M.F.A., English Language and Literature
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Item AR:RANGE:MENTSHeller, Esther (2023-08)Ar:range:ments is an arrangement of poetry, essay, prose, and images that in their presentarrangement, are a possibility of time and space that is felt now, has been felt, and is yet to be known/unknown. Gathering language and memories as a means of becoming whole. The hope for language, omnidirectional temporality, and multispatial presence zests in the arrangements made and yet to be made from language, memory, space, and timeItem You Are Stranded, ChildZong, Winniebell (2023-08)A poetry collection navigating through intergeneration, maternal lineage, PTSD after surviving sexual assault, and how COVID-era family separation expounds the diaspora identity for a Chinese woman. Other themes include feminism, mother-daughter relationship, and experiments in poetic form (such as contrapuntal, erasure, and free form).Item J. Harmon's Blush DepartmentsHarmon, Juan (2023-08)Poems written by Juan Harmon during the 21-23 MFA program at Cornell University.Item Water CycleIqbal, Sarah (2023-08)The intention behind this collection is to use poetry as a vehicle for describing what cannot be conveyed through the literal word. For me, much of what lacks description is rooted in my experiences with chronic illness, and with navigating my own multiculturality as a biracial woman raised in the United States after immigrating from Romania at age two. The glue between these re-constructed narratives is the foundational element of water that carries the speaker through understanding the human body, its lineage, and accompanying fauna.Item OutsiderdomIwunze, Chioma (2023-08)In Outsiderdom, Nkoli is not your typical Nigerian immigrant. She's a mathematician who lives her life by the rules of numbers and patterns. When she ponders leaving her Nigerian husband for an American man, she turns to mathematical theories and simulations to support her decision. But soon she discovers that her new husband, Bon, may be hiding African ancestry. As they navigate the complexities of their relationship, they must each pay the high cost demanded by their identity crises. Their loved ones are not left out. Iyke, Nkoli's son from her previous marriage, is torn between loving Bon, his stepfather and ballet mentor, and remaining close to a biological father he feels more culturally distant from by the day. At home, school, and on stage, he is constantly confronted by the question of where he belongs—if he belongs. As Nkoli realizes that the numbers and patterns she relied on have failed her, she must face the consequences of her choices and find a way to overcome the challenges of black parenting in America. Will she do this alone or with the help of her first husband? Told by an ensemble cast, united by their connection to Nkoli,, Outsiderdom explores questions of race, immigration, masculinity and black parenting in America. The novel begins and ends with the voice of a group of black feminists in Ithaca, providing a unique and thought-provoking reading experience.Item Item The Song of a BoatChakrabarty, Arpita (2023-08)This manuscript of nine short stories and a beginning of a novel explores time, adolescence, class anxieties, old age and its loneliness, relationship ambiguities, male gaze and sexual desire, and conflicts of English language in erstwhile colonialised places. The stories are not based in a distinct geographical place, but the characters speak Bangla and Hindi, and traverse spaces of liminality between Bangla and English, silences and language, unmeasured time and clock. The child narrators attempt to transgress the order imposed on them and practice in different acts of lawlessness. The adult narrators are often the people who come in conflicts with their self-defining forces resulting in simultaneity of human experiences at a single moment.Item The Milling RoomsLee, Michael (2022-12)In his Eulogy for Franz Ferdinand in July 1914, Karl Kraus wrote that Austria was a “laboratory of the apocalypse”. A month later, Europe erupted into total war on an industrial scale yet unseen: poison gas, concentration camps, machine guns, flamethrowers, and aerial bombardments. Yet nearly all of these new weapons of mass slaughter had already been used in Europe's colonies. The Maxim gun was first used by the British against the Matabele, the Germans innovated the concentration camp in the genocide of the Herrero and Nama people, and Italy carried out the first recorded aerial and chemical attacks in Ethiopia. If Kraus was right that the heart of one of Europe’s “great” empires was a laboratory for apocalypse, then it was doubly the case that the colonial periphery beyond Europe’s metropoles were also laboratories of apocalypse, without which World War One would not have been possible. The psychological and material framework required to enact colonial genocides were the same required to enact similar violences against one’s neighbors. Where geographical distance was minimal, the imagined and narrative distances became nearly as vast. This collection of poetry, The Milling Rooms racks interrelated projects of Western colonialism, Nation-building and industrialization as vectors of apocalypse, positioning apocalypse not as a future possibility but as a present condition, historical precedent and policy position. From the advent of the guillotine, the machine gun, and cast-steel to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, American Westward Expansion, the industrial slaughterhouse and Nazi death camps, the poems within this book illuminate and indict these networks of terror less as perfectly linear processes with clear beginnings and endings, and more a genealogical constellation of events and ideas. Beyond simply identifying these relationships, The Milling Rooms examines how these apocalyptic logics have shaped race, place, memory/imagination, the idea of the human, and relationships to violence and nature in the 20th and 21st centuries. How has the evolution of State sanctioned executions shaped our understanding of citizenship and public/private space? How did railroads and industrial slaughterhouses map a blueprint for modern war and the Holocaust? Where in our daily lives can we witness (and apprehend) these legacies of horror?Item The NudeRaisin, Courtney (2022-12)Item in pre: tendHackle, India (2022-12)