Author: Thomas Thomas
Major: Psychology, Creative Writing
Approved: Spring 2019
Status: Completed
With the dawning World War I, humanity entered a new stage of warfare, by combining inventive ability with industrial production to mass produce brutal and efficient abattoirs of death. This era of military innovation continued into the second World War. Caught in the midst of all this technology and death were ordinary people pushed to their limits by extraordinary circumstance. These people had experienced things beyond common comprehension, and from these experiences they began to produce creative works. These works took the form of visual art, poetry, and literature. Much of this literature fell into the categories of Dystopian and Science Fiction.
My project will be the examination of the interplay between technology, conflict, and humanity through the exploration of media borne from the dawn of modern warfare (WWI-II) and the creation of my own media with these interlocking themes at its core. During this project I will research works of poetry, visual art, and fantastic fiction produced in the World Wars era, examining these works for overarching themes in the Literary sense as well as details regarding the craft of these works, and how they were produced in the Creative Writing sense. From my research I will then produce works of my own. This will include a series of short stories set in a fantastic alternative-historical world, told through a graphic novel serialized for digital release, supplemented with other pieces of visual art and poetry in the post-war surrealist style.
