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- Creator:
- Gates, Andrew E.
- Description:
- This thesis is an investigation into the role of names within Olga Grushin’s Forty Rooms, in order to in understand the protagonist, Mrs. Caldwell, as an “everywoman” in which readers can see themselves. I use the names of the male characters to show them as the patriarchy, and I use their actions to show them as oppressors. Conversely, I investigate the names of the women to show their universality and characteristics that keep them blind to their existence in an oppressive social atmosphere. I go on to emphasize the importance of the protagonist’s namelessness and show how several rhetorical devices and images – namely the use of pronoun confusion, first to third person narrative perspective switch, mermaids and mirrors – are used to help readers understand the protagonist as a hybrid and representing the masses of oppressed women.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Chico
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Ellet, Hannah Camille
- Description:
- American contemporary and multicultural literature focuses on issues surrounding race. This project analyzes race through differing spaces, places, and environments in three works of 20th and 21st century American literature. Despite their differences in time and place, each novel deals with the restriction or removal of a marginalized group from a space or environment. Because an essential part of one’s identity is rooted in their relationship to the various physical environments or spaces of which they are a part, this project asks questions surrounding identity, heritage, and the creation of self. It also looks at the movement of individuals between spaces, focusing on the different ways an individual’s identity changes within urban and rural environments.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Chico
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- D'Augelli, Carissa
- Description:
- “Mother Outsider” is a collection of poems that explores non-conventional motherhood while also pushing against cultural assumptions of motherhood. Questioning these societal assumptions and the speaker’s own questions of herself are central to the poems in this collection. Uncertainties surrounding whether or not step-mothers are “true” mothers is also a major aspect. Some poems in this collection will talk back to the societal voices saying that motherhood happens when a woman gives birth. “Mother Outsider” invites readers to see an alternative mother on a journey through legitimacy and validation.
- Resource Type:
- Graduate project
- Campus Tesim:
- Chico
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Allen, Ian T.
- Description:
- Reasons to Worry is a collection of short stories and flash fiction focused on the traditions of literary fabulism and speculative fiction. Their genres span across cyberpunk, gothic, folklore, science fiction, horror, magical realism, and cosmicism. Each narrative explores different aspects of anxiety, self-identity, and personal metamorphosis, often interweaving humor, satire, and hyperbole to emphasize these themes and to create undercurrents of meaning. Reasons to Worry also seeks to blur the lines between what is considered the real and the fantastic, posing the question of “what if?” and seeks to eventually supplant this speculation with the revelation of “what is.” The critical introduction of this project provides a deeper examination of its incorporated craft elements such as the strategic use of genre, subtlety, and form. It expands on these with examples supplemented by the works of Charles Baxter, Rob Davidson, Tara L. Masih, Herman Melville, Maria Romasco Moore, Annie Neugebauer, Virgilio Piñera, and Neal Stephenson. Additionally, it touches on a few of its methods of inspiration, revision, and the evolution of its overall style into its current iteration.
- Resource Type:
- Graduate project
- Campus Tesim:
- Chico
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Smith, Jennifer L.
- Description:
- Touch the Stars/Touch the Earth is a collection of four short stories that explore themes of grief, death, loss and agency through the medium of fiction, specifically using the genres of fabulist and science fiction. Each story has a central theme of loss and a regaining of agency. Each story uses genre to get at issues that are utterly mundane: the loss of a loved one, feeling stagnant, the process of being depressed and possibly suicidal, an unwanted pregnancy. Prefacing these stories is a discussion dwelling on the influences, theories, and popular culture that have helped shape the creative work, in particular the writing of Ursula K. Le Guin, English folk ballad Tam Lin, and numerous discussions that have taken place both online and in the real world regarding representation and how diversity is echoed or not echoed in popular fiction.
- Resource Type:
- Graduate project
- Campus Tesim:
- Chico
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Martinez, Zeth M.
- Description:
- The Cost of Freedom and Other Stories is a collection of interconnected fictional short stories that turn the internal conflict into a tangible obstacle the characters must overcome. By exploring themes of escapism, obsession, and toxic patterns, The Cost of Freedom and Other Stories takes a hybrid approach to the genres of Cyberpunk and Fabulist Fiction. This hybridity allows the fabulist elements to take on a more active role in the plot of the story. The critical introduction discusses the craft elements of defamiliarization and characterization as they explore the fabulist elements of the stories. The authors discussed in the critical introduction are Kôbô Abe, Charles Baxter, John Ajvide Lindqvist, Gloria Naylor, Marge Piercy, and Victor Shklovsky.
- Resource Type:
- Graduate project
- Campus Tesim:
- Chico
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Harris, Scarlett O.
