degree projects
Copyright Jessica Mehr 2018
Ph.D CandidaTE
PURDUE UNIVERSITY
Scholarly Interests:
Disability Studies
American Modernist Fiction
Awards:
First Prize, R.W. Babcock Award for Essay on Shakespeare, 2013
First Prize, PEFCU Award for Creative Nonfiction, 2011
Committee:
Maren Linett (Advisor)
John Duvall
Wendy Flory
Copyright Purdue University College of Liberal Arts
Dissertation Abstract: Time and the Disabled Mind in American Modernist Literature
This study examines the use of literary experimentation with time to represent the disabled mind in American modernist fiction (1920-1940). By the early twentieth-century, Newton’s view of time as absolute and objective was destabilized by changes including wireless telegraphy, evolution, thermodynamics, and Einstein’s relativity theory. Modernist fiction used experimental techniques to interrogate these rapidly-changing views of time. These shifts in understanding temporality also contributed to negative attitudes toward the disabled, who were increasingly defined by a time-based rhetoric in which they were “handicapped” in life’s race. Time and the Disabled Mind argues that because modernist aesthetics and perceptions of disability were both constructed in response to changing views of time, this creates a complex relationship between disabled characters and temporality in the narratives they occupy. My goal is to contextualize these narratives within the science that changed understandings of time in order to better grasp disability’s larger cultural meaning. My dissertation includes chapters on postpartum psychosis in Emily Holmes Coleman's The Shutter of Snow, cognitive disability in William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, and shell shock in Ernest Hemingway's short stories featuring Nick Adams.
MFA in Fiction
PURDUE UNIVERSITY
2008
Awards:
First Prize, Bloomington National Society of Arts and Letters,
O-Meara Award in Fiction, 2007
Committee:
Sharon Solowitz
Porter Shreve
Margaret Rowe
Copyright Purdue University 2010
My MFA thesis was entitled, What You Can Live With, a novel (250 pages) precipitated by the drowning of Celia Adams in the Hudson River, while sailing with a married man with whom she is having an affair. It alternates between three first-person narrators: Frank (the married man), Allie (his sister and Celia's best friend), and Mary (Celia's younger sister). Mary travels to NYC to pack up Celia's apartment and becomes obsessed with the secrets of Celia's life and death, secrets that lead all the way back to the childhood shared by Celia, Allie, and Frank across the Hudson in Hoboken, New Jersey.
B.A. in English
high distinction
UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA
2001
Scholarly Interests:
American Feminism
Early American Literature
Awards:
Phi Beta Kappa
Waggenheim Award for Best Undergraduate Short Story, 2001
Committee:
Charles Vandersee
Susan Fraiman
Elizabeth Denton
Copyright University of Virginia 2013
In order to graduate with honors, I wrote a 150-page undergraduate critical/creative writing dissertation titled, Invicta: An American Feminist Novel. For this independent project, I read 20 American novels published from 1780 - 1995, studied the rise of second-wave feminism in America, and developed a working definition of what constitutes a "feminist" novel. I identified key themes in my selected texts, including: the female artist, mental illness, sexuality, and female friendships. I then wrote a 50-page critical thesis that established these themes through close textual analysis and scholarly sources. This was followed by a 100-page creative writing excerpt from my feminist novel, Invicta.