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Mitigating Black Claustrophobia: Space, Trauma, And Healing Modalities In The Postcolonial Narrative., Saleema Mustafa Campbell Dec 2020

Mitigating Black Claustrophobia: Space, Trauma, And Healing Modalities In The Postcolonial Narrative., Saleema Mustafa Campbell

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines the space or spaces of blackness and the black body in the United States. This nation was shaped by the institution of slavery, and its greatest legacy is the trauma that still resonates in social structures and spaces complicating the lived experiences of many. The various responses to these traumas are documented in literary form by authors who serve as cultural witnesses. The narratives featured in this research project, collectively and individually, offer a voice to the traumatic plight of individuals in the U.S. who struggle to contemplate and rectify the traumas of this nation’s past. This …


Critiquing Psychiatry, Narrating Trauma: Madness In Twentieth-Century North American Literature And Film, Sarah Blanchette Aug 2020

Critiquing Psychiatry, Narrating Trauma: Madness In Twentieth-Century North American Literature And Film, Sarah Blanchette

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation explores representations of trauma and mental distress in twentieth-century novels and films. Drawn on research that emphasizes the ways that marginalized communities—in particular women-coded, racialized, and Indigenous persons—have historically been pathologized, the thesis considers how select novels and films query biomedical approaches to mental illness and critique psychiatric contexts, which prioritize social control more than they provide substantive and humane forms of support and care. How might representations of trauma and mental distress be understood without confirming regimes of psy-authority or psy-power? The thesis takes up this core issue by building on theories drawn from Mad Studies, illuminating …


Trauma, Violence, And Deathly Consequences: Female Justice In Contemporary Literature And Television Adaptations, Allie Owens May 2020

Trauma, Violence, And Deathly Consequences: Female Justice In Contemporary Literature And Television Adaptations, Allie Owens

English MA Theses

Over the past decade, a familiar villainous character has begun to arise in television adaptation: the mentally-fractured heroine who turns to villainy: women who have been attacked, raped, or lost loved ones to villains. These attacks and losses trigger murderous rampages and other violence that often leads to their descent into villainy. Netflix’s Jessica Jones, George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, and its television adaptation Game of Thrones, feature heroines that turn to violence to get revenge. However, the violent heroines in these texts and television adaptations do not just become villains; some …


Colonial Trauma And Testimony In Mary Shelley’S Frankenstein And Jamaica Kincaid’S Autobiography Of My Mother, Leana Rene Jan 2020

Colonial Trauma And Testimony In Mary Shelley’S Frankenstein And Jamaica Kincaid’S Autobiography Of My Mother, Leana Rene

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis will examine Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle to examine the colonial trauma and loss found in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Jamaica Kincaid’s Autobiography of My Mother, not just on a character level, but in a much larger colonial context. Some scholars have suggested that Shelley’s monster is a symbol of a colonized other (due to his appearance and certain features he has). Kincaid’s Xuela is for sure a colonized other because of the heritage of her mother. This thesis explores their abandonment by their creators as the abandonment of colonized nations from their colonizers. Even now, formerly colonized …


Maladaptive Grief: Irish And American Experiences Of Loss, Mourning, And Trauma, Abby Hey Jan 2020

Maladaptive Grief: Irish And American Experiences Of Loss, Mourning, And Trauma, Abby Hey

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Literature that responds to loss and expresses mourning, a genre referred to as the elegy, traditionally follows an adaptive pattern in which a mourner reaches consolation and comfort. In the modern period, however, mourning transformed into destructive experiences that were notably private. With this phenomenon of greater social and emotional isolation, writers like Sylvia Plath, Samuel Beckett, and Elizabeth Bishop expressed rumination and irresolution. In contrast, before the twentieth century, elegies were not only more consolatory, but there was a greater emphasis on shared feeling, and this communal type of mourning is more often adaptive. By grieving together in the …