Browsing by Author "Levy, E. J., advisor"
Now showing 1 - 7 of 7
Results Per Page
Sort Options
Item Restricted All things occur in the heights(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2015) Casolo, Amanda, author; Levy, E. J., advisor; Doenges, Judy, committee member; Vasudevan, Ramaa, committee memberThis thesis submission is a novel-in-progress written during a three-year period of M.F.A. study at Colorado State University. Written in polyphonic omniscient point of view, the novel applies a modular narrative design, following the lives of four characters from 1945 through 2010. The setting is Waterbury, CT, a diverse city, and the location of Holy Land, a now abandoned Catholic amusement park. As the city and its people struggle to define themselves in personal memory, in history, from corruption and poverty, the park's sixty-foot illuminated cross shines out across the city every night and casts its looming shadow over every day.Item Restricted Any good thing(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2016) Mangan, Andrew Nicholas, author; Levy, E. J., advisor; Doenges, Judy, committee member; Khrebtan-Hörhager, Julia, committee memberThis thesis is titled after its first story but also functions the primary theme of the collection itself: Each character is in casting around desperately for “any good thing” in their lives. These “good things” range from monetary salvation, to the mitigation of loneliness, to escape from someone toxic. The arc of the collection as a whole is that of people identifying their conditions, trying to rescue themselves from them, then finally doing so in complicated ways.Item Restricted (Dis)connected(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2014) Savory, Alita, author; Levy, E. J., advisor; Thompson, Deborah, committee member; Little, Ann, committee memberI have been interested in learning about alternative lifestyles for years. This may be because I've known so many miserable people trapped within serial-monogamous lifestyles, and I wanted to break away from this chain of misery. For a long time, I thought that all I was interested in was sex. I read books about prostitution in the west, took a class about the history of sexuality in America, and wrote about my own experiences with sex and BDSM for writing workshops. Due to these interests, I thought what I wanted to write about was BDSM and how practitioners of this lifestyle use power in extraordinary and transparent ways within their relationships. I realized as I wrote that I was fascinated less with the sexual aspects of relationships and more with the ways that people were able to find love and sustain romantic relationships. This thesis began as an idea to explore sexual relationships, but it has transformed into something much more powerful: a memoir about the search for connection.Item Restricted Recurrence: a novel. Book one(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2023) Shrayfer, Lilia, author; Ausubel, Ramona, advisor; Levy, E. J., advisor; Yalen, Deborah, committee member; Foskin, Kevin, committee memberInspired by the disappearances of over a dozen Soviet Jews during the refugee crisis between 1979-1989 in Italy, this novel aims to offer a speculative portal into the crises of identity that may have led to such tragedy. Spanning three generations of one Bukharan-Jewish family, from Stalin's purges of the 1930's, to Khruschev's Sovietization campaign, to the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan, to the above period of statelessness in Europe, the book explores this family's exile through the lens of Eva Kalandarova's gender and sexual identity. What is transmasculinity for transient lives? What does it mean for someone haunted by the sins of their father? In 1941, Russian poet Anna Akhmatova was evacuated to Central Asia, where she and other Russian writers in exile sought to recreate literary life. It is in Central Asia that she wrote—and later burned—her only play of a writer condemned not only by the state, but by her peers. Her contemporaries at the time, such as Nadezhda Mandelstam, write that she saw the future of the Soviet Union. Inspired by her diary entries detailing typhus-induced hallucinations, the novel speculates on the possibility that Akhmatova's relationship with the landscape and its locals may be found in her work. Accordingly, the novel imagines parallel dreams and associations between the Bukharan Jewish families centered in this book and her writing. Similarly, the novel explores Ladispoli as a mirror to the historical anxieties and traumas of the Jews of Rome. I have aimed for a poets' novel; I have aimed for a historical fiction novel, a speculative novel, a trans-national Jewish novel that imagines new Jewish questions. I have aimed to situate my people amidst the Jewish literature that has too long overlooked them, for even in our silence, we have much to say.Item Restricted The conquered(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2014) Thayer, Kristen Marie, author; Levy, E. J., advisor; Becker, Leslee, committee member; Khrebtan-Hörhager, Julia, committee memberThe Conquered is a novel about the unintended consequences that spiral out of deeply felt emotions and unresolved conflicts--about how the little things, unchecked, become the big things. It is about the cycles of good and evil that are experienced and passed on, both intentionally and unintentionally, and the small acts of understanding that make us human. This is a novel primarily about women: their concerns, their choices, their public and private griefs. It is an epic tale of mothers and daughters, of communities linked by faith and torn apart by prejudices. Set among the Uyghurs of northwestern China, a Muslim minority totaling ten million people, The Conquered follows the lives of three Uyghur women--Habiba, an ambitious middle-aged shopkeeper whose success in the world of business puts her personal and familial relationships in jeopardy; Zulpiya, the shopkeeper's teenaged daughter who is caught between the Han and Uyghur worlds because of her success in the Han educational system; and Rashida, a young woman attending Xinjiang University who gets involved with the growing Uyghur separatist movement. The narration spans the period from April 2008 (just before the 2008 Beijing Olympics) to August 2009 (just after the July 2009 ethnic riots in Urumqi).Item Restricted The people we meet(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2015) Hill, Jessica J., author; Thompson, Debby, advisor; Levy, E. J., advisor; Sagas, Ernesto, committee memberThis is a story based on trust -- from losing my sense of love and family when my father's infidelity ruined my perception of the perfect American Dream to finding faith and trust in strangers halfway around the world, in Asia. From the woman I met in Thailand who became my mentor and friend, who urged me to go home and marry at my ripe age of 26, to the fatherly man I met on a motorcycle in Vietnam who made me question the silent punishment I'd given my own father for nearly one year, I will finally begin to understand humanity in a different light. Instead of the love many hoped I would find, I will find a different kind. I will find my small-town roots and my father's little girl, but I will find her in the eyes of a grown woman who's trying so hard to be lost.Item Restricted When the body starves(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2017) Bohling, Joyce, author; Levy, E. J., advisor; Fletcher, Harrison Candelaria, committee member; Gallego, Silvia Soler, committee memberThis thesis is a collection of personal essays, blending memoir and cultural criticism, on the topic of eating disorders. Several of the chapters are personal narratives about my experience having anorexia nervosa and recovery from anorexia. Between these personal narratives are interstitial chapters examining larger cultural issues related to food, body, and weight, such as taboos surrounding poop and the Health at Every Size movement.