Traps and Other Stories

Abstract

This selection of four short stories treats low-culture plots, subjects, and storylines, with high-culture rhetorical techniques. Taking as its sources material B-movies, or Portuguese plays from the 16th century, this thesis believes that the distinction between high and low art is nonexistent, another binary created where binaries do not exist. Literature is for, and made of, drunks, prostitutes, and thieves, as much as many honorable people. It is also attempts to be American, in the sense that the plots hint at violence, aberrant sex, and Christianity, the American trinity.