Digital Commons Network^™

Naturally: Memory In Verse, Heather L. Drouse

English Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis is a collection of free verse poetry that I have written that share a common theme of nature and family. This is a creative work that explores my personal memories and the feelings associated with them with the intention to spread joy and cause readers to reflect upon similar experiences they might have had as children. It consists of four major sections -- mother, father, love, and bridges -- and 18 poems, with "love" having 7 minor sections.

Unable To Locate A Fire, Lily Isabel Taggart

Senior Projects Spring 2023

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

Pendjur For Baba, Mina Emilia Dahl

Senior Projects Spring 2023

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

This Is The Sky That I See, Gavin T. Mckenzie

Senior Projects Spring 2022

This is the sky that I see, a Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College, reflects the power we hold in defining and redefining spaces, and how ordinary places can be reimagined for the Othered body. I produced this show to allow the characters to shape and decide their worlds, centering on their relationships and feelings. This is the sky that I see establishes a completely queer world that centers Queer joy and friendship.

Yo Soy Rumano (I Am Romanian): An Autobiography Exploring The Effects Of Memory And Trauma On The Formation Of The Self, Andrei Bucaloiu

Honors Theses

I came to the United States from Romania with my parents when I was two years old. This moment of cultural, linguistic, and geographic separation occurred before I was able to consciously recall it, yet it constitutes a traumatic experience, in the Freudian and Lacanian sense, that defines my positionality and serves as a primary space in which I seek to develop who I am. However, regardless of how much I have developed my ability to communicate in English, it is not the language of my emotional affect. At the same time, profound expression in Romanian is not possible for …

Memory And Identity: Inter-Generational Resilience And Construction Of Diasporic Identities Among Somali Refugees, Hamida Dahir Sheikh Ahmed

Master's Theses

The violence and displacement many refugees face often create a lifelong trauma that manifests in many ways within themselves, their families, and communities. The Somali refugee community in the United States is no different. Since their resettlement in America started in the 1990s following the civil war, the community has struggled with different manifestations of that trauma; substance abuse and gang violence among the youth, prominence of depression and suicide rates, rise of domestic violence, as well as other direct and indirect results associated with mental health. This is the reality of many refugee and immigrant communities, coming directly from …

Fragmented Worlds, Fractured Families - Narrative Levels In Graphic Memoir, Henry Wilson Essman

MSU Graduate Theses

This collection of creative writing explores the dynamics of parent-child relationships, as well as the way time can cause these roles to shift and reverse, bringing into question who has the right to tell another’s story. The individual pieces are both in the mediums of prose and graphic narrative, often focused on themes of family and trying to reconcile fractured perspectives. These works are introduced through an essay demonstrating how graphic narratives are uniquely situated to show narrative levels, and how narrative levels are key to showing the shifts in parent-child relationships and the way perspectives can differ while still …

Dimentia: Footnotes Of Time, Zachary Hait

Senior Projects Spring 2021

Time from the physicist's perspective is not inclusive of our lived experience of time; time from the philosopher's perspective is not mathematically engaged, in fact Henri Bergson asserted explicitly that time could not be mathematically engaged whatsoever. What follows is a mathematical engagement of time that is inclusive of our lived experiences, requiring the tools of storytelling.

The Youngest, Trezlen Drake

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is a collection of poems that considers life in a southern Black family, memory, nostalgia, dysfunction, race and gender, and generational trauma. These poems are influenced by poetry, fiction, music, popular culture, and scholarship, each providing a different perspective on life and language to talk about that which can sometimes be unspeakable.

A recurring character in this collection is the girlchild, reminiscent of Marge Piercy’s character in “Barbie Doll.” The girlchild here is the figure of the woman or girl who experiences trauma, and what some consider to be unspeakable.

These poems are also an exploration and disruption …

Shadow Smoke: A Nonfiction Collection On Memories Lost, Taken, And Storied, Sarah Ann Canterbury

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Shadow Smoke investigates the neuroscientific nature of memory and memory’s role/ authority in creative nonfiction as an illustration of how the genre lays the process of memory bare and accurately models the mind’s process of memory. The scholarship as well as body of creative works revolve around the understanding and tension of memory being a creative process which is explored through genre discussions, neuroscientific studies, and individual creative works. Shadow Smoke consists of four braided nonfiction essays and five nonfiction vignettes to form a collection on memories lost, taken, and storied framed by a critically researched introduction assessing the collection’s …

Cicadas & Other Hauntings, Miriam J. Anastasi

Senior Projects Spring 2020

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

In The Shadows And Folds, Julia Mueller

Senior Projects Spring 2020

In the shadows and folds is the result of a mental scavenger hunt that I began this past year, to uncover myself and find what is hidden in my crevices. It was spurred by my fear of memory loss which had grown to such a size that it sat visible in the back of my mind unaddressed for some time. The reason for this fear is not large but it feels monumental. I have been existing in various states of sadness and disconnect, which have acted like a thick blanket over my mind. This blanket is simultaneously protective and damaging, …

Asteraceae, Rachel G. Lyons

Senior Projects Fall 2020

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

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 …

"Quiddity | Leaving Home", Jonathan U. Barton

Theses and Dissertations

The poetry collection in four sections features pieces concerned with memory, particularly of the author’s childhood in Ireland. Difficult family relationships as well as early romantic failures are prominent obsessions. Landscapes and careful portraits of characters recur. Travel to Eastern Europe and within the author’s adopted United States give the opportunity to meditate on larger issues and spans of time. Domestic pleasures and the struggle to be a good parent and husband provide the ultimate trajectory of the work.

The nonfiction memoir consists of eight essays which tackle among other topics a failed first marriage, a return visit to the …

Plantain Stain, Loreli Mojica

Senior Projects Spring 2018

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

No-One Was Watching: A Collection Of Short Fiction And Stories Beyond The Gates: An Exegesis, Ann Elizabeth Horner

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

This research project asserts the primacy of creative practice as a key method of enquiry and explores how fictional stories, re-imagined from historical events of the mid-twentieth century, may provide different ways of viewing a world which was inhabited by once-silenced children, now known as the ‘forgotten Australians’. To this end, the thesis is made up of a creative component in the form of a book-length collection of short fiction that is accompanied by a critical component positioning the thesis contextually, theoretically and methodologically. The research reveals overwhelming evidence of a culture of endemic abuse within Australian child welfare organisations …

I Am A Branch In A Dark Room, Samuel Stenard

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

"I Am a Branch in a Dark Room"–– the first of two intersecting novellas–– relays the consciousness of Edmund, a young man trapped in a waking coma. He is able to hear the sounds of the care facility yet unable to directly engage them. To him, he seems only a mind, drifting untethered from the world around him; to the world–– and even his own mother–– he seems little more than a corpse. As the narrative progresses, his bearing is fractured and he reels toward the void. The self reduces: from an interior monologue, to a cluster of perception, until, …

Where They Wander, Kevin T. Gleich

Theses

The stories contained within are all concerned in one way or another with our memory. More specifically, what it means to remember something. With a fictional drug, referred to only as “serum,” the characters in these stories all fall victim to what can be described as an overdose of experience. Our memories are what allow us to develop ideology, our concept of self, and intimacy with others. Each story in “Where They Wander” deals in some way with these basic human traits by exaggerating the characters’ abilities to confront their experiences.

There is another thread that pulls these stories together. …

Blankets Of Memory: Short Stories, Kyle S. Kubik

Honors Undergraduate Theses

The collection of short stories presented in this thesis seeks to form a counter-narrative to the stigmas associated with mental illness and trauma through the portrayal of protagonists suffering from or affected by such issues. Individuals influenced by mental illness and/or trauma are not "others" deserving ostracization but fellow human beings searching for hope in a world too often touched by sorrow. The first three stories within this thesis address protagonists directly impacted by mental illness. "Twin Magnolias" follows Maggie Briggins, an elderly woman battling both paranoia and Alzheimer's simultaneously in a search for reality. "Fabergé" explores Candy Friedman's depression …

The Waters I Saw Drank Me In, Will Steen Strand

Senior Projects Spring 2017

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

The Places That Became Home: A Collection Of Short Stories And Memories, Stephanie Ewing Mace

CMC Senior Theses

This is a collection of short stories and memories from the eight places that I have lived. Through these stories and memories, I reflect on themes of identity and community. I also consider the idea of home: what defines a home, how we make a place feel like a home, and what transforms a city or a town into a home. Each chapter also includes my own original designs and photographs.

The stories about Sharon and Westwood, small towns in Massachusetts, focus on childhood and familial relationships. The narratives about St. Louis, Missouri and Toluca Lake, California, consider the transition …

Slow Emergencies, Jordyn N. Rhorer

Theses and Dissertations--English

Like the ever-circling lines in the skin of trees, sometimes the whole of a person is peeled back, layer by layer, until only seeds remain. Names, faces, stories, and relationships are unmade and molded into new shapes. Without warning, those left at the base, at the roots, can’t recognize this maple’s form. They hold a pile of leaves, a bottle of glue, and the hope that something familiar will take sprout again. The tree becomes new, and its tangled branches reach out. These poems explore the lives of those living with and caring for those with dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. …

Echoes, Sarah Abigail Adleman

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

When I was sixteen, my mother was killed one evening while running on the bayou behind our house in Houston. The man, who is now on Death Row in Texas, beat, raped, and then strangled her to death. Writer Mary Cappello says of Creative Nonfiction, to compose discursively requires that we turn in the direction of the discourses that have made us who we are rather than start from a place of what we think happened to us in the course of our lives. She goes on further to say, Creative nonfiction appreciates the power of prepositions. Instead of writing …

Narrativizing Pain: Reconstructing Selfhood Through Memory And Language, Erin Joy Carden

Senior Projects Spring 2016

The three female authors I study for this paper- Alicia Kozameh, Alicia Partnoy, and Nora Strejilevich- are all survivors of the Argentinean military Junta’s state-inflicted terror and who have written, with great beauty, about the horrors they experienced as political prisoners during the Dirty War. Through the written word these survivors gain the power to reclaim their human dignity and a sense of distinctive selfhood which were severely damaged through trauma and torture. Through analyzing four works: Steps Under Water(1996) by Alicia Kozameh, The Little School(1986) and Revenge of the Apple(1999) by Alicia Partnoy, and A Single …

A Landscape Of Days, Kassandra Alex Thatcher

Senior Projects Spring 2016

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

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), …

Memoric Form: Poem As Memory, Lawrence V. Eby

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Machinist in the Snow is a narrative long poem, much like a novel in verse that deals with the loss of memory and environmental rebirth. In the book, the narrator exiles himself into a frozen nature and attempts to return the frozen wasteland into its former, flourishing environment. The poems take on the memoric form of memory in a wide range of poetic forms from the traditional sonnet, haiku, or villanelle, to a scattered projective verse. In the center of these poems is an attempt to mimic the mind in the way that it shifts, in its moments of clarity, …

The Prologue Past, Raymond Mckee

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Prologue Past is a collection of four essays and one novella which explore the past in different fashions. Memory, and the ability to reflect and find meaning in our experiences, is an important cornerstone of engaging the past. Memories are a true anomaly of how our inner-consciousness operates. With each day, the past facilitates a special part of our memory bank which we seldom have any control of. While the abilities of people to recall times, events, places, and experiences differ largely in capacity, we all undoubtedly share universal traits in the manner in which we hold onto our …