Date of Award
Summer 8-7-2025
Degree Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts - English
Department
English
First Advisor
Dr. Michael Martin
Second Advisor
Dr. Steve Marsden
Third Advisor
Dr. Bridget Adams
Fourth Advisor
Dr. Leslie Cecil
Abstract
Donald Ray Pollock’s 2008 short story cycle, Knockemstiff, is a regionalist work of grotesque Grit Lit featuring characters from a small, rural holler community in southern Ohio. This work examines the form, narratives, and characters through close reading, illuminating the layers of different liminalities present in the cycle. These liminalities include narrative liminality of the form of the short story cycle, the social and economic liminal spaces inhabited by the characters, and the ways that the text comments on the liminal nature of storytelling itself. This thesis will argue that the geography of the cycle’s setting coupled with the subject matter and contained by the form create irreconcilable, almost inescapable liminality and that Pollock’s use of the grotesque in these stories represents and reflects that irreconcilability.
Repository Citation
Ranniger, Celia A., ""Driving Circles Around the Holler:" Liminality and the Grotesque in Donald Ray Pollock's Knockemstiff" (2025). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 639.
https://scholarworks.sfasu.edu/etds/639
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
