| Creative Dissertation: The Connoisseur of Pain is a comic noir set in Hollywood in 1962, and its central conceit is that cartoons are real, live-action films starring anthropomorphic animals that cartoonists later replicate frame by frame in order to make the violent content palatable to children. The book's protagonist and narrator is Tom Grimalkin, Tom of Tom and Jerry, who begins sleuthing around Hollywood after a series of talking animal actors are murdered; simultaneously he stars in an all-animal staging of Hamlet at the Hollywood Bowl. Taken together, The Connoisseur of Pain is a mix of The Public Burning, The Big Sleep, and Kiss Me, Kate.;Critical Dissertation: This dissertation analyzes the theological consequences of the formal aesthetic choices in Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life, Ron Hansen's Mariette in Ecstasy, and the landscape paintings of Thomas Kinkade. My contention is that these works attempt to convey ecstatic religious experience formally, through beauty and sublimity. |
