Arts and Humanities Commons^™

You Don’T Even Need The Ghosts: A Writer’S Look At The Turn Of The Screw, Andrea M. Schenkel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The novella Turn of the Screw by Henry James was first published in 1898 as a serialized novel in Collier's Magazine. The short novel is characterized by its concise language. James chooses words carefully and consciously. The linguistic compression forces the reader to deal intensively with the main protagonists of the novel: the Governess, the children, Miles and Flora, and Mrs. Grose. Nothing is as it seems. James aims to challenge the reader by forcing them to constantly question what they read.

Countless essays have been written about the text since the novel was published. The figures, especially those …

Haunting At Troy: Troy Narratives, Trauma, And Desire For The Past In Late Medieval English Literature, Woo Ree Heor

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The mythical city of Troy functioned as an imagined point of origin for many medieval nations, providing a tangible connection to the legendary past and nation-building tools useful for the ruling class. Troy provided a convenient foundation narrative upon which ideas of collective identity could be built for these nations, and England, where construction of a homogeneous past was difficult due to frequent ruptures in its development of communal identity, was an eager producer and consumer of such a legitimizing device. However, the trauma of war and destruction intrinsic in Troy narratives also generates potent political anxiety about the reanimated …

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. …

Diy The Process Of Healing From Trauma Through Woodworking, And Living Off Grid, Rachel A. Pollock

Theses and Dissertations

DIY is a website and short hybrid documentary that explores off-grid living, the longing for authenticity and healing from trauma. It is also about clinging to memories, even ones that may be painful, and the desire to move on. The website, Bare Minimums explores healing through the written word, and the short documentary “Home Is Where You Park It” explores the processing of trauma through video. They are two different approaches that evoke completely different emotions and outcomes. Processing memories and trauma through these mediums shows a kind of nostalgia for what once was, mixed with uncomfortable feelings that anticipate …

Shocking, Heartbreaking, Transformative, Jess Shane

Theses and Dissertations

Shocking, Heartbreaking, Transformative is a 4-part creative non-fiction podcast that problematizes the use of personal stories in the documentary industry and examines the power dynamics between documentary-makers and their subjects. The series features a story within a story: it follows me, documentarian Jess Shane, as I craft short documentaries about four individuals’ lives— individuals who have applied to participate in my project by responding to an online ad. It also dives into the behind-the-scenes decisions required to tailor individuals’ life experiences to conform to industry standards of what makes a “good story.” In tandem, these two narratives— of me producing …

I, Discomfort Woman: A Fugue In F Minor, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

"Dear Stanford: You Must Reckon With Your History Of Sexual Violence" By Seo-Young Chu, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

In 2000 a Stanford professor raped me. My rape is now older than I was. (I’m still not as old as he was.) The more time passes the more I’m struck by Stanford’s apathy and fecklessness about sexual violence. I wrote a letter asking Stanford to stop compounding the abuse and to reckon with its rape culture. This letter—including the “Incomplete Compilation of Links to Sources Documenting Stanford’s History of Sexual Violence, in Chronological Order”—should be mandatory reading for administrators, faculty, students, alumni, and stakeholders at both Stanford and CUNY. #MeToo #MeTooAcademia

Bells Like Hooves, Elizabeth Mixter

Theses and Dissertations

BELLS LIKE HOOVES is an exploration of grief and love. This play wrestles with what it feels like when someone disappears, or “ghosts”, and the complexities of survivorship. The play delves into what it means to be the one who’s left behind, our need for stories, and the limits of language.

Anamnesis: A Film About Forgetting, Neville Pullar Elder

Theses and Dissertations

In the film Anamnesis I bear witness to the injury and death of my childhood best friend Dominic, when I was 11. The film is a quest: A search for a visual memory that I have forgotten or perhaps, deliberately hidden from myself. Can remembering the events in their entirety and chronological order help me heal? Is searching for the lost memories nothing more than a smokescreen to avoid the steps I must take to deal/heal the trauma?

