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Beyond Me: Class, Sexuality, And The Work Of The Autobiographical Fragments Of Audre Lorde, Dorothy Allison, And Eileen Myles, Erin E. Heiser

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation looks at what I am calling the “autobiographical fragments” of three working-class, lesbian (or queer) authors: Audre Lorde, Dorothy Allison, and Eileen Myles whose writing is stylistically quite different from one another’s, but who nonetheless have all produced bodies of work that represent bits of their lives over and over and in different ways, sometimes overlapping in time and narrative detail. While there are certainly other writers whose work shares many of the same characteristics, I argue that the autobiographical fragment has special significance for marginalized subjects. Woven throughout the dissertation are many of my own autobiographical fragments …

Grieving: A Record Of My Becoming, Neyshka Diaz Maldonado

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This memoir travels into my experience growing up in Puerto Rico throughout moments of joy, sorrow, triumph, and growth. Through memorable recollections and introspective thoughts, the memoir navigates memory, offering insights into my relationships, aspirations, and struggles. Each chapter unfolds and captures the essence of my life up until this moment.

I explore my ability to overcome challenges with resilience and grace, discovering strength in vulnerability and wisdom in the face of adversity. Through moments of self-discovery and profound transformation, they unearth the threads of my resilience, embracing both the light and shadow that define my life experience.

This memoir …

Negotiated Access: Haccessibility, Autonomy, And Infrastructure In The Age Of The Abstraction, Patrick Smyth

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Negotiated Access asks how we can exercise our values from within systems and structures over which we have little control. The project, fundamentally, is about autonomy, a specific form of resistance to control, or the ability to act on values or goals despite influence from outside or above. Negotiation, here, is the ongoing encounter with enclosing or encircling systems, entities, or spaces. It is the gap, the small room for maneuver, between ourselves and the physical or social environment.

The project begins with local and concrete challenges and radiates outward to analyze and critique broader structures, forces, and institutions that …

Inclinaciones Del Yo: Aproximaciones Desde El Afecto Y La Vulnerabilidad A La Literatura Y El Cine Autobiográficos De La España En Crisis (2008–2019), Salvador Gómez Barranco

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores the autobiographical literature and cinema produced in the context of a Spain in Crisis (between 2008 and 2019), using recent theories on affect (Brian Massumi, Sarah Ahmed ...) and vulnerability (Judith Butler, Adriana Cavarero…). Through comprehensive close reading, it examines three novels (Clavícula by Marta Sanz, Ordesaby Manuel Vilas and El amor del revés by Luisgé Martín) and three films (Mapa by Elías León Siminiani, True Love by Ion de Sosa, both representative of the Other Spanish Cinema, and Dolor y gloria by Pedro Almodóvar) in order to identify the “inclinations of the …

The Communal "I": Exclusion And Belonging In American Autobiography, Melissa Coss Aquino

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Communal “I” in American autobiography emerges as an aesthetic response to the pressure of using “the master’s tools” to write from a community on the margins to disclose identity in the conflicts of exclusion and belonging. In this case “the master’s tools” to refer to several distinct elements the communal “I” is tasked with navigating: the use of what we have come to identify as standard English, the form and function of European autobiography as a celebration of individual exceptionalism, and the contradictory pressures on these autobiographies to both elevate and protect the communities in question from further marginalization. …

Memory In Memoir & Biography: Science, Place, And Agency, Johnathan E. Longo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis explores modern scientific understanding of memory in humans and how it affects works of life writing. Scientific research shows that memory is unreliable and often misunderstood by the general public, and this has implications for different forms of life writing. This paper uses biographies, memoirs, and hybrid forms of life writing to explore how memory, with all its limitations, is used in service of a life story. How do writers of these sub-genres use memory and why are those strategies different from one another? Questions of agency and authority over written and spoken material make the issues still …

Genres Of Feminist Lives: Autobiography, Archives, And Community, 1970-1983, Meredith A. Benjamin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The desire to record lives and the conviction that such recordings would serve an important purpose for other women were the motivations behind much of the autobiographical writing in U.S. feminist writing of the 1970s and 80s. In Genres of Feminist Lives: Autobiography, Archives, and Community, 1970-1983, I argue that feminist writers in this period used autobiographical writing to create a sense of community among their readers: a new feminist public. Realizing the inadequacy of a sense of identification, these writers encouraged their audiences, in the words of Audre Lorde, to transform silence into language and action. While scholars …

A Dark Record: Criminal Discourse And The African American Literary Project, 1721-1864, Brian Baaki

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A Dark Record charts the emergence and traces the evolution of a central figure in American culture, the myth of the black criminal. It does so both to explore the ideological effects of print, and to present an alternative history of African American literature. Historians have long maintained that the association of African Americans with crime solidified in our national culture during the post-Reconstruction period, the nadir for African American civil rights, with a corresponding rise in the over-policing of black individuals and communities. For its part, my study looks back from the post-Reconstruction period, and examines the role earlier …

Educating Desire: Auto/Bio/Graphical Impressions Of Addiction In/And Alcoholics Anonymous (Aa), Peter Waldman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is an attempt to connect the personal with the socio-historical--addiction with Addiction, respectively. It is also an attempt to demonstrate that knowledge production can be generated through radically non-traditional means.

What follows is an interpretive, impressionistic, exploratory narrative about addiction in/and Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). It is also a narrative about Narrative. I 'tell' a semi-fictional auto/bio/graphical tale of one 'open' AA meeting in order to disclose what it's like to be an addict and a newcomer in AA. In the 'notes' sections after all but one of the chapters the sober researcher takes over. These 'made-up' aspects of …

The Vastness Of Small Spaces: Self-Portraits Of The Artist As A Child Enclosed, Matthew John Burgess

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A tent of bed sheets, a furniture fort, a corner of the closet surrounded by chosen objects--the child finds or fashions these spaces and within them daydreaming begins. What do small spaces signify for the child, and why do scenes of enclosure emerge in autobiographical self-portraits of the artist? Sigmund Freud's theory that the literary vocation can be traced to childhood experiences is at the heart of this project, especially his observation that "the child at play behaves like a writer, in that he creates a world of his own, or rather, re-arranges the things of this world in a …