| Education: M.A English Thesis & Course List |
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| Thesis: Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried: A Postmodern Response |
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| Abstract: My intent in this thesis is to provide a postmodern reading
of Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried by demonstrating
through an analysis of the structure of the text that the
primary thematic concern of the author is the transmission
of the narrative. I argue against the inclusion of the work
into the genre "Vietnam War Literature" as defined by Kali
Tal and other traditional Vietnam critics because of the
work's insistent subversion of the tenets of that genre. As
a postmodern reading of the text shows, Tim O'Brien
transcends the traditional conventions of the Vietnam
narrative by focusing on the role of narration in the recreation of experience rather than on the constraints the
context of the experience exerts. |
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| Course List |
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| 501: Introduction to Research Methods |
 Joe Orton: A Checklist of Primary and Secondary Works and a Synthesis of Criticism |
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| 502: Introduction to Literary Theory and Writing |
| Review/Analysis of Berlin, James. Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges 1900-1985, 1987 |
| Review/Analysis of Felman, Shoshana. Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight, 1987 |
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| 506: Age of Milton |
| Purpose and Audience in Donne's Valediction: forbidding mourning: An Alternative Reading |
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| 509: Literature and Other Arts |
| Hemingway and Cezanne |
| James Joyce and Music |
| Giacometti to Beckett and Beyond |
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| 525: Seminar in Linguistics |
| The Role of Fantasy in Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried |
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| 550: Workshop in Fiction |
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| 560: Modern British Drama |
| The Use of Dramatic Alienation in Shelagh Delaney's A Taste of Honey |
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| 563: Twentieth Century European Drama |
| An Evaluation of the Selection, Adaptation and Performance of Early European Avant Garde: An Alternative Pedagogical Route |
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Edward Chaffin