Date of Award

6-2016

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Organizational Unit

College of Arts Humanities and Social Sciences, English and Literary Arts

First Advisor

Selah Saterstrom

Keywords

Creative writing, Fiction

Abstract

The Region of Perhaps: A Novel aims to challenge the parent-child hierarchy and satirize the institutionalized, academic voice in order to ask an underlying question about authority and agency in the act of storytelling. Through employing unreliability in thirdperson objective point of view—made manifest through support group narratives and bedtime stories—I juxtapose imagined folklore with scholarly prose in an effort to illustrate the contentious-yet-reciprocal relationship between history and allegory. This is played out most overtly through the family of a Room Scholar, a Wrist Scholar, and their daughter, a child who ultimately becomes an ice sculptor. By at once telling his daughter too much (about the capacity for the world to be ugly) and not enough (about her growing, evolving body), the Wrist Scholar’s success in professing is called into question. Anchored by the narratives of The Fathers of Lost Daughters—a self-help group composed of archaic male tropes (Butcher, Wainwright, Barber, Angler, Smith, Miller, and Archivist) who communally cope with their lost daughters during a deliberately ambiguous era—The Region of Perhaps satirizes the dissemination of empirical knowledge when the narration of present-tense events conflict with those events’ portrayal in shared stories. By confronting the narrative authority of disembodied storytelling through form, The Region of Perhaps provides the platform for asking the central question that drives my identity as a scholar-artist; that is, who gets to voice our stories and from where does that power derive?

Publication Statement

Copyright is held by the author. This work may only be accessed by members of the University of Denver community. The work is provided by permission of the author for individual research purposes only and may not be further copied or distributed. User is responsible for all copyright compliance.

Rights Holder

Lindsey Drager

Provenance

Received from author

File Format

application/pdf

Language

en

File Size

169 pgs

Discipline

Creative writing

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