I communicate the relationship between the interplay of memory-making and sense-making and the reconstruction process that enables our past and present to …

Cùng Với Nhau Chung Tay: A Collaborative Project With Vietnamese American Youth, Khanh Le

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The purpose of my research is to document, remember and reflect on the experiences of Vietnamese Americans. To create a space in which Vietnamese American youth can co-labor (García, 2020) and co-produce knowledge to disrupt the silence surrounding their lived experience in the U.S., I drew across methodological traditions for this collaborative project. In doing so, I seek to answer the following questions:

1. How do Vietnamese American youth view/narrate their lives and relationships to the past and the present in the U.S. and Vietnam?
2. What do youths’ narratives communicate about their transtrauma?

This collaborative project drew from translanguaging and …

"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 …

How She Haunts: Missed Endings, The Fragmentary, And The Female Figure In British Romanticism, Jane Clare Bolin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation I discuss a relatively small grouping of fragmentary texts by Coleridge (Sibylline Leaves, “The Three Graves,” “Christabel,” and “Kubla Khan”), De Quincey (Suspiria de Profundis), and Keats (“La Belle Dame Sans Merci” and Lamia). In critical discussions of the Romantic fragment, it is most often referred to as incomplete, lacking closure, and unintentionally so. The fragments I have chosen to include transcend such a reading of lack and embrace a perpetuation of possibility. My claim is not that these are exemplary British Romantic fragments but rather that they lend themselves to a …

Unsettling, Cynthia Groya

Theses and Dissertations

Unsettling is an experimental essay film created during COVID-19 shelter-in-place isolation, documenting remembrances of traumatic life events and the impact these memories have on my vision and life. Preparing to leave my home, my marriage and the lifestyle I have inhabited for fourteen years, I contemplate, “What are memories?” “What do you hold onto from the past and what do you let go?” This film documents my personal journey exploring love, loss, denial, grief and acceptance, told in the third person. The personal ramifications of historic racism, cancer, divorce and white supremacy and the role these issues play in the …

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 Life Of Dan, Jeremy S. Levine

Theses and Dissertations

The Life of Dan is a hybrid film about the complications of brotherly love and working through the horrors of the past. The film explores past traumas between brothers Dan and Jeremy through their shared love of horror films. As they work through unsettled moments from their childhoods, building towards Dan’s temporary hospitalization, the documentary transforms into a horror film about mental illness and traumatic memory.

Binaural: Trauma And Disability Representation In Cinema, Joshua Grossberg

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the year 2019, the film business is undergoing profound change. Streaming services like Netflix and Amazon have become major distribution outlets, threatening the hegemony of traditional Hollywood studios and altering the kinds of movies that receive a theatrical release. Gone is the middle budget film, replaced by franchises like Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Fast and the Furious and Star Wars based on already popular intellectual property. But that's not all. In the wake of the fallout of the #OscarsSoWhite controversy and the #MeToo Movement, for the first time serious efforts are being made both outside and inside the industry …

Translator Of Soliloquies: Fugues In The Key Of Dissociation, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

Chu, Seo-Young. “Translator of Soliloquies: Fugues in the Key of Dissociation” (chapbook). Black Warrior Review 46.2, Spring 2020.

Contradictions Of Freedom In The Tempest And The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao, Menaka Serres

Theses and Dissertations

In William Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1610-1611) and Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) the character negotiate contradictions of freedom: the entitlements that justify violence as well as oppression on the one hand and rights that grant access to emancipation from violence and imposition on the other.

Between Time, Evan Remick

Theses and Dissertations

Between Time is an intimate conversation between transgender artists on their own terms. The film is a ritual in entering the past and writing the future from the present moment. Conversations weave through natural landscapes and present as both intensely personal and connected to a greater story about the vastness of trans experience.

"Mute Flesh": Women's Death-Worlds In David's Story And Waiting For The Barbarians, Kate Finley

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis expands upon Achille Mbembe's theory on necropower and death-worlds to incorporate the consideration of gender. This is done using the lens of violence against women during South African apartheid and through an examination of two novels: Zoë Wicomb's David's Story and J.M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians.

