Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Trash, Fragments, And Breaking Things: Toward A Grotesque Cripistemology For Disabled Life Writing, Michelle Anne Lloyd

All Dissertations

Despite the boom of memoirs of mental health post-1997 and the first advertisements for Prozac, most of them follow the same formula and come from the same places of privilege. This privilege is evident in the author bios on the books themselves and the careers of the writers. The popularity of these books within both abled and disabled realms has therefore created a script that those with mental illnesses are expected to abide by. Following in the example of Margaret Price, Katie Rose Guest Pryal, Merri Lisa Johnson, and others, I resituate mental illness as mental disability and place it …

The Politics & Poetics Of Audience Creation In Contemporary Epistolary Memoir, Sarah M. Davis

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and Kiese Laymon’s Heavy as works of life writing that leverage the epistolary form to engage their direct maternal addressees and audiences beyond them in revision and reconstruction of identity. Secondary audiences are considered in light of Michael Warner’s “Publics and Counterpublics,” and the social affordances of the epistolary form and self-constructive affordances of life writing are analyzed in tandem as a hybrid epistolary memoir form. Specifically, this project explores how the epistolary memoir form affords Vuong and Laymon opportunities for the process of personal, relational, and communal identity construction, …

Dorothy Wordsworth, Religion, And The Rydal Journals, Emily Stephens Kasper

Theses and Dissertations

Dorothy Wordsworth’s religious practices continued to evolve throughout her life. She was baptized Anglican, but after her mother’s death she resided with her mother’s cousin, where she practiced Unitarianism. When she later moved in with her uncle, she embraced evangelical Anglicanism. Records of her religious beliefs in her twenties are scarce, as after moving to Racedown with her brother William in 1795 and throughout her years living in Alfoxden, she rarely wrote of her involvement with organized religion. Only in the 1810s while at Grasmere did Dorothy Wordsworth begin to record a gradual return to church attendance. Concerning her religious …

The Secret Life Of A Black Aspie: A New Form Of Slave Narrative, Justin Rizzi

English Honors Theses

In Anand Prahlad's 2017 memoir The Secret Life of a Black Aspie, he describes his upbringing as a Black child growing up on a plantation in Virginia. Through his claims to speak to the spirits of enslaved people and his unique perception of chronology, Prahlad creates a memoir that works as both a neo-slave narrative and a first-person memoir of slavery, and this only becomes possible through his necessary dismissal of neurotypical and Western ideals of how time, memory, and place work.

From Real Life To Story – And Back Again: Using Autobiographical Fiction Writing To Understand Self, Others And Family Generations, Alberta N. Adji

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

Writing autobiographically includes complicated responsibilities to the subjects involved: to family members, friends, colleagues, and even cultural communities. This article explores creative developments occurring during the process of writing an autobiographical novel called ‘The longing’, which is drawn from a recollection of intergenerational lived experiences of a middle-class Chinese Indonesian family from 1956 to 2018. I reflect on my strategies and approaches on tackling challenges that arose while using autobiographical material and autofictional techniques to write fiction and communicating cultural complexities for it allows agreeable distance between the author and her writing subject. In the article, I also argue that …

Twenty-Nine Delusions Concerning Love, Jackie Donaldson

Masters Theses

Twenty-Nine Delusions Concerning Love is the story of my relationship. I narrate the relationship's unfolding through the contexts of philosophy and cultural theory, and through artifacts of my own work rendered since the relationship's inception in December of 2020. The purpose of this project was to identify a gap in the autotheory genre, and to fill that gap with my own meaningful contribution -- a book which hybridizes life writing with prose and poetry. This piece is both a narration of my own experience, and an investigation into hookup culture and the way technology has redefined the modern romantic relationship. …

A Contemplative And Artful Métissage Of Inquiry And Response, Jackie Mitchell, Nicholas Phillips, Robyn Trail, Susan C. Walsh, Barbara Bickel, Wendalyn Bartley, Medwyn Mcconachy

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

In this mixed media métissage, we offer an exploration of artful and contemplative inquiry and response. We are a group of seven artist-researchers who engage with contemplative practices associated with various spiritual traditions, including spiritual feminist, Wiccan, Mi’kmaw, and Tibetan Buddhist, integral to all of which are beliefs about human interconnectedness with the energies of all sentient beings, the Earth, and beings in the spirit worlds. As artist-researchers, we engage with a range of arts disciplines including poetry, creative non-fiction, storytelling, sounding, visual art, filmmaking, and photography. Together, we invite the reader/listener/viewer--as co-creator—into the potentialities of our métissage: the narratives, …

Female Autistic Perspectives: Limits In Diagnosis And Understanding, Alexandra Helmers

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder has increased dramatically within the last two decades, with males being diagnosed, on average, four to five times more than females. Although researchers in the medical community have searched for a biological explanation for this discrepancy, no definitive cause has been found. I argue that our understanding of autism is primarily a social and cultural construction, in addition to a diagnosable medical disorder. The gender disparity in diagnosis reflects cultural narratives surrounding social interaction and the widespread belief in two distinct gender roles. Furthermore, narratives surrounding the topic of autism tend to unintentionally highlight …

Aesth/Ethics Of Distance: (Un)Veiling Grief In Rosa Montero’S La Ridícula Idea De No Volver A Verte, Deirdre Kelly

Books/Book Chapters

This chapter analyses the generically hybrid auto/biographical grief memoir, La ridícula idea de no volver a verte (2013), by the well-known contemporary Spanish author and journalist, Rosa Montero (b. Madrid, 1951), as a singular text within the Spanish tradition of life writing. The book traces a number of parallels between Montero and her biographical subject, the Polish scientist and two-times Nobel prize winner, Marie Curie—particularly regarding their respective grieving processes in widowhood. This chapter contextualises Montero and her text within the Spanish tradition of life writing and discusses Montero’s ethics and aesthetics of distance and how she negotiates with the …

Emancipating The Passive Muse: A Call For A Feminist Approach To Writing Biographies On Historical Women, Ina C. Seethaler

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

This essay analyzes two popular biographies on historical women to interrogate how a focus on gender has shaped the genre: Nancy Ruben Stuart’s The Muse of the Revolution: The Secret Pen of Mercy Otis Warren and the Founding of a Nation (2008) and Jung Chang’s Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China (2013). I argue that biographers who perpetuate gender stereotypes miss a momentous opportunity during the current life writing boom in the United States to educate readers on women’s social, cultural, and political contributions worldwide. In proposing that feminist-informed biographies are more accurate, complete, and make social …

No More False Heavens: In The Wake Of Campus Sexual Violence, Destry Sibley

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project [https://arcg.is/0zy0eb] explores the crisis of sexual assault on college campuses. The project draws on a collective "biography" of women students and their experiences, as well as creative writing and data visualization. It exists on the web and uses a mix of media -- data interactives, photographs, writing, audio, video, and annotