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Doctoral Dissertation Announcement
Candidate: Michael J. Davis
Degree of:
Doctor of Philosophy
Department: English
Title: Gravity: Stories
Committee:
Jaimy Gordon, D.A., Chair
Steve Feffer, Ph.D.
Richard Katrovas, M.F.A.
Stuart Dybek, M.F.A.
Peter Blickle, Ph.D.
Date: Friday, May 14, 2010 10:00 a.m. - Noon
3025 Brown
Hall
Abstract:
This work constitutes a collection of short stories themed around social inequity and the search for employment. Although the stories in Gravity operate from the perspective of male speakers, the experiences they describe are as much about women as men. Bound up in them is the assumption that everything in life depends on being solvent, employed, and generally needed. These things constitute the gravity, or the seriousness, of one’s situation—that which holds a person’s life together and makes it mean something. Each of the stories makes use of a heightened, idiosyncratic voice associated with the maximalist aesthetic in contemporary fiction.