The Men That Sleep Built

Date of Award

2018

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts in English

Department

English

First Advisor

Derek Nikitas

Abstract

The Men that Sleep Built, a collection of short stories, is an experimentation with the formal narrative elements that represent observable trends across a select body of texts from the genre of gay literature. This collection points to stylistic commonalities between texts that give the genre a distinctive, cohesive formal body, and is an attempt to offer an alternative representation of gay literature as a genre that not only possesses its own mythos, symbols, and taxonomies, but that also occupies its own unique stylistic category. This collection, gestures toward the importance of style as a series of inherited techniques—acknowledgements of historical and cultural meaning, which point to commonalities not only between the stories that are being told, and have been told, but also the formal devices that a group relies upon to tell its stories. Gay literature should be understood as an art-form that depicts a mode of being, and that mode of being is best captured through attention to the stylistic and formal elements of storytelling.

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