2020 UMKC Theses - Access Restricted to UMKC
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The items in this collection are theses that are available only to members of the University of Missouri-Kansas City campus. Click on one of the browse buttons above for a complete listing of the works.
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Item Tiger's Eye & Twine, with Sails in Flame: A Triptych(2020) Schultz, Dennison Ty; Hodgen, Christie, 1974-This thesis is a triptych of poetic sequences on queer reckoning—queer as an identity, a community, and a strategy of engaging with the world. Progressing further into interiority as the triptych progresses, the poems first confront contemporary politics, utilizing news sources, hearing transcripts, and other found text to interrogate the language with which we interact in our everyday lives, challenging the violence inherent in hegemonic rhetorics and recognizing its negative effect on the body/bodies. The second section, a single fifteen-sonnet poem, focuses more intensely on questions of queerness raised in the previous section, constructing a working theory of gender as a liberating and intentional construction of self and queer community, entering into a queer literary tradition to imagine potentials and multiplicities of being. The final section, a series of cubist self-portraits, bears witness to a particular interiority in a multi-modal project to understand the self through shifting, associative, disorienting lenses. The poems are simultaneously concerned with urgent questions of language, genre, and limitation that follow a lineage of experimental poetics, inclusive of visual, sonic, and formal constructions. They argue that these latter components of craft are as important as the language and equally able to generate meaning, often that which engages logics of feeling and embodiedness that disrupt (ir)rational hegemonic logics. In doing so, the poems knowingly risk difficulty in order to search for languages outside of normative power structures and toward a more realized queer possibility.Item Oakaville(2020) Shrum, Cody; Terrell, WhitneyThis collection is comprised of short stories and flash fiction, all revolving around the same fictional town of Oakaville, KS, dealing with the themes of home, nostalgia, love, coming of age, family dysfunction, disillusionment, and disconnection. “Zenith” is about a group of kids who get high and mess around on train tracks, and the locomotive engineer who was unlucky enough to have been passing through. “The Batman of Perry County” showcases an absurd obsession over a false hero, but a hero the town desperately needs. “Bowtie” follows a boy finally connecting with his father, and his crush across the street. In “127 Feet,” a man has a near-death experience after being fired from his job, and an omniscient narrator gives a unique perspective on all of it. In “Wayward Women,” a daughter discovers she doesn’t know her dying mother as well as she thought she did.