Award Date
May 2023
Degree Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Fine Arts (MFA)
Department
English
First Committee Member
Donald Revell
Second Committee Member
Claudia Keelan
Third Committee Member
Jarret Keene
Fourth Committee Member
Ying Bao
Number of Pages
69
Abstract
PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION is a book-length poem that uses two images: the Chinese character for dismantle, 拆, and the Beijing Subway map. 拆 was the character that government contractors spray painted on condemned buildings in urban renewal projects in Beijing. It is made of two components, hand and rebuke, which together mean dismantle. In Beijing, the neighborhood I grew up in went through two major changes according to urban renewal policy pushes: the first, destroying vernacular architecture, grey brick hutongs and replacing them with an exercise park; the second, further destruction of vernacular architecture and informal buildings to widen a street by two lanes. I needed to map movement, as movement is the permanence state of the city. According to the UN Report, “World Urbanization Prospects, 2018 Revision,” “more people live in urban areas than in rural areas, with 55 per cent of the world’s population residing in urban areas in 2018. In 1950, 30 per cent of the world’s population was urban, and by 2050, 68 per cent of the world’s population is projected to be urban.” I wanted to explore the types of environments that people live in and that I lived in. My project is a rejection of the idea that one must leave other people and the city to find beauty or connection, while acknowledging that many urban spaces do often oppress and confuse the “you” that moves through the city. Urban built environments generate perception in an individual that the individual remembers, and the rapid changes in built environments displace individual and collective memory. My primary goal, above all personal, global, or national context of the present, was to generate a beautiful and true art object.
Disciplines
Creative Writing
Degree Grantor
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Language
English
Repository Citation
Stallings, Benjamin, "Public Transportation" (2023). UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones. 4784.
https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/thesesdissertations/4784
Rights
IN COPYRIGHT. For more information about this rights statement, please visit http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/