Browsing by Subject "Stories"
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Item Bric-á-brac : a memoir(2016-05) Sauvola, Teena; Isackes, Richard M.; Bloodgood, WilliamBric-Á-Brac: A Memoir is a performative installation focusing on how visual narratives contribute to or expand the meaning of written texts. It seeks to place designers in authorial roles and outlines the notion that objects and visual cues can influence existing or original texts.Item Exit slowly, pursued by bears(Texas Tech University, 2005-08) Stueart, Jerome Wesley; Patterson, Jill; Jones, Stephen G.; Covington, DennisTEXAS TECH UNIVERSITY The Graduate School Lubbock, Texas ABSTRACT OF DISSERTATION for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Author’s Full Name: Jerome Wesley Stueart Title of Dissertation: Exit Slowly, Pursued By Bears Names of Committee Members: Jill Patterson, Co-Chairperson, Stephen Graham Jones, Co-Chairperson, Dennis Covington Major: English (Creative Writing) Date of Graduation: August 2005 Exit Slowly, Pursued by Bears is a collection of short stories about people in relationships that have gone a bit absurd and the emotions they practice to regain balance in their lives, not always successfully. The stories are set in Missouri, California and Texas, as well as far northern landscapes in Canada. Characters fight to influence their relationships, and in the process try to salvage their own personal myths of who they and others seem to be. In these stories, a brash young college scientist comes to personal terms with evolution; a father tries to prevent his son from shooting local legendary lions; a woman discovers her husband’s infidelity on Halloween amid a time of roaming polar bears; a boy desperately wants to befriend, and become, a werewolf; a young man searches for his birthfather at an astronomy convention; a woman dates a bear on the internet; and a park ranger tries to keep his long distance relationship alive. When faced with their absurdities, characters run to the myths and beliefs society and culture offers, or those that they’ve created, sometimes sacrificing reality for their own personal fantasy of how life should be, sometimes realizing the truth and moving on from there. There are bears in three of the seven story, but “bears†can also mean those pressures to make hard decisions. Running slowly characterizes the odd or confident, courageous or defiant response to that pressure. Two of these stories have been published: “Old Lions†in Redivider, and “Lemmings in the Third Year†in Tesseracts Nine.Item Writing a way home : Cherokee narratives of critical and ethical nationhood(2014-05) Russell, Bryan Edward; Cox, James H. (James Howard), 1968-; González, John MoránWriting a Way Home examines ways that Cherokees in the latter half of the 20th century who have been marginalized through the privileging of state narratives have deployed literature as a way to challenge narratives of state domination and to imagine and work toward more critical, ethical Cherokee nationhood. I examine the ways that Robert K. Thomas and Natachee Scott Momaday used literature during the federal Termination and Relocation programs to imagine functioning tribal nations against the United States' assimilation narrative of the time. I further delve into how the Cherokee Nation's state narrative of the Cherokee Freedmen has denationalized Freedmen descendants and how, by using the WPA narratives of former Cherokee slaves and Tom Holm and Thomas' Peoplehood Matrix, we can re-narrate the Freedmen descendants into a more ethical Cherokee Nation. Finally, I close the study with an examination of Daniel Heath Justice's Way of Thorn and Thunder trilogy that uses storytelling to re-imagine a place of reverence for gay and queer-identified Cherokees at a time when the Cherokee Nation passed a ban on same-sex marriage, claiming that such relationships defied what the Cherokee state narrates as tribal tradition. I aim to show in this study the danger of uncritically accepting the state model for tribal nations and the importance of periodically challenging tribal nations when leaders behave unethically. Likewise, this study demonstrates the power of story to not only check the excesses of state sovereignty that marginalize people based on their history, politics, race and sexuality, but also the power to re-imagine a nation -- a home -- that welcomes all its relations.