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All Feathers And Attitude, Virginia Macdonald

All NMU Master's Theses

This collection of essays and prose poems seeks to examine the elements of an identity: how memories, culture, work, place, family, and brain chemistry simultaneously create and undermine a sense of self. How the sense of self is not contiguous, or smooth. How hope and regret wrestle.

While deeply personal, All Feathers and Attitude is not a memoir, but rather an assemblage of interpretations based on actual events. The individual pieces are gathered into sections that correlate somewhat to the themes mentioned above, but the sections are not labeled as such. The readers may draw whatever conclusions they wish regarding …

The Historian’S Daughter (A Novel); Monsters And Memory (An Essay), Rashida Murphy

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

This thesis comprises two parts, a novel and an essay. ‘The Historian’s Daughter’ is a work of fiction based on family memories and historical research that speaks to the trauma of abandonment and displacement in an immigrant family living in Australia. The accompanying essay is titled ‘Monsters and Memory’ and is an autoethnographical text which combines theoretical, experiential and embodied research to argue that the inclusion of women’s stories, particularly those of trauma and abuse, must be foregrounded in any exploration of cultural and diasporic memory. Drawing primarily on the work of Said (1978, 1993, 1999, 2001), Bhabha (1990, 1994), …