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The Story Of Identity: Narrative Self-Fashioning In Kazuo Ishiguro’S A Pale View Of Hills And When We Were Orphans, Hayley Angle

English Theses

The moments we remember from our lives are the foundation of the stories we tell about ourselves. I have spent many a night trying to fall asleep by running through my memories like the montage scene of a movie—clips of a funny moment with a friend, the smile of a loved one, a stupid thing I said to someone I was supposed to impress. These moments I remember portray, at the deepest level, who I want to be, who I am scared to be, and who I most understand myself to be. Intentional remembrance, as opposed to actual experience, tends …

Catastrophe Of War, Sujit Kumar Singh, Ayushi Jaiswal

Critical Humanities

The paper selects the novel Palpasa Café (2005) by Nepali author Narayan Wagle to highlight the factors that contributed to the Maoist insurgency and counter-insurgency that punctured the Nepali consciousness. It will also critique Eurocentric trauma theory for diminishing the South Asian perspectives of trauma (incidents) from the main discourse of trauma theory. In addition, the paper will explore the detrimental impacts of war and conflict as experienced by Nepalese cops and civilians together, and its long-lasting imprint on their psyche as manifested in different forms of trauma in the text. The dissemination of the 'inarticulable trauma' concept into something …

“A More Perfect World”: Posthumanism And Technological Integration In A Memory Called Empire, Garrett R. Johnson

Masters Theses

This thesis considers the relationship of technology to the human through a posthumanist lens, questioning what will become of the human an increasingly more-than-human world through an examination of the novel A Memory Called Empire, by Arkady Martine. Through an examination of the imago device from the novel, the thesis evaluates the human experience of memory and the influence of empire. The thesis advances four key concepts: 1. The collapsed divide between the human and the technic through memory and imagination; 2. Technology’s development and use; 3. The user that is integrated with the technic; and 4. The poisonous influence …

Creatività Diasporiche Dialoghi Transnazionali Tra Teoria E Arti, Simone Brioni Dr., Loredana Polezzi Dr., Franca Sinopoli

Department of English Faculty Publications

Creatività diasporiche è un volume bilingue costituito da tredici conversazioni tra studiosi/studiose di materie umanistiche e artisti/artiste il cui lavoro si concentra sul tema della migrazione e dell’identità. I contributi nella raccolta abbracciano forme di produzione che vanno dalla letteratura alle arti visive, dal cinema alla performance teatrale, dai podcast alla musica rap, mentre tra le tematiche ricorrenti emergono dibattiti su identità, lingua, migrazione, memoria e cittadinanza. Questo volume è anche un invito a ripensare il lavoro creativo e quello accademico, in area umanistica, come intrinsecamente legati al dialogo e alla collaborazione. Ciascuna conversazione si concentra sull’Italia intesa come un …

Irreverent Womanhood: The Healing Of Intergenerational And Cultural Trauma In The Chicanx And Latinx Sonic Poetry Of Amalia Ortiz And Melissa Lozada-Oliva, Yasmine A. Gomez

Theses and Dissertations

The connections between nontraditional forms of literature and spiritual activism lie within the resistive practices of Chicanx Feminism. This thesis argues that cultural healing and social change is dependent upon the recognition of trauma as a step towards enacting social justice. Additionally, this thesis focuses on the figure of Coyolxauhqui and indigenous motherhood to reveal procedures for change. Through the theory of trauma, this thesis examines the nontraditional Chicanx/Latinx poetry of Amalia Ortiz’s sonic rock opera, Cancíon, Cannibal, Cabaret, & Other Songs and Melissa Lozada-Oliva’s novel in verse, Dreaming of You.

My investigation into the breaking of gendered …

Neil Gaiman's Elevated Fairy Tale: Childhood Trauma Through The Lens Of Postmodernism, Faith Adams

Student Works

In The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Neil Gaiman explores the influence of trauma on identity formation. In the sinister world of his liminal fantasy, Gaiman’s nameless narrator strives to assemble a comforting sense of identity in the midst of traumatic chaos. Viewed through a postmodern lens, Gaiman’s use of hypertextuality and non-linear storytelling undermines idealized views of objective truth and reality, ultimately suggesting that nothing in life can be reduced to a binary.

Ruptures In Indentures In Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter Of Maladies And Unaccustomed Earth, Prabal D. Gupta

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Jhumpa Lahiri (1967) is one of the prominent American writers of Bengali descent, contributing mainly to diaspora literature to depict the nuanced aspects of Bengalis in their immigrant lives. Lahiri’s stories in Interpreter of Maladies (1999) and Unaccustomed Earth (2008) illustrate the challenges of the Bengali diaspora due to their indentured identity, which I have used to refer to the Bengali people’s culturally-rooted identity. This study investigates how the diaspora’s native cultural identity fluctuates in connection with the host culture. The research renders a reconfigured image of “home” because the concept of home changes for these people after migration in …

Framing The Portrait Of Life: Functions Of Embedded Texts In Vladimir Nabokov's The Gift, Caroline Sisk

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

Disorientation Of Memory: Trauma, The 9/11 Novel, And Don Delillo’S Falling Man, Julia Walsh

English Honors Theses

This paper explores the literary devices and motifs used to portray 9/11 trauma on the page as representation for survivors and depictions of trauma for non-survivors. The paper focuses specifically on Don DeLillo's Falling Man as the quintessential 9/11 novel to provide analysis on the larger genre. DeLillo is experimental in his form within the novel, using fragmentation and disorientation to explore the nuances of memory function during and after a traumatic event. These nuances of memory delve into complications of remembrance such as PTSD, memory impairment diseases, and the impact of media on memory.

Finding Eternal Life At The Intersection Of Bergson And Proust, Kelly Capers

Graduate Research Showcase

Finding Eternal Life at the Intersection of Bergson and Proust is a research project that explores the relationship of spirit and matter attempting to answer the question: Does the Proust Effect prove humans have an eternal soul? The Proust Effect is defined as “the vivid reliving of events from the past through sensory stimuli” based on a passage in the novel Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust. Applying quantum mechanics to Proust’s themes of time and memory and philosopher Henri Bergson’s studies of matter and spirit, one can examine how the body and soul connect. Proust’s labyrinth of language offers a …

The Funeral's The Thing: Unification Through The Burial Rite In Hamlet, Ferrell J. Mowell

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The funeral service is an ancient custom that is deeply cultural, and Shakespeare uses it prominently in Hamlet. The play's ending with Fortinbras commanding a military-like tribute for Hamlet is somewhat surprising because Hamlet was never a soldier, and he has breached the etiquette of funeral rites in the cases of Polonius, by withholding the remains immediately after the death, and Ophelia by making a spectacle with Laertes in her grave. Additionally, he has arranged for the execution before the observance of confessional rites in the case of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Hamlet's dead march is an example of how …

"Never Forget": Embodied Absence And Extended Relations Of Care After 9/11, Sophie L. Riemenschneider

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a reflection on how loss was articulated in the wake of 9/11. The terror attacks engendered a memorial style that sought to give shape to grief, acknowledging it without filling it in or erasing it. This new style, which I term embodied absence, exists across a range of mediums, from literature to architecture. It is such a potent memorial form because it also captures the traumatic process, which is prolonged, layered, and potentially open-ended. However, despite their ability to mirror the nature of trauma, instances of embodied absence never verbalize the attacks’ root trauma—the disconnect between our …

Twistin’ The Night Away: Perverted Nostalgia In How I Learned To Drive, Coco Mcneil

English Honors Theses

This paper situates Paula Vogel's 1997 play How I Learned to Drive as an American memory play that is representative of 1990s cultural and political discourses rooted in nostalgia for the 1960s. By examining each character--the Greek Chorus, Peck, and Li'l Bit--within Lauren Berlant's 'intimate public sphere,' 1960s iconography, and memory practices, I argue that Vogel offers an allegory in Drive that characterizes this nostalgia as perverted and traumatizing rather than idyllic.

Memory, Identity, And World Ii In Australia: Liz Reed's "Bigger Than Gallipoli", Christopher T. Lough

Student Publications

This paper is structured as a review of Liz Reed's 2004 study Bigger Than Gallipoli: War, History, and Memory in Australia, an analysis of the Australian government's public commemoration of the Second World War from 1994-95. Critiquing certain aspects of Reed's methodology, I bring in some of Jill Ker Conway's insights on Australian identity from her 1989 memoir The Road from Coorain, as well as other scholars of historical memory and political theory. While Reed makes some important insights on the merits and deficiencies of political nostalgia, I argue that her book represents a missed opportunity overall.

This Is What Makes Us Girls: Recovering The Feminine Voice In Nabokov's Lolita, Amanda Wulforst

English Theses

Sigmund Freud established psychoanalysis as an attempt to uncover the inner mechanics of the human mind and treat mental neuroses. With this theory, Freud asserts that intrapsychic tensions between the conscious and unconscious can produce psychological issues. For instance, Freud addresses two types of emotional responses to loss in “Mourning and Melancholia.” In this essay, Freud states that mourning is a normal, conscious reaction to the libido’s forced detachment from a loved object. Conversely, Freud classifies melancholia as the extreme anguish over a lost ideal deeply buried in the unconscious; without an object-cathexis, the newly freed libido forms an identification …

Returning To Childhood: Memoirs Of Childhood Reading, Stephanie Montalti

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis analyzes Francis Spufford’s The Child that Books Built: A Life in Reading, Jane Sullivan’s Storytime: Growing up with Books, and Margaret Mackey’s One Child Reading: My Auto-Bibliography to investigate how memoirists recall events and reread stories from childhood. I argue that memoirs of childhood reading or bibliomemoirs temporarily fuse childhood and adulthood through the act of rereading, which produces emotional responses, and writing a memoir. By rereading childhood stories, memoirists identify with their child self and express feelings comparable to those they felt upon first reading. In bibliomemoirs, passive and active reading create what I describe as a …

Engl 110: College Writing (Writing About Memory), Evgeniya A. Koroleva

Open Educational Resources

English 110: Writing about Memory is designed to help students improve critical thinking and writing skills. Fundamentals of academic writing are practiced in relation to the subject of memory examined from historical, philosophical, scientific, psychological, literary, artistic, political, and cultural perspectives.

The Memorialist, Lindsey Houchin

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

The Memorialist is a work of creative nonfiction. In this long-form essay, the author digests the memories and secondhand stories unearthed while exploring the junked, rusted, and wrecked life of an eccentric uncle who was preceded in death by his sister, the author’s mother. Through its associative and slippery structure, it follows the author as she untangles two histories halted—connected, contrasting lives disrupted by death. Meditative and metaphorical, the narrative explores both the beauty and burden of death through the eulogy form in a quest to determine how to memorialize a life defined by what death leaves behind.

"Sometimes Your Memories Are Not Your Own": The Graphic Turn And The Future Of Holocaust Representation, Victoria Aarons

English Faculty Research

“The legacy of the Shoah” writes Eva Hoffman, a child of Holocaust survivors, “is being passed on to … the post-generation … The inheritance … is being placed in our hands, perhaps in our trust.” We are entering an era that will witness the end of direct survivor testimony. As we move farther and farther from the events of the Shoah, subsequent generations, who see their own lives shaped by the defining rupture of the past, continue to respond to the call of memory. The current era has seen a burgeoning of Holocaust literary representation in the evolving genre of …

Pictures Of Words: The Importance Of Visual Strategies In Tutoring Writing, Kylie Smith

Tutor's Column

An estimated 65% of people are visual learners. Additionally, research suggests that most people are more likely to remember learned concepts when those concepts are attached to visual aids. Unfortunately, Writing Center tutors often forget the importance of using visual strategies when tutoring writing concepts. The implementation of quick and simple visual strategies in tutoring sessions will help students retain information and help them become independent writers for life.

Revisiting Missions: Decolonizing Public Memories In California, Brenda M. Helmbrecht

English

Living in California seems to require interaction with the state’s twenty-one historic Spanish missions, either by visiting them as a tourist, driving by a mission in one’s neighborhood, or learning about them as a schoolchild. While the missions ostensibly celebrate California’s history, many promote an anachronistic and dishonest re-telling of history that elides the devastating impact of the missions on Native communities (both historically and today). The missions operate as largely uncontested tourist attractions that promote self-serving collective memories about California’s founding narrative. Rhetorical analysis, I argue, can lead to a more honest engagement with the “hard truths” of their …

Letters To My Dead Mom, Alexandra Mclaughlin

Creative Nonfiction MFA Theses

This thesis is a collection of letters to the author's mother spaced throughout seasons of the year.

Memory In T/Rubble: Tackling (Nuclear) Ruins, Marilena Parlati

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The 1945 bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki seem to have recently started to recede back in the memory of Western culture. 9/11 and the age of global warfare which we are in have averted our gazes away from that past, in our tremulous expectations of the next traumatic event. In the twentieth century, poets like Tony Harrison have tackled this delicate topic, while Japanese culture has in many ways been forced and willing to reconsider its own agendas and sense of identity from those ‘ground zeroes’ onwards. In both A Pale View of Hills (1982) and An Artist of the …

Between The Living And The Dead, Laura Henriksen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Throughout my studies at the Graduate Center, I have attempted to deepen my understanding of how some people, such as myself and my family, came to be white, and what that means, and how it can be undone. This question of whiteness has pushed me further back ontologically, or deeper down, to include how some people came to be human, and then even further, how some matter came to be living. In my thesis project I attempt to participate in dismantling one of the most fundamental binaries in binary thinking — the strict and uncomplicated division between the living and …

You Can Go Home Again: The Misunderstood Memories Of Captain Charles Ryder, Monica M. Krason

ETD Archive

Critics have frequently commented on the nostalgic tone of Brideshead Revisited. Their assessment has been largely negative, with most considering Brideshead too sentimental about England’s aristocratic past. This current characterization fails to recognize Waugh’s critiques of such thinking in Brideshead, wherein he upends the nostalgic tropes of popular Oxford novels, illustrates the dangers of both insulated upper class living and thoughtless presentism through his depictions of various characters, and proposes a greater metaphysical drama through memory is at play in the novel. Brideshead offers nostalgia as an enlivening force which allows Charles Ryder to maintain a vibrant understanding for who …

Tourists Of The Past: Topographies Of Memory In W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz, Ana Menéndez's Loving Che, And Teju Cole's Open City, Benjamin Lee Williams

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Examining, comparatively, the exemplary fictional texts of W. G. Sebald, Ana Menéndez, and Teju Cole enriches the study of exilic experience concerning cultural memory as their destabilization, while geographically and ethnically divergent, represents the constellations of mobility and potential for memory. As absences resonate and profoundly disrupt their works, there is a turn to histories to cope with traumas. By turning to the past, each writer confronts destabilization and uprootedness and, in doing so, plays a game with History. Readers play too as we search through the fictionalized lacunae to consider the extent to which we are complicit in the …

The Magic Of A Strange Sky : Nature And The Mysticism Of Memory In Beckett's Trilogy, Daniel James Warhol

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This essay attempts to examine the later prose of Samuel Beckett within the frame of a growing body of critical research that aligns the author’s universal philosophy of the human condition with Indian and Buddhist philosophies. Inspired by the research of Lidan Lin, in her essay “Samuel Beckett’s Encounter with the East,” and Paul Foster’s Beckett and Zen: A Study of Dilemma in the Novels of Samuel Beckett, I take up a similar line of inquiry, choosing to focus on moments in the trilogy that are concerned with contact between the individual and the natural world. While many critics have …

Where Woman Is Her Center: Interrogating Morality And Spatiality In The Works Of Joan Didion, Hannah Nicole Martin

Honors Projects

This project outlines new and expansive critical categories for discussing Joan Didion’s work through an interrogation of Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking and earlier personal essays using an interplay of close reading and affect theory. This paper seeks to help move the critical conversation in new directions by shifting the focus towards an analysis of Didion’s unique spatialization of memory, articulated through her use of particular details. Divided in two parts, the first section of this paper discusses The Year of Magical Thinking while the second engages in a dialogue with the critical voices surrounding Didion, as well as …

Remembrances Reconsidered: Site-Specific Affective Retellings, Melanie W. Lozier

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is an examination of the ways in which strong affective feelings, trauma, and memories are written about by women through diverse narrative forms. Through storytelling, writers engage with the relationship between deep feelings, significant places, and language, such as the frequent employment of words containing the prefix "re."

Seeing Trauma: The Known And The Hidden In Nineteenth-Century Literature, Alisa M. Deborde

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Trauma as an official diagnosis first entered the DSM in 1980 and literary theorists began employing the term to discuss literature not too long after. Since the 1990s, theorists have largely focused on twentieth-century trauma literature with Holocaust and Modernist texts garnering much of the critical interest. Yet, Victorian life was also marked by trauma-causing events. From railway catastrophes, to industrial accidents, to premature deaths, and infectious diseases, Victorians reckoned with wounds to the mind through their lived experience. Trauma scholars who do work with nineteenth-century texts, with few exceptions, consider trauma in terms of its modern theories. While the …