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theses

Other People is a story cycle that includes, for the purposes of this MFA thesis, five long stories, one short story, and one story yet unfinished. It is intended to be published in its entirety as a collection of connected stories, or a complete novel. The stories follow the journey of a circus troupe called the Majestic Oriental Circus through a somewhat anachronistic South Asia in the early twentieth century. The stories are fantastical, and are intended to explore different local mythologies, folk tales, storytelling techniques and ways of experiencing life in different parts of South Asia. Each of the stories is narrated in the first person by a different character, adding a multiplicity of voices and perspectives to the narrative, and complicating the nature of truth. At the craft level, it hopes to be an examination of verisimilitude as well as representation in fiction; and the subtle shifting and growing of oral stories with every retelling. In the structuring of this work, I have drawn influences from medieval story cycles (both Anglophone and not) like The Canterbury Tales of Geoffrey Chaucer, the Arabian Nights cycle of Middle-Eastern folklore, the tales of Vikram and Betaal from South Asian folklore, and the interchangeable story cycles of Akbarand- Birbal, Mullah Nasruddin and others which exist across several Islamic cultures. I have modernized the context of my work by also drawing from popular American comics story arcs—epitomized by DC and Marvel Comics—in which the stories of superheroes are forever revised and retold, each time by a different combination of narrators. What results, in both these very disparate instances, is not a single story that may be specifically pinned down as canonical and the rest discarded as apocrypha, but a “mythos” which surges and ebbs under various perspectives. The author I have most closely emulated in writing this thesis is the British fantasy writer Terry Pratchett, whose Discworld series of novels (1983–2005) grows similarly in the telling. Other authors whose works have lent inspiration to this thesis include Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Salman Rushdie, Angela Carter, Neil Gaiman, Octavia Butler, and Kelly Link.

ETD_8619

M.F.A.

by Monidipa Mondal

doi:10.7282/T3J106CT

ETD graduate

The author owns the copyright to this work.