This collection of stories spans a range of content: the personal, the domestic, the political, and the downright terrifying. In “Ilka the Flyer,” a young man is faced with his own crisis and that of his veteran uncle. Sister relationships bloom and fade as the entire family deals with changes...
This novel-in-progress is an attempt to struggle with the complicated process of forging one’s identity in the murk of urban Northwest life. The protagonist of this piece is confused, to put it lightly: bi-racial, torn between the affections of divorced parents, unsure about his religious views, and baffled by his...
These stories are an attempt to give a distinct literary voice to the people and places of rural Southern Indiana. They also strive to deal with certain elements indigenous to that region, some of which can be described generally as the tension between modernization and tradition, family and marriage as...
In This Side of Paradise, The Great Gatsby, and several of his short stories, F. Scott Fitzgerald questions the importance of wealth as a factor in supporting happiness and fostering the American Dream on an individual basis. With these texts, Fitzgerald acknowledges that wealth is a factor and, simultaneously, a...
These stories follow the lives of women in a variety of roles—housewife, deli employee, artist, bird keeper, and sitter for the elderly—and at different stages of life. In “Beneath this Roof,” a young housewife’s life is rocked by a visit from an old friend who has changed in unexpected ways....
This collection of poems spans a range of content. They pose many questions that consider issues surrounding identity, perception, and the relationship between the self and other. The collection consists of four parts. Parts I and IV explore the self and other by using personal experience and persona. Part II...
May We All Wake Up One By One is the beginning of a novel set in the West African country of Guinea. The story follows Sean Wake, a twenty-something American who finds himself working for the Feed the World Program as the country falls apart around him. While his co-workers...
This thesis is a study of Herman Melville’s symbolism. I have chosen to investigate the elemental images of water, fire, and stone in Moby-Dick (1851), Pierre; Or, The Ambiguities (1852), and Clarel; A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876). This work is a semiotic study, insofar as the...
In this thesis I explore the ways in which twenty-first century Americans have access
to Geoffrey Chaucer and his works. I look at issues surrounding Chaucer within the
canon debate, high school history and literature textbooks, and Chaucer in popular
culture, such as in movies like A Knight's Tale. I...
Lauren Fath, in her non-fiction collection Half-Life: Essays, examines the underpinnings of her upbringing in suburban Fort Wayne, Indiana, focusing primarily on familial relationships and the importance of hindsight in understanding how our families make an imprint on our lives. By looking at our relationships through the lens offered by...