Date of Graduation
Spring 2014
Degree
Master of Arts in English
Department
English
Committee Chair
Michael Czyzniejewski
Abstract
The goal of this thesis is to explore Victor Schklovsky's idea of defamiliarization from his essay "Art as Technique” and Mikhail Bakhtin's idea of polyphony as defined in his book Problems in Dostoevsky's Poetics through the practice of writing short fiction. The stories collected in the thesis explore these ideas by taking advantage of different approaches to narrative form and content and exploring current trends in literary fiction including fabulism, flash-fiction, and non-narrative fiction. The thesis demonstrates different ways to approach defamiliarization and polyphony in short fiction and shows that these techniques can be used to vastly different results in the discourse of short fiction.
Keywords
defamiliarization, short story, flash-fiction, non-narrative, polyphony
Subject Categories
English Language and Literature
Copyright
© Andrew Daniel Myers
Recommended Citation
Myers, Andrew Daniel, "What We Understand to Be Ghosts" (2014). MSU Graduate Theses/Dissertations. 1132.
https://bearworks.missouristate.edu/theses/1132
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