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Woman Flytrap, Brianna Jo Hobson
Woman Flytrap, Brianna Jo Hobson
Student Theses and Dissertations
Woman FlyTrap is a short story zine collection that explores the topic of sexual violence through the perpetrator and victim relationship with an explicit lens. Replete with cultural and entomological themes and motifs, Woman Flytrap seeks to remind survivors that we are not alone. In our bodies or in our lives. Neither in the world. There are over a million insects to every human, proving that there is strength in numbers. All five stories in the collection present different abstracts: revenge, transformation, justice, healing, body image, self-harm, mourning, etc. There is also a playlist and a section about the author. …
Invisible Ailments: A Collection, Jane L. Godiner
Invisible Ailments: A Collection, Jane L. Godiner
Honors Projects
"Invisible Ailments" is a collection of short stories that trace the depth, breath, and sweeping range of lived experiences of people struggling with mental illness. While it is a work of fiction, the people in these stories might feel eerily familiar — to your friends, your family members, your loved ones, or, if you're brave enough to admit it, yourself.
Investigating How Reading Enhances Empathy: A Longitudinal, Diary Study Of Everyday Reading Habits, Caleb H. Mitchell
Investigating How Reading Enhances Empathy: A Longitudinal, Diary Study Of Everyday Reading Habits, Caleb H. Mitchell
CGU Theses & Dissertations
Empathy is the social glue that holds people together, and one way to enhance empathy is through reading fiction. Though reading can enhance empathy, there is little understanding of the mechanisms by which it does so. The purpose of this dissertation is to investigate how time spent reading enhances empathy. I posit that two reading experience variables, narrative transportation and reading flow, mediate the relationship between reading and empathy. This is because transportation, feeling absorbed into a story, helps bring characters to life and increases readers’ emotional connections, and reading flow, a balance between skill and challenge while reading, can …
What We Owe To Our Audience: The Hermeneutical Responsibility Of Fiction Creators, Kathryn Wojtkiewicz
What We Owe To Our Audience: The Hermeneutical Responsibility Of Fiction Creators, Kathryn Wojtkiewicz
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
The goal of this project is to provide a theoretical underpinning for the belief that creators of fiction should dedicate time to diversifying the cast of characters in their fictions, and to avoiding harmful stereotypes when doing so. I establish this as a hermeneutical responsibility: because of the epistemic influence fictions can wield over their audiences, trafficking in harmful stereotypes of marginalized identities (instances of which I call Bad Representation Problems) or excluding marginalized identities entirely (which I call No Representation Problems) from one’s fictions can reinforce harmful beliefs about real people with those identities. The more popular the fiction, …
Madwomen And Mad Women: An Analysis Of The Use Of Female Insanity And Anger In Narrative Fiction, From Vilification To Validation., Lindsay Haralu
Madwomen And Mad Women: An Analysis Of The Use Of Female Insanity And Anger In Narrative Fiction, From Vilification To Validation., Lindsay Haralu
College of Arts & Sciences Senior Honors Theses
This project examines the use of female insanity and anger in narrative fiction, as demonstrated by the character of the madwoman. Madness is a concept that has long been gendered female throughout Western history, in medicine, language, religion, and culture. Socially and culturally constructed madness can be used to determine the boundaries of society, the norms and values from which “madness” deviates, while the character of the madwoman can be used to demonstrate how women have challenged these boundaries and how the roles of women and definitions of femininity have changed over time. This study analyzes the madwoman trope from …
The Inevitability Of Collision: Creating Empathy Through Fiction, Danielle Beckman
The Inevitability Of Collision: Creating Empathy Through Fiction, Danielle Beckman
Regis University Student Publications (comprehensive collection)
While the stigma for mental illnesses has greatly declined in the last decade, there is still a disconnect between individuals without neurological illnesses and those with neurological illnesses, especially those that cause individuals to lose contact with reality. The goal of this interdisciplinary paper is to create empathy for these individuals, specifically people with schizophrenia, Alzheimer disease, and post-traumatic amnesia. Through a collection of four stories told from the perspective of these unreliable narrators, I used fiction writing techniques from the field of cognitive literary studies such as gapping and defamiliarization to create more empathy in the reader. In reading …
Social Justice: A Catholic Autistic Perspective, Rebecca Schneider
Social Justice: A Catholic Autistic Perspective, Rebecca Schneider
Honors Projects
This is a collection of short stories about social injustices impacting the autistic community and how Catholic Social Teaching supports a more just approach. It is written from an autistic perspective and informed by the stories of people who are actually autistic. Each story is followed by an analysis that explains the choices made, which are backed by both research and the experiences of the autistic writer and the autistic community. This collection also includes information on how justice can be attained on the individual level by allies and on the institutional level by organizations.
Cultivating Empathy In Middle School Students Through Narrative Fiction, Kane M. Hamilton
Cultivating Empathy In Middle School Students Through Narrative Fiction, Kane M. Hamilton
Educational Specialist, 2009-2019
The purpose of this study was to investigate whether reading narrative fiction can potentiate empathy in middle school students. Participants were randomly assigned to two groups: narrative fiction group and expository nonfiction group. Participants in the narrative fiction group were asked to read a passage from a novel selected from the 5th grade Common Core reading curriculum. Participants in the expository nonfiction group were asked to read a passage from a science book from the 5th grade Common Core science curriculum. Pretest and posttest data were collected using the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI). Results of this study indicate …
Inner Experience While Reading Fiction: A Descriptive Experience Sampling Exploration, Vincent Peter Brouwers
Inner Experience While Reading Fiction: A Descriptive Experience Sampling Exploration, Vincent Peter Brouwers
UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones
Reading is ubiquitous. In Western culture, childhood education places a strong emphasis on acquiring the ability to read. Whereas many studies have examined the cognitive processes underlying reading ability, no previous studies have used a high-fidelity method of sampling inner experience to examine the direct, momentary inner experience while reading. The current study used the Descriptive Experience Sampling Method (DES) to explore the inner experience of 17 undergraduates, who had been trained in DES, while reading classical short stories. We found that participants while reading often innerly saw a visual depiction of the story, though the congruency of these depictions …