La Vigencia De Lo R/Real: La Memoria Traumática Y El Relato Policial Postdictatorial En Argentina Y Chile, 1996–2015, Jelena Mihailovic

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The present dissertation investigates crime fiction produced in Argentina and Chile between 1996 and 2015. It offers an analytical and critical reflection on five Argentinian works (four novels and one movie) and four Chilean novels. The Argentinian corpus includes the novels El secreto y las voces (2002) by Carlos Gamerro, A quien corresponda (2008) by Martín Caparrós, El espíritu de mis padres sigue subiendo en la lluvia (2011) by Patricio Pron, and Una misma noche (2012) by Leopoldo Brizuela, and the movie El secreto de sus ojos (2009), directed by Juan José Campanella. The Chilean novels are Estrella distante (1996) …

"Free Indirect Suicide: An Unfinished Fugue In H Minor", Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

In this lyric essay/work of creative nonfiction (listed among “Notable Essays & Literary Nonfiction” in Best American Essays 2020), Seo-Young Chu uses poetry, autotheory, and creative nonfiction to explore the generational trauma/postmemory han she inherited from her parents and the importance of destigmatizing mental illness through dialogue.

Reframing As Reclamation: Trauma Theory, African Spiritualism, And Ecocriticism In Jesmyn Ward’S Sing, Unburied, Sing, Alexandra Cohl Ms.

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis explores how ecocriticism and trauma theory intersect within Jesmyn Ward’s novel Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) to tackle the complex act of collective healing. Trauma, and its subset transgenerational trauma, have often been a focal point for critical analysis of other African American texts that engage with ghosts and hauntings, such as Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987). Often, these ghosts are symbolic of transgenerational trauma in fictional works. While this association is apparent in Ward’s novel, this thesis applies the aforementioned modes of scholarship alongside African-based spiritualism to investigate further the inclusion of ghosts. To accomplish this approach, this thesis …

I Know You Are, But What Am I?: The Language Of Trauma And Identity Formation In Virginia Woolf’S Mrs. Dalloway And Vladimir Nabokov’S Lolita, Claire A. Setton

Theses and Dissertations

This paper delves into Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, and Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, looking at how the instability seen in the narrative structure of the novels correlates to the impact of trauma on the psychoanalytic development of the characters.

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."

Better Than Before, Makia Harper

Theses and Dissertations

Better than Before is an experiential art installation that profiles the life of James Isreal, a Vietnam vet who shares a spiritual journey that is filled with self-discovery, introspection, and hope in the midst of war and abhorrent racism. His poignant retrospective follows his struggle to find peace in the midst of trauma and disease, providing life lessons that transcend the pangs of adversity and the unknown.

A Refuge For Jae-In Doe: Fugues In The Key Of English Major, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

"A Refuge for Jae-in Doe: Fugues in the Key of English Major"

Author(s):

Seo-Young Chu (see profile)

Date:

2017

Subject(s):

Feminism, Creative nonfiction, Asian American literature, Sonnets, Social justice, Trauma

Item Type:

Essay

Tag(s):

#MeToo, Stanford, women in academia, early american

Permanent URL:

http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/cp82-8f39

Trauma And Human Objecthood, Leslie Kelman

Theses and Dissertations

I am processing recent traumatic personal content in multiple media. This investigation dovetails with the work I was conducting previously, that of contemplating humans as objects continuous with their environment. This represents a reduced position in the biological hierarchy for humans, or a rejection of the hierarchy itself.

Not Black Or White, Lori Balaban

Dissertations and Theses

No abstract provided.

The Journey Back: Revisiting Childhood Trauma, Ruth Lipman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the adult's endeavor to revisit childhood trauma in four sets of literary texts that are not typically studied together. These works, all published after 1968, address the central problem of revisiting childhood trauma in order to open a potential for mourning and sometimes for healing. I explore connections between individual/family trauma and collective/historical trauma. I argue that the use of objects and/or photographs is integral to the process of touching and representing the buried, embodied wounds of childhood, propelling the journeys and conveying the experience to the reader. Each pairing of literary works concerns a different kind …