Date of Award
2024
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts (MA)
Department
English
Committee Chair
Joe Conway
Committee Member
Eric Smith
Committee Member
Alanna Frost
Research Advisor
Joe Conway
Subject(s)
Adrian Jones Pearson--Criticism and interpretation, Adrian Jones Pearson--Cow country, A.J. Perry--Criticism and interpretation, A.J. Perry--Twelve stories of Russia, A.J. Perry--Old People, Cow Eye Press, Intertextuality, Parafiction
Abstract
Cow Eye Press, A.J. Perry, and the pseudonymous Adrian Jones Pearson have largely been ignored by academics. Between 2001 and 2021, Perry composed a collection of texts which this study calls the Cow Eye Project. The project received brief attention when critics and journalists began comparing Pearson to Thomas Pynchon. However, the online spectacle overshadowed engagement with the texts themselves. This thesis exists to document the project and foreground Perry’s works on their own merits to examine their value and position within contemporary American literature. Previous scholars have treated the texts individually. This thesis argues that the central texts of the project, Twelve Stories of Russia, Cow Country, and The Old People, should be interpreted collectively—as a sequence of texts, or literary triptych—with which Perry challenges biography, authorship, structure, and form by blurring subject/object, fiction/nonfiction, and modernity/postmodernity through metatextual, intertextual and parafictional practices.
Recommended Citation
Galliher, James A., "Constructing other worlds: an intertextual analysis of Cow Eye Press, Adrian Jones Pearson and the works of A.J. Perry" (2024). Theses. 709.
https://louis.uah.edu/uah-theses/709