- Description:
- “The Good Housewife’s Receipt Book” is a master’s thesis investigating the real and symbolic role of the middling-sort rural English housewife of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and the resulting gendered nature of ideas about household food production and domestic industry. This particular housewife identity, though a reality for only a narrow demographic, was symbolic of the lifecycle for the vast majority of early modern Englishwomen and colored how food, labor, and women were understood. A juxtaposition of three types of primary sources allows for a comparative evaluation of gender roles, utilizing male-published guidebooks and treatises on proper female behavior, multimedia popular culture sources featuring the housewife trope, and the handwritten receipt books and letters of the newly-literate housewife herself to fully illuminate the figure of the woman in the kitchen. The work focuses particularly on the theoretical kitchen, rather than the physical, encompassing the knowledge of and ideas about housewifery in two parts, Recipes and Human Relations.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Chico
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Tellesen, Hilary Beth
- Description:
- ABSTRACT ALTERNATIVE SUBTERFUGE: PRANKING RHETORIC IN SHOPDROPPING AND IDENTITY CORRECTION by Hilary Beth Tellesen Master of Arts in English California State University, Chico Spring 2009 Currently corporate rhetoric monopolizes all means of cultural production. A new form of social activism has risen to disrupt the corporate control of culture to humorous levels of intervention. Art activists have become pranksters in order to critique power and disseminate messages of resistance to diverse publics. In this study I examine the projects of the Yes Men, who work to correct the identity of corporate power-holders. The Yes Men create characters personifying free-trade ideologies and present fictitious speeches with candid accounts of free-trade practices. Additionally I examine the work of Packard Jennings who leaves products containing social and political messages on the corporate store shelf. Jennings is a shopdropper: the opposite of a shoplifter. The work of Jennings and the Yes Men articulates the need for social movements to engage in creative tactics against the hegemony. This study asserts that viii pranking challenges traditional conceptions of rhetorical analysis that gauge success by access to authority or revolutionary manifestation of the public. Pranking rhetoric’s tactics utilize discombobulating tactics to emphasize confounding inadequacies in our ideological framework and create qualitative change in social discourse. Through analysis of the artist’s purpose and impact the rhetorical implications of the prank speak directly to the democratic principles that have become latent in a progressive, consumerist culture.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Chico
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Cullen, Christopher William
- Description:
- ABSTRACT IN THERE SOMEWHERE: A MEMOIR by Christopher William Cullen Master of Arts in English California State University, Chico Spring 2009 In There Somewhere is a memoir focusing on my family and relationships, and on coming of age and the male identity. This memoir explores the nature of inter-generational male relationships. More specifically, I examine both my relationship with my father and my relationship with my grandfather; I also examine my father’s and grandfather’s relationship. This multi-generational approach allows the reader to understand how the past affects the future and how my grandfather’s and father’s relationship affects my own relationships with both of these two men. The memoir is divided into a critical introduction, which examines and contextualizes theories developed and explored by Bill Roorbach, Tim O’Brien, John Gardner and Charles Baxter, and four full-length chapters. The critical introduction also examines some contemporary memoirs and applies these theoretical ideas all while trying to explain where I fit in the literary landscape. The four subsequent chapters all focus on a particular story, but within each story other memories and events are developed. These flashbacks vii help to weave all the chapters together to form one full-length memoir rather than four shorter individual memoirs. Through the progression of the stories this memoir invites the reader to witness a young six-year-old boy learning to play golf and bond with his father change to a more mature adult figure who is forced to grow up and deal with difficult problems and situations. It is a complicated family memoir about love and pain and finding one’s own place in the world and in the family.
- Resource Type:
- Graduate project
- Campus Tesim:
- Chico
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Becker, Karl
- Description:
- ABSTRACT THE NEW WORLD OF THE POST-APOCALYPTIC IMAGINATION by © Karl Becker 2010 Master of Arts in English California State University, Chico Spring 2010 In light of a recent explosion of post-apocalyptic narratives in popular film and literature, this thesis approaches an analysis of the genre as a means of expressing deep-seated anxiety about modern consumer practices and their perceived eventual outcomes. The project explores the literary tropes that illustrate materialist practices in American culture in both post-apocalyptic works of fiction and early European encounter literature, particularly the interaction between the indigenous inhabitants and explorers of the New World and their post-apocalyptic antecedents. By examining narrative elements of the 2007 film adaptation of Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel I Am Legend and Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 novel The Road, this thesis will discuss the postapocalyptic genre as a modern transposition of pre-colonial encounter narratives. The discussion will reveal that many of the motives underlying the Conquest of the Americas shape post-apocalyptic narratives, even where they perform different functions. vii While the post-apocalyptic genre attempts to communicate hypothetical outcomes to modern consumer practices, they prove also to fulfill a consumer fantasy as it is perpetuated by images of destruction, depopulation, unlimited materialism, and nightmare inhabitants that recall details from America’s imperial past.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Chico
- Department:
- English