Every year, Mr. Chapman takes a group of high school students on a bear-sighting trip called “Ex-bear-dition.” The story picks up at their arrival to Montana where the students learn about bears and quarrel with one another. When it’s time to take the long-anticipated, killer hike at Glacier National Park, the students find themselves in situations that require them to put their wilderness survival skills to the test. Peggy, one of the teaching assistants, and Nathan, one of the students, take a tumble in the snow, unable to return to the group. Mr. Chapman also finds himself incapable of hiking out, so the group must split again to go get help. Keller, the other teaching assistant, must lead a small assembly back to the trailhead, while Mr. Chapman’s remaining students, and Nathan and Peggy must weather their camps. This novella is a series of narratives and found materials.

This literary analysis thesis determines the relationship between twin characterization in Victorian novels and contemporary literature. Using Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-glass as foundational works for twin characterization with the Freudian definition of doubles as uncanny, this thesis analyzes the following twin tropes: the trickster twins, twins separated into binaries of “good” or “whole” and “damaged” or “evil,” male twins where one dies and the other marries the woman they both love, and female twins associated with shared supernatural appearance and abilities. These tropes are identified in Victorian works including Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins and Wilkie Collins’ Poor Miss Finch, then demonstrated in contemporary sources including Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement, Kim Edwards’s novel The Memory-Keeper’s Daughter, J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, and Stanley Kubrick’s film The Shining. Ultimately, this thesis analyzes these tropes of twin characterization in 19th-century and contemporary literature from a variety of genres to demonstrate how the fin de siècle fears of cultural degradation, explored through duality using the vehicle of twin characters, remain as pervasive influences in today’s literature with similar concerns about individual identity.

Paraprosdokian is a collection of stories about all different types of lives in Phoenix, AZ. There are several stories that work together, involving lonely teenagers at punk house shows, while the rest standalone: the eclectic interactions of a waiter at a 24-hour diner, a blind fair ride operator with a propensity for accidental murder, a hapless son of a clumsy dental assistant, a literary scholar stuck in an addiction to both Kafka and pornography, a kid who learns that writing is not a formula, and a high school death that nobody cares about. Some pieces unfold parts of 21st century culture that have been knotted in ambivalence, like how men raised on pornography reconcile with intimacy, while others are as simple as trying to encapsulate the experience of growing up in what is often perceived as an artless suburbia. The project aims at mixing prose with photography to create, as Ben Lerner describes it, “a constellation of language and image”—a complete artistic product. Using the work of a local Arizona photographer, the collection complicates a reader’s elementary notion of a “picture book” by forcing the reader to view photographs beyond exposition or symbolism. The title of the collection comes from a term used in comedic rhetoric that refers to a figure of speech in which the latter part of a statement or phrase reorients one’s understanding of the whole. Under this definition, the collection seeks to amend its author and reader’s orientation to Phoenix in a quest for empathy, giving pathetic characters a chance to speak without ever sacrificing a touch of humorous joy.