Shrapnel is an exploration through memory. It’s a work that bends and twists upon itself and, as memory often does, lands within worlds and experiences only for a moment before jumping to the next story or thought. This text is a hybrid work that doesn’t fit neatly within any specific...
The protagonists in the fiction of Paule Marshall, Alice Walker, and Toni
Morrison illuminate American cultural perceptions of black women and illustrate how the
creators of these characters hope to change those perceptions. I studied Paule Marshall's
Daughters, Alice Walker's Meridian and The Color Purple, and Toni Morrison's The
Bluest...
These five stories investigate characters who must deal with their unresolved,
emotionally troubling pasts. The characters attempt to journey back to life having
recognized that their isolation, safe and undisturbing as it is, is worse than a life in which
the possibility of joy is mixed with the inevitability of...
This is a collection of eight short stories, all of which deal on some level with
alienation and the struggle to find meaning in one's life. Although most of the stories deal
with issues related to women or feature female protagonists, I did not set out to create a
political...
My primary purpose in this thesis is to continue the refocused attention given to American "proletarian" fiction of the 1930's. Because of their politics and supposed artistic inferiority, many of these works have been marginalized by American literary critics. However, many contemporary scholars are reconsidering this genre and devoting more...
These essays are an attempt to rebuild memories that explore the nature of work and family. They explore how work knocks against the joints of the body and against the joints between family members, and, as time passes, how the next generation inherits the family line of work only to...
This thesis is the first third of a coming of age novel called i. In this selection the central character, Bea Bouvier, prepares to see her estranged mother on a cruise ship to the Bahamas. She hopes her parents will decide to reunite as a family, though it becomes increasingly...
The Gospel: According to Matt is a novel, told in the first person, simple past tense, depicting the struggle of a young man attempting to make sense of his relationship with his estranged father as he wrestles with a growing crisis of faith. Matt is deeply sincere in his desire...
This collection of loosely-linked stories explores the lives of a set of characters who exist in the margins of society, but quietly so. In the opening story, "Two-Minute Histories," an ostensibly negative act—breaking and entering, among other verifiable crimes—is demonstrated to lead to some positive outcome such as a moment...