I'm here, I'm listening : short stories

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Jennifer Julian
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
The Political ◽  
University Of Missouri ◽  
Female Protagonists ◽  
Creative Writers ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
Creative Dissertation ◽  
The University

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.] I'm Here, I'm Listening is a creative dissertation that makes the case for non-realist speculation as a fundamental tool for creative writers. The collection's twelve short stories push against the boundaries of realism, borrowing from genre conventions found in historic fiction, fabulism, and sci-fi to investigate the uncanny intersection of ecology, technology, and the human experience. The critical introduction, "New Worlds, Green Futures," argues for the political potential in science fiction and speculative writing. It close reads two novels -- Margaret Atwood's Surfacing (1972) and Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being (2013) -- and argues that the cathartic instances of time travel in these novels serve to break down the societal limitations of gender, time, environment, and species. The creative component of the dissertation depicts variations on womanhood and loss. The stories' many female protagonists contend with missing parents, siblings, and partners, absences both physical and emotional. Non-realist and speculative genres highlight the estranging experience of mourning. Characters must navigate strange and perilous dystopias, and many face external conflicts typical of a Cold War era sci-fi film--mutant spiders, doorways to other dimensions, sentient plant people, and cyber-ghosts. At the same time, the collection hones in on these women's interior lives, exploring, not only what makes their world strange and surreal, but what sense of beauty can be found and what connections can be forged in the wake of their own personal apocalypses.

Arlen, Michael (1895–1956)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Girling
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
New Age ◽  
The Usa ◽  
University Of Edinburgh ◽  
Short Hand ◽  
Lady Chatterley's Lover ◽  
The University

Michael Arlen, although now largely forgotten, was one of the most successful novelists of the 1920s. Born Dikran Kouyoumdjian in Ruse, Bulgaria, to Armenian parents, Arlen’s family came to Britain in the early 1900s, and he attended Malvern College. He briefly studied at the University of Edinburgh before moving to London in the mid 1910s to embark on a career as a writer, initially working for A. R. Orage’s magazine, The New Age. His first publication was a collection of his pieces from the magazine, published as The London Venture in 1920. It was at this point that he began writing as Michael Arlen. Arlen produced a steady stream of short stories and novels throughout the early 1920s, all offering a similar whimsical, romantic glimpse of young London socialites, culminating in 1924 with the publication of The Green Hat. It was an immediate success (selling 150,000 copies that year alone), and went on to become one of the bestselling novels of the 1920s, enabling Arlen to fund Noel Coward’s play, The Vortex. Arlen and his novel quickly became short hand for a popular conception of the 1920s; both are referred to in a slew of novels from the time (Michaelis, for instance, in D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, is thought to be based on him). Arlen moved to the USA in 1941 and continued to write until his death, experimenting with a range of genres, including science fiction, but he never again wrote anything as successful as The Green Hat.

Magic for unlucky girls : stories

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Alison A. Balaskovits
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Small Town ◽  
University Of Missouri ◽  
Crooked Nose ◽  
The University ◽  
The City ◽  
The Town

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.] Magic for Unlucky Girls: Stories is a collection of short stories that weave Western oral and literary folklore influences around women-centered narratives. The characters react in different ways to the expectations and prejudices heaped upon them in their respective worlds--some collapse under the weight of those expectations, some embrace them in perverse or tragic ways, and some rebel outright. These stories focus on feminine violence reworked through old fairy tale and folklore themes. In "Food My Father Feeds Me, Love My Husband Shows Me", a passionately carnivorous girl whose father is a butcher is married off to a vegetarian. In "Suburban Alchemy", an alchemist attempts to resurrect his dead wife while struggling with his inability to understand the needs of his preteen daughter and her obsession with a famous pop star. "Put Back Together Again” features a depressed pharmacist who struggles to reconcile the medical horrors she witnesses with the appearance of a super-man who cannot be injured, all while the city she lives in is ravaged by earthquakes. "Let Down Your Long Hair and Then Yourself" tells of what happens to Rapunzel after she is married to her murderous child-groom whose only love is physical perfection, and the lengths she must go to save her daughter who is born with a crooked nose. In "Eden", a young boy befriends the town scapegoat who is whispered to have a too familiar relationship with his horses, as well as the small town ex-beauty queen, the most current in a line of ex-queens who carry shotguns out in the night.

