"Driving Circles Around the Holler:" Liminality and the Grotesque in Donald Ray Pollock's Knockemstiff

<p>Donald Ray Pollock’s 2008 short story cycle, Knockemstiff, is a regionalist work of grotesque Grit Lit featuring characters from a small, rural holler community in southern Ohio. This work examines the form, narratives, and characters through close reading, illuminating the layers of different liminalities present in the cycle. These liminalities include narrative liminality of the form of the short story cycle, the social and economic liminal spaces inhabited by the characters, and the ways that the text comments on the liminal nature of storytelling itself. This thesis will argue that the geography of the cycle’s setting coupled with the subject matter and contained by the form create irreconcilable, almost inescapable liminality and that Pollock’s use of the grotesque in these stories represents and reflects that irreconcilability.</p>

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Arts - English

Level thesis:degree_level

Thesis

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

English

Year dc:date.available

2025

Author dc:creator

• Ranniger, Celia A

Contributors dc:contributor

• Dr. Michael Martin
• Dr. Steve Marsden
• Dr. Bridget Adams

• pollock
• knockemstiff
• short story cycle
• liminality
• regionalism
• American Studies

Repository record dc:identifier

https://scholarworks.sfasu.edu/etds/639

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:scholarworks.sfasu.edu:etds-1674