Mime

Identifier

etd-04162009-175920

Degree

Master of Fine Arts (MFA)

Department

English

Document Type

Thesis

Abstract

Mime is a collection of prose, poems, prose poems, and lists that uses its hybridity of form to explore issues of sexuality, bodies, and gender: how we see and define the self, how we communicate and how we are (still) silenced. The book falls in and out of personas—largely borrowing from Ovid’s metamorphosis, the ultimate source of womens' bodies changing form in relation to perceived sexuality—but it is also clearly just one voice, one narrator, taking on various thin masks with which to address her sexuality and her self. Like Ovid’s girls, the speaker continually changes into something else: a tree, a landscape, a woman in a wooden cow suit, a housewife, an anorexic, a Siren, a landscape, a victim, a woman, a rib. Part poetry, part stories, part autobiography, Mime looks at the connection between the body and its various appetites, and asks why it is sometimes easier to deny all hunger completely, or morph into something entirely new, than to face head-on the complicated territory of our desire.

Date

2009

Document Availability at the Time of Submission

Secure the entire work for patent and/or proprietary purposes for a period of one year. Student has submitted appropriate documentation which states: During this period the copyright owner also agrees not to exercise her/his ownership rights, including public use in works, without prior authorization from LSU. At the end of the one year period, either we or LSU may request an automatic extension for one additional year. At the end of the one year secure period (or its extension, if such is requested), the work will be released for access worldwide.

Committee Chair

Laura Mullen

DOI

10.31390/gradschool_theses.3137

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