The education of a gambler's daughter

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Deanna Benjamin
Keyword(s):  
University Of Missouri ◽  
Woman Warrior ◽  
Family Secrets ◽  
Creative Dissertation ◽  
The Family ◽  
Self Actualization ◽  
Family Secret ◽  
The Woman Warrior ◽  
The University ◽  
The Relationship

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.] The Education of a Gambler's Daughter is a creative dissertation that tells the story of a daughter trying to make sense out of the chaos that resulted from her family's relationship to gambling. In the process of this sense-making, I explore how my adolescent world was a negotiation between her self-actualization and her understanding of risk. In the critical introduction, 'Writing Someone Else's Story or Imagining Narrative in Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior," I examine the way in which Kingston retells the family secret of her aunt's demise by applying ethnographer Amy Shuman's theory about the relationship between entitlement and privacy to understanding the balance between truth and compassion in retelling someone else's story. Together, the critical introduction and the memoir call into question the responsibilities the memoirist bears in retelling her own story when that story is dependent upon other people's stories and the family secrets embedded in them.

Philip K. Dick

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francis Gene-Rowe
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Short Stories ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Jean Baudrillard ◽  
Central Figure ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Stanislaw Lem ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Fredric Jameson

Philip K. Dick was a central figure of science fiction literature from the 1950s to the 1970s. His novels and short stories were greatly admired by fellow authors such as Brian Aldiss, Ursula Le Guin, and Stanisław Lem, as well as by theorists of postmodernism such as Jean Baudrillard, Fredric Jameson, and Slavoj Žižek. Dick was highly prolific, publishing over 120 short stories and authoring forty-four novels over the course of his career. In addition to his science fiction, Dick wrote several mainstream works of fiction, of which only one was published during his lifetime. Dick’s fiction has been widely adapted to cinema, both in and outside of Hollywood. Dick’s characteristic themes include Cold War paranoia, dystopia, artificial intelligence, psychopathology, drugs and the 1960s counterculture, illusion and simulation, empathy, entropy and determinism, spiritual revelation, and religious salvation.

This way back : essays from Cyprus

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Joanna Eleftheriou
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Forced Migration ◽  
University Of Missouri ◽  
Guerrilla War ◽  
British Rule ◽  
Political Events ◽  
Greek Cypriot ◽  
Creative Dissertation ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The University

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.] This Way Back is a creative dissertation that explores the predicament of the transmigrant, the immigrant who has the capability of returning to the host country, and gets caught in an in-between space, not quite assimilated, and not quite unchanged. Transmigrant subjectivities coincide with globalized financial markets, and with twenty-first century forms of national allegiance. The text calls several binaries into question: Greek/Turk, Greek/Cypriot, Greek/American, gay/straight, male/female, ancient/modern, critical/creative writing, and, through its form, essay collection/memoir. The critical introduction, "Essay, Memoir, or Both? Hunger of Memory and the Problem of Nonfiction Hybrids" addresses this binary, and suggests that reading Hunger of Memory as a memoir animated by essayism makes possible a reconciliation of contradictions that have puzzled Rodriguez scholars in the past. The main, creative component of the dissertation relates stories from the author's life as a New-York-born Greek-speaking citizen of Cyprus: dancing to re-enact a mass suicide by jumping off a school stage onto gym mats, harvesting carobs on her great-grandfather's land, purchasing UNESCO-protected lace, traveling against her father's wishes to the island's occupied north, and pruning cypress trees, geraniums, and jasmine after he grew too weak to lift the shears. Narrating these stories allows her to investigate questions of voluntary and forced migration, nationhood, and war. Political events such as the 1959 guerrilla war against British rule, and the 1974 partition of the island, are conveyed through the stories of Cypriot people--the island's refugees and its returnees, among them the author's late father. Together, the essays are a memorial, one which embodies the links between political and personal loss; the individual and the environment; the living and the dead.

For the love of God and country : nation-building and the (re)gendering of emotions in Francoist Spain

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Evelyn Yamoah
Keyword(s):  
Social Power ◽  
Male Dominance ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cultural Institutions ◽  
Gender Identities ◽  
University Of Missouri ◽  
Basic Emotions ◽  
History Of Emotion ◽  
History Of ◽  
The University

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT REQUEST OF AUTHOR.] Studies on the history of emotion have shown that the standards of a given society towards basic emotions and the appropriate means of expressing them reflect or encourage certain attitudes or conducts in its people. Since emotions function largely as learned responses, political, social and cultural institutions are able to harness its influence by proposing normative emotions about professed values, standards or ideals, and then establishing official rituals and practices to express and inculcate them. My dissertation explores the (re)gendering of emotions to mobilize popular support for Francoist gender identity roles as part of the regime's National-Catholic ideology. I explore the disparities between the emotional rewards propagandists presented as inherent to the Francoist models of masculinity and femininity and those employed in portraying these gender identities in selected texts and film. I establish that while the Francoist regime harnessed the political and social power of emotions for the legitimation of the male dominance and female subservience which were considered fundamental to the regeneration of the Spanish nation, literary and filmic representations of these gender identities and roles used emotion to highlight the gap between prescribed behaviors and emotions and everyday life practices within the nationalist project.

Augustine and Politics as Longing in the World. By John von Heyking. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001. 278p. $37.50.

2002 ◽  
Vol 96 (4) ◽  
pp. 816-818
Author(s):  
Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Saint Augustine ◽  
The Political ◽  
Columbia University ◽  
Short List ◽  
University Of Missouri ◽  
Augustine Of Hippo ◽  
Multiple Audiences ◽  
Mixed Messages ◽  
The Cold War

John von Heyking's inquiry into Augustine's politics of “longing” is a provocative contribution to the growing genre of “Augustine redux” literature written to resonate with our fin de siècle sensibilities. These valuable pearl-diving expeditions bridge scholarship and literate conversation, careful textual exegesis and political advocacy. Not surprisingly, they also illustrate the challenges of writing for multiple audiences with mixed messages. This work enters an already crowded field of recent crossover texts with Peter Brown's Augustine of Hippo (2000), Gary Wills's Saint Augustine (1999), Hannah Arendt's Love and Saint Augustine (1996), and Jean Elshtain's Augustine and theLimits of Politics (1995). A further trip back in time to the Cold War and the politics of “realism” turns up Herbert Deane's The Political and Social Ideas of St. Augustine (1963), another retrieval project written to persuade as well as inform. And this is just a very short list.

scholarly journals Capital as Artificial Intelligence

2015 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 685-709 ◽  
Author(s):  
GERRY CANAVAN
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Short Stories ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Financial Markets ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Global Capitalism ◽  
Player Piano ◽  
American Science ◽  
The Cold War

This article examines science-fictional allegorizations of Soviet-style planned economies, financial markets, autonomous trading algorithms, and global capitalism writ large as nonhuman artificial intelligences, focussing primarily on American science fiction of the Cold War period. Key fictional texts discussed include Star Trek, Isaac Asimov's Machine stories, Terminator, Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano (1952), Charles Stross's Accelerando (2005), and the short stories of Philip K. Dick. The final section of the article discusses Kim Stanley Robinson's novel 2312 (2012) within the contemporary political context of accelerationist anticapitalism, whose advocates propose working with “the machines” rather than against them.

TEM study of boron additions to cobalt aluminide

1988 ◽  
Vol 46 ◽  
pp. 546-547
Author(s):  
Gerald B. Feldewerth
Keyword(s):  
High Temperature ◽  
Turbine Engines ◽  
Major Drawback ◽  
University Of Missouri ◽  
Specific Strength ◽  
Aerospace Applications ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Ordered Alloys ◽  
The University ◽  
Very High

In recent years an increasing emphasis has been placed on the study of high temperature intermetallic compounds for possible aerospace applications. One group of interest is the B2 aiuminides. This group of intermetaliics has a very high melting temperature, good high temperature, and excellent specific strength. These qualities make it a candidate for applications such as turbine engines. The B2 aiuminides exist over a wide range of compositions and also have a large solubility for third element substitutional additions, which may allow alloying additions to overcome their major drawback, their brittle nature.One B2 aluminide currently being studied is cobalt aluminide. Optical microscopy of CoAl alloys produced at the University of Missouri-Rolla showed a dramatic decrease in the grain size which affects the yield strength and flow stress of long range ordered alloys, and a change in the grain shape with the addition of 0.5 % boron.

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