kyle and krystal  

Each section is sorted in reverse chronological order (newest to oldest).

• Argument for Symmetry
  A portfolio of selected poems and fiction, with revision and drafts, from my intro-level Creative Writing class at Whitworth College in Spring 2006. Not top-notch, but I enjoyed making it a lot.

• Mimetic Incoherence in The Waste Land
  (May 2007)
  Understanding The Waste Land in context of its former title, “He do the Police in Different Voices,” we find that perspective shifts, situatedness, and narrative incoherence are as essential to Eliot’s understanding of the world as they are to our understanding of The Waste Land. That incoherence which is often dismissed as a side effect of Eliot’s nervous breakdown is more than coincident with the poem; it is in fact fundamental as a poetic and structural device.
• Wheels Within Wheels - The Metatheatrical Cosmology of Shakespeare’s The Tempest
  (December 2005)
  This addresses the use of metatheatre as not only a literary device but also a statement of personal cosmology in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. It attempts to draw a correlation between Shakespeare’s presentation of Prospero’s island, his perception of his own role as playwright, and his perception of the role of man as pawn in a larger process. I’m not the first to propose this interpretation, but I believe I gave it a little of my own spin, at least.
• Through with Memory: Heritage and Spirituality in Li-Young Lee and David Henry Hwang
  (November 2005)
  Here I examine in brief the Asian-American immigrant authors Li-Young Lee and David Henry Hwang, both well-established poets and playwrights in the immigrant tradition, and contrast their views of cultural memory as spiritual forces. The teacher liked it, anyway.
• Members of One Another - Social Capital in Gaskell’s North and South
  (October 2005)
  Deals with Elizabeth Gaskell’s 19th century proto-feminist Victorian social novel, North and South, examining the failure of deconstructionist theory to adequately understand the role of polar contrast in the novel and presenting an alternative theory of social connectedness as a means to ending class conflict (as presented in North and South, at least.) I had fun with this one.
• Problems of Freedom — Free Will in Peace Like A River
  (September 2005)
  Although this was written for a class (EL-125 at Whitworth), it became in the end more of general rumination on the role of the free will in a Judeo-Christian context rather than a direct correlation to the novel (because of this, I got a B+). This is an older version of the essay; I don’t feel the final made as concise an argument, although it integrated more of the novel. The novel, by the way, is Leif Enger’s Peace Like A River, and is excellent.