftermath of mass tragedy events. On April 15th, 2013, at 2:49 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, two bombs exploded near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing three people and injuring nearly three hundred more. Within a five-day span, the perpetrators of this attack committed a carjacking and a kidnapping, murdered a police officer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, started a firefight with members of the Watertown Police Department on a residential street, and brought the city to its knees for twenty hours while the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Massachusetts National Guard, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Joint Terrorism Task Force, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, the Boston Police Special Operations Unit, and dozens of additional teams searched door-to-door for the surviving perpetrator. This story has been told and retold in the press, in ghostwritten memoirs, and on the screens of Hollywood. What has been neglected are the shreds of fear that resound long after the echoes of the bombs fade, the cracks in the mind unrepairable by doctors and nurses, the parasitic nature of survivor's guilt, the desperate need to define and explicate this event. Audiences have been spoon-fed the inspirational version of events, the sugar-coated #BostonStrong narrative. That is not the whole truth. The pages of this novel are tattooed with fragments of the bombings: flashbacks of shattered glass and scraps of fabric, personal belongings sealed in evidence bags, headlines and transcripts, posts from social media sites, messages scrawled in chalk at the temporary memorial on Boylston Street. The narrative threadsthose of Theia Bronwyn, twenty-one-year-old sociology student captivated by Greek mythology, and Johnathan Mensch, twenty-seven-year-old Marine mourning the loss of his brother in Afghanistanbegin to intertwine in the suffocating moments after the detonations and finally tether in the last pages of the text with the realization that both suffering and survival are knotted. This is a book about self-preservation, mass confusion, the hierarchy of victimhood, the insidiousness of the media, the consequences of public violence, and the reverberations of fear in a post-September 11th culture fixated on race and religion, but it is also a novel of hope, of determination, and of forgiveness. It is an attempt to fill the hollows with stillness, with remembrance. It is failed meaning-making from unspeakable tragedy. It is a reminder to meet every human with grace. an·ni·ver·sa·ry: a five-year fragmentation holds the bleeding-over of Not so Dreadful Here, the nonfiction unable to be contained in the fictional realm. In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings, a temporary memorial bloomed at the edge of the crime scene, providing comfort to the people of Boston. In June of 2013, the items left at this shrine were removed, tagged, and transported to the City of Boston's archives, where they now sit in bankers' boxes nestled on metal shelves, forgotten. A permanent memorial has yet to be erected. an·ni·ver·sa·ry serves as a textual memorial, a hodgepodge of speeches, letters, etymological tracings, records of items from the original shrine, and medical logs, all interwoven with a personal account of the five years after the bombings. Told from a survivor's perspective, the central narrative focuses on mental health, the erasure of identity, the never-ending search for answers, and a desperate attempt to make peace with an unspeakable reality. an·ni·ver·sa·ry is memorialization, remembrance, and resilience. It is, ultimately, a map to forgiveness.
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Pączki
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2012) Alexander, Karen E., author; Becker, Leslee, advisor; Alexander, Ruth, committee member; Calderazzo, John, committee member
This collection of short stories and essays was written and revised between 2009-2012 during my tenure as a student in the M.F.A. in Creative Writing program at Colorado State University. Taken as a polished creative portfolio, these works document my development as a young writer and serve as fulfillment of the thesis portion of the M.F.A. dual degree in Fiction and Nonfiction.
Open Access
Rhetorics of silence/listening and teaching trauma: Holocaust testimony in the composition classroom
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2010) Miller, Teva, author; Langstraat, Lisa, advisor; Jacobi, Tobi, committee member; Alexander, Ruth, committee member
Many scholars and educators who have taught Holocaust testimony and literature in their classes have offered numerous pedagogical methods to outline best practices, ethical concerns, and student engagement. While some of these methodologies are particularly instructive for the first year college composition course, most do not address the gaps or silences found in Holocaust testimony. Other pedagogical methods tend to lack the affective component that is an unavoidable part of teaching trauma texts. In this thesis, I offer a heuristic that can be used in the composition classroom to engage with Holocaust testimony. I argue that there is a need for this heuristic because it not only attends to the affective economies that are vital and inseparable from reading and writing about Holocaust testimony, but also because it re-privileges silence as a powerful rhetorical act made by both survivors and secondary witnesses. It also works to destabilize and disrupt “sentimental” student responses that tend to thwart invested critical analysis and which often lead to dehumanizing depictions of victim as well as potential misappropriations of a victim’s or survivor’s words.
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That one place and other stories
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2021) Craig, Katherine, author; Levy, EJ, advisor; Alexander, Ruth, committee member; Ausubel, Ramona, committee member
That One Place and Other Stories is a collection of nine short pieces of fiction, each of which explores relationships amid extreme circumstances and the consumer culture of the late-20th- and early-21st-century United States. The protagonists, primarily women in Colorado, grapple with the misconception of personal value being defined by hyper productivity, competitive consumerism and individual contribution in the years leading up to the Coronavirus pandemic. Characters struggle to perform their various societal roles in the midst of circumstances for which they are unprepared, grappling with how to act in the face of uncertainty. They also wrestle with the increasing commodification of self and time, as the flexibility of working anywhere and anytime morphs into an expectation of working everywhere at all times, even to the extent of economizing social interactions via transactional relationships and accumulating endorsements of personal branding. The pieces experiment with a variety of points of view as they serve the individual stories at hand, investigating what it means to come of age and parent; to live, love and confront death; and ultimately to persist or surrender in late capitalist communities at the turn of the 21st century.
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The future of statues
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2015) FitzPatrick, Cornelius James, author; Becker, Leslee, advisor; Levy, E. J., committee member; Alexander, Ruth, committee member
This thesis is titled after a piece by Rene Magritte. The piece is explained in the title story, but so as not to send you searching: Magritte took a plaster copy of Napoleon's death mask and painted a sky over it. He hung it on the wall and called it "The Future of Statues." I first saw an image of this mask at AWP last year. I became obsessed with it. The title story and most of the stories in this collection are a result of that obsession and of the questions it inspired.
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The lion tamer
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2016) Hansen, Sarah, author; Doenges, Judy, advisor; Becker, Leslee, committee member; Alexander, Ruth, committee member
The Lion Tamer is a novel set in an early 20th century Midwest American circus, following the stories of two women whose lives become entangled when they are both involved in a murder. The novel centers mainly on a young woman, Mae, who runs away after the death of her parents and joins the circus. She connects with a young lion cub, and consequently works her way up to become one of the world's first female lion tamers. She meets Ziggy, a Painted Lady who murders her husband, and together, their paths spiral into deceit, blackmail, and abuse. The novel's main concern is power and autonomy, especially for women at the turn of the century, and what sacrifices each character makes to gain both.
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The lost continent
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2013) Goss, Brittany Lynn, author; Becker, Leslee, advisor; Schwartz, Steven, committee member; Alexander, Ruth, committee member
This collection of short stories was written and revised between 2010 and 2013 during my tenure as a student in the M.F.A. in Creative Writing program at Colorado State University. Taken as a polished creative portfolio, these works document my development as a young writer and serve as fulfillment of the thesis portion of the M.F.A. degree in Fiction.
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The mind of heaven
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2012) Clements, Mark Andre, author; Becker, Leslee, advisor; Schwartz, Steven, committee member; Alexander, Ruth, committee member
This thesis consists of four short historical fiction pieces and one novella. The four short stories are part of an ongoing project, cultivated from an interest in the relationship between fiction and modernist long poems. If this project follows in the footsteps of its inspirations, it probably will never be "finished"--what you will find here are the first steps out into the abyss of history. One of the central figures of this project, the prophet Elijah, appears in one form or another in several of these stories. The novella is an attempt to frame similar cosmo-ontological issues in a sustained, contemporary context. It tells the story of a demon, living under the name Andrus Andross, and his experiences as a bartender in a neglected Chesapeake Bay resort town.
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The octopus tree
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2018) Hansen, Chelsea Lorraine, author; Becker, Leslee, advisor; Coke, Pamela, committee member; Alexander, Ruth, committee member
"The Octopus Tree" was a story idea I started thinking about when I was teenager. I didn't feel like my writing ability and own mental health was in a positive enough state to write it until I pursued this MFA. "The Octopus Tree" is a result in an interest in assisting adolescents and young adults in dealing with difficult emotions and situations and helping them identify and work through mental illnesses. The story revolves around a set of eighteen-year-old twins: Sawyer has unexpectedly died in a car crash, leaving his brother Jacoby to work through his grief alone. The chapters alternate between the two: Jacoby searches for a lost sketchbook of Sawyer's, while Sawyer exists in Limbo and tries to find ways to stop Jacoby from finding the book.
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The only ones who understand
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2010) Ray, Marcy, author; Schwartz, Steven, advisor; Alexander, Ruth, committee member; Becker, Leslee, committee member
The Only Ones Who Understand is a collection of five interrelated short stories. I wrote these pieces while enrolled in the M.F.A. Fiction program at Colorado State University. All of these stories involve members of the same family and are set in a town in eastern Oregon. They seek to explore in impact the family unit as a whole has on the individual members that make up the family as well as looking at the way these characters communicate and fail to communicate.
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The residents
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2017) Heins, Kaitlin, author; Levy, EJ, advisor; Alexander, Ruth, committee member; Becker, Leslee, committee member
The Residents is a collage horror novel that follows Robbie, a wilderness ranger in Aspen, as she is mourns the death of her partner, Evie, and is haunted by her in their previously-shared home. Robbie's perspective on class, nature, and sexuality informs her memories of Evie and their relationship. When Evie's brother, Dylan, comes to stay with Robbie in Aspen, offering to help Robbie put the house on the market, Robbie suspects that he has other motives even as he helps her move past her grief, guilt, and rage. This story considers the damaging impact of humans on both natural and human terrain. It explores grief and culpability in respect to a dying partner and a dying planet. It uses the trope of body horror to explore self-destruction, anorexia, and sexuality.
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These are the people I've been telling you about
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2010) Billings, Amanda M., author; Becker, Leslee, advisor; Alexander, Ruth, committee member; Doenges, Judy, committee member
The stories in this collection were written over the course of the past three years as I completed the MEA program in Creative Writing at Colorado State University. These stories follow the struggles of characters as they attempt to build meaning out of lives at once absurd and banal. Toward this end, this collection plays with the problem of communication and meaning both in content and in form.