Burning Skies: A Novella

Burning Skies is a seventy-page novella completed as an Honors Thesis in Creative Writing. The story is set in Los Angeles, California, during the 1992 riots surrounding the controversy over the beating of Rodney King by four white police officers. The story is toldthrough the perspectives of the four main characters: Erin, a woman who is four months pregnant with a baby she desperately wants; her husband David, who has moved the couple out to California so that he can pursue his dream of being a cinematographer; Abby, David’s deeplyreligious younger sister who has unexpectedly flown out to Los Angeles from her home in Indiana after discovering her husband’s infidelity; and Cameron, a black man training to be a pastor who Abby has befriended through her years of missionary work in Los Angeles.The novella follows the events of the riots as they break out all across the city and the personal dramas of each of the four main characters, looking at how the public interacts with theprivate and examining the ways in which explosions in the public and political sphere can ricochet into our private and personal lives. It is a story about the political and racial climate in Los Angeles in the early 1990s, but it is also a story about four human beings, about their needs and their desires, about their struggles to survive in an unpredictable world. The novella showcases the skills and techniques the author has learned after four years of studying fiction at Bucknell University; it can best be described as a work of realistic fiction.

Representations of the Human/ Nonhuman Primate Divide: the Influence of Science, Fiction, and Science-Fiction on the Concept of 'Being Human'

For as far back as human history can be traced, mankind has questioned what it means to be human. One of the most common approaches throughout Western culture's intellectual tradition in attempts to answering this question has been to compare humans with or against other animals. I argue that it was not until Charles Darwin's publication of The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871) that Western culture was forced to seriously consider human identity in relation to the human/ nonhuman primate line. Since no thinker prior to Charles Darwin had caused such an identity crisis in Western thought, this interdisciplinary analysis of the history of how the human/ nonhuman primate line has been understood focuses on the reciprocal relationship of popular culture and scientific representations from 1871 to the Human Genome Consortium in 2000. Focusing on the concept coined as the "Darwin-Müller debate," representations of the human/ nonhuman primate line are traced through themes of language, intelligence, and claims of variation throughout the popular texts: Descent of Man, The Jungle Books (1894), Tarzan of the Apes (1914), and Planet of the Apes (1963). Additional themes such as the nature versus nurture debate and other comparative phenotypic attributes commonly used for comparison between man and apes are also analyzed. Such popular culture representations are compared with related or influential scientific research during the respective time period of each text to shed light on the reciprocal nature of Western intellectual tradition, popular notions of the human/ nonhuman primate line, and the development of the field of primatology. Ultimately this thesis shows that the Darwin-Müller debate is indeterminable, and such a lack of resolution makes man uncomfortable. Man's unsettled response and desire for self-knowledge further facilitates a continued search for answers to human identity. As the Human Genome Project has led to the rise of new debates, and primate research has become less anthropocentric over time, the mysteries of man's future have become more concerning than the questions of our past. The human/ nonhuman primate line is reduced to a 1% difference, and new debates have begun to overshadow the Darwin-Müller debate. In conclusion, I argue that human identity is best represented through the metaphor of evolution: both have an unknown beginning, both have an indeterminable future with no definite end, and like a species under the influence of evolution, what it means to be human is a constant, indeterminable process of change.