Date on Senior Honors Thesis
5-2022
Document Type
Senior Honors Thesis
Degree Name
B.A.
Degree Program
College of Arts and Sciences
Author's Keywords
narrative craft; narrative structure; tone; voice; pacing; short story collections; climate fiction; nonlinear fiction
Abstract
This project details the narrative decisions made within a quarter of my own stories, with special attention paid to cross-story relationships, the dynamics of linked short story collections, and the elements of craft I have honed while at the University of Louisville. The nature of narrative structure and narrative time is discussed in the first story; the crafting of dialogue and the narrative texture conjured from that dialogue in the second; the interaction between a character's psychology and a story's setting in the third; and the relevance of both sensorial and visual motifs in the fourth. This thesis also discusses works of relevance, inspiration, and similarity to my own, with particular emphasis placed on Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad and Tommy Orange's There There.
Recommended Citation
Sauls, Roman, "Greetings from Eureka!: a story quartet and critical afterword." (2022). College of Arts & Sciences Senior Honors Theses. Paper 272.
Retrieved from https://ir.library.louisville.edu/honors/272
Lay Summary
Short story collections and in the interwoven novel have become a near-staple of modern literary tradition, with works like Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad, an instance of the former, and Tommy Orange's There There, an instance of the latter, garnering significant critical acclaim and commercial attention. The reemergence of non-traditional and non-linear forms of storytelling implies the growth of an audience that continually live non-traditional and non-linear lives in an ever-fracturing world.
The four stories I've provided in this thesis serve to extend the current literary project occurring in the field of the interwoven novel, as a modest quartet that both contains interrelationships and interconnections within itself and gestures toward a greater project.
The critical analysis that follows dissects each story as an individual piece and as a member of a larger whole. There are several topics covered, most prominently the crafting of place and setting, the crafting of non-linear story structures, the crafting of visual motif and dialogue texture, and the crafting of a holistic collection.
This is my foray into the field and a meaningful contribution to the movement of literature stirring in the modern-day.
