Famous Performances

Academic Abstract: Famous Performances examines the complications and struggles that people face attempting to maintain a sense of authentic humanity in the twenty-first century. Through various performances, the collection deals with how human-made phenomena like popular culture, technology, and consumer society, to name a few, affect identity formation, complicating the ways in which the self, as well as the world of today, is both similar and remarkably distinct from the world of only fifteen or twenty years ago. These stories run the gamut of the above mentioned interests, including a story about a television writer and his sister, a performance artist, who tour the country, acting in a bizarre, improvisatory show together, while debating the merits of commercial versus avant-garde art; as well as a story about a wealthy and emotionally unstable man who grapples with his famous activist mother's death, when her face is printed on a commemorative coin. General Abstract: Famous Performances is a short story collection that attempts to investigate the complexities of the modern world and the importance of performance in people's everyday lives. Each story dramatically examines a particular type of performance and its effects on people's inner and social lives. The characters in this collection are grappling with the various ways performance is presented to us in modern society, through technology, the media, pop culture, social media, and more. Throughout the collection the reader is forced to confront their own iterations of authenticity and performance.

Name thesis:degree_name

MFA

Level thesis:degree_level

masters

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Creative Writing

Department dc:contributor.department

English

Grantor dc:publisher

Virginia Tech

Year dc:date.issued

2018

Author dc:creator

• McDonald, Travis William

Chair dc:contributor.committeechair

• Vollmer, James M

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Roy, Lucinda H
• Lavender-Smith, Evan

• Performance
• Postmodernism
• Irony
• Sincerity
• Popular Culture

Statement dc:rights

• This item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. Some uses of this item may be deemed fair and permitted by law even without permission from the rights holder(s), or the rights holder(s) may have licensed the work for use under certain conditions. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights holder(s).

Dc Identifier Other

vt_gsexam:15693

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/115584