Date of Award

2022

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Philosophy (Ph.D)

Department

English

First Advisor

Steven Mentz

Second Advisor

Amy King

Third Advisor

Stephen Sicari

Abstract

The 21st Century has ushered in a need to problemetize and challenge traditional boundaries between social and philosophical realms. It is therefore more important now than ever to revisit the classification of literary genres, specially the short story. Through the intersection of queer, literary, and ecocritical theory, this book reexamines the current identity of the contemporary American short story in order to posit that it is a queer formation, a hybrid of both the novel and the poem, among the generic literary landscape. Through this queer literary form, the short story subsequently has the ironic potential to reveal insight into 21st Century heteromasculinity. More specifically, this dissertation will examine five of Benjamin Percy’s short stories, a writer who both maintains some of the masculine characteristics of Hemingway’s hypermasculine characters and natural environments and reenvisions heteromasculinity and the relationships between men and natural spaces, in an effort to offer new models of heteromasculine behavior in the 21st Century.

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