Western Michigan University ScholarWorks at WMU Dissertations Graduate College 6-2000 Utah Jazz, A Novel Dairen DeFrain Western Michigan University Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/dissertations Part of the Fiction Commons Recommended Citation DeFrain, Dairen, "Utah Jazz, A Novel" (2000). Dissertations. 1445. https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/dissertations/1445 This Dissertation-Open Access is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate College at ScholarWorks at WMU. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks at WMU. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. UTAH JAZZ, A NOVEL by Dairen DeFrain A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of The Graduate College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English Western Michigan University Kalamazoo, Michigan June 2000 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. UTAH JAZZ, A NOVEL Darren DeFrain, Ph.D. Western Michigan University, 2000 This novel concerns a young Mormon who has fallen away from his religion and his family and juxtaposes his struggles with his faith, belief and heritage with those of a drifter deliberately distancing himself from a much darker past The novel is also acutely interested in place and landscape as powerful originations of any contemporary sense of paradise and perdition we may hang onto. The episodic setting of the novel, in conjunction with the narrator’s story, concurrently traces the National Basketball Association’s Utah Jazz’s 1996 play-off appearance. The novel uses this setting to examine the ways in which the basketball team’s search for an identity is in some ways reflective of the both the narrator’s and the state of Utah’s searches for their respective identities.