Tag: Angela Bogart-Montieth

Presenter(s): Jess Thompson

Faculty Mentor(s): Angela Bogart-Montieth

Oral Session 1 DL

This project explores the method behind the fear-inducing works of fiction created by two of the most famous masterminds of literary horror, Edgar Allan Poe and Stephen King. The research delves into close readings of both King and Poe’s work, and analyzes the tactic known as “defamiliarizing the familiar,” a strategy that turns a variety of recognizable components—from characters to setting to even stylistic choices—into something strange in order to disorient and scare the reader. As an aspiring horror fiction writer, my goal is to put the work of these two authors in conversation with each other in order to borrow tools from them and further improve my own writing.

Presenter(s): Kaity Olsen

Faculty Mentor(s): Angela Bogart-Montieth

Oral Session 3 DL

Dishes is a short story that follows Anna as she navigates difficulties in her marriage and in her rocky relationship with her sister. Following a series of escalating fights, Anna goes to stay with her sister, where she is finally forced to confront the trouble between her and her sister and the infidelity she has ignored for years. When I first started writing Dishes, I was focusing primarily on the relationship between Paul and Anna, two people who had married at a young age and, through the years, struggled to maintain that love. As the piece grew, and in much of my work this year, I became more interested in exploring the complicated dynamics of women in families- between sisters and their mothers.

Presenter(s): Julia Mueller

Faculty Mentor(s): Angela Bogart-Montieth

Oral Session 2 DL

Literary depictions of traumatic experiences are as complex as the human minds that experience and remember them. In literature, traumatic experiences are typically filtered through a character’s perspective: presented to the reader as a memory, clouded by that character’s naivete or lack thereof, shrouded by denial or emotion, and grappled with through language unique to that character. This research project explores the different techniques authors use to convey to the reader the confusion, struggle, and emotion of their characters’ traumatic experiences. In an effort to depict the realism of how that trauma affects or is comprehended by the character, authors often use types of ambiguous language. This is especially true with stories that depict sexual violence. I’ve examined five short stories wherein the authors use ambiguity to depict or refer to the character’s rape and found three main categories of ambiguity used: inexactness, omission, and allusion. In all five cases, the authors use different types of ambiguity to convey through language that their characters are struggling internally to come to terms with the traumatic experiences they’ve endured. This project aims to help authors and readers both understand techniques used to convey traumatic experiences and explore the human mind of a literary character as he or she processes trauma.

Presenter(s): Lida Ford

Faculty Mentor(s): Angela Bogart-Montieth

Oral Session 2 DL

An ending can make or break a story. In the modern tradition, most stories end with an epiphany, whereby the main character of the story comes to a great philosophical understanding or discovery. More recently, however, and in the non-western tradition, the epiphany ending is being reconsidered. Charles Baxter, in his article “Against Epiphanies,” calls for a complete overhaul of the epiphany ending, in favor of more complicated and less predictable options. While Baxter certainly makes a valid point, he fails to notice the prevalence of non-epiphany, or reimagined epiphany endings already occurring outside of an English-based canon. In this paper, I explore the work of Spanish-language writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who reinvents epiphanies in numerous ways in his short stories. Marquez uses three techniques that I will highlight in this inquiry: the “ubiquitous epiphany” that allows the reader satisfaction at the end, and presents a larger social moral in the story, the “subverted epiphany” that presents the reader with an idea of how the story functions and then subverts that idea, and the “anticlimactic-epiphany,” where the story is structured to lead the reader to expect an epiphany, and then does not present one. These innovative techniques have not only led to Marquez’s acclaim as an author but give writers from the English-based tradition inspiration in their own work.