The Swan and the Lights
This is a collection of seven short stories submitted as a thesis project to Florida State University in the spring of 2014. Although most of the stories take place in the state of New York, they are all set in America and they all deal with issues of national identity such as class, community, and...
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| Format: | Others |
| Language: | English English |
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Florida State University
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| Online Access: | http://purl.flvc.org/fsu/fd/FSU_migr_etd-8856 |
| Summary: | This is a collection of seven short stories submitted as a thesis project to Florida State University in the spring of 2014. Although most of the stories take place in the state of New York, they are all set in America and they all deal with issues of national identity such as class, community, and culture. On a more personal level, the stories are about gender, the relationship between the past and the present, communication, parenting, aging, mental health, the fear of death, and death itself. The stories are also explorations of style as much as they are of themes. The tense, unfolding of time, reliability of narrators, and narrative distance vary between stories, and the point of view in "Homecoming" is a hybrid of first- and second-person. Taken together, the content and form serve to illuminate characters in the midst of existential crises. In essence, the stories examine, often indirectly, how people can seek meaningful, even spiritual, connections with external structures, others, and themselves in what is an increasingly impersonal world. === A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Master of Fine Arts. === Spring Semester, 2014. === April 11, 2014. === Includes bibliographical references. === Robert Olen Butler, Professor Directing Thesis; Robert Shacochis, Committee Member; Diane Roberts, Committee Member. |
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