Masters Theses

Date of Award

8-1991

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts

Major

English

Major Professor

Marilyn Kallet

Committee Members

Robert Stillman, Ed Bratton

Abstract

This thesis has two parts. Part I consists of thirteen poems, most of which begin with awe toward the natural world and move from there to look at our human position in that world. For example, "The Snake" begins with the snake's beauty and fitness as it is and culminates with the automatic animosity of the driver who kills it.

Part 2 consists of seven stories. They are primarily in the first person and attempt to enter an individual's private reactions to death, family conflict, fear. These stories are, generally, of the sudden-fiction type in that they succinctly express a single incident from a single point of view. This is particularly true of "No Way" and "The Burial."

Overall, there is a sense of the connectedness of life, a feeling that, like it or not, the ache of what happens to the women in "Connections," or the pain associated with death in "The Burial" is part of each of us. We may not experience the same particulars, but the feelings, the pains and the joys, are universal.

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