The Dead Fish at Twenty Mile and Other Stories from Bodock, Mississippi
Document Type
Thesis
Degree
Master of Fine Arts (MFA)
Major/Program
Creative Writing
First Advisor's Name
John Dufresne
First Advisor's Committee Title
Committee Chair
Second Advisor's Name
Denise Duhamel
Third Advisor's Name
Bruce Harvey
Date of Defense
3-8-2011
Abstract
THE DEAD FISH AT TWENTY MILE AND OTHER STORIES FROM BODOCK, MISSISSIPPI is set in a mythical town of nine-hundred-and-forty-eight Bodockians on the northwest corner of fictitious Claygardner County. Much like the canon of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha works, the stories in this collection contribute to the myth of Bodock-from the fictional town's origins sometime in the 1830s, to the turn of the twenty-first century-while exploring such themes as mortality, regret, folklore, the New South at the end of the twentieth-century, and the relationship between man and nature. With the exception of the title story, the occasion for these stories is the ice storm which devastated much of the Mid-South in 1994. To accomplish this myth creation, the stories often employ folklore, magical realism, pathos and comedy, and storytelling, as influenced by Lewis Nordan's Welcome to the Arrow-Catcher Fair and Flannery O'Connor's A Good Man is Hard to Find.
Identifier
FI14051896
Recommended Citation
Busby, Robert, "The Dead Fish at Twenty Mile and Other Stories from Bodock, Mississippi" (2011). FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 1870.
https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/etd/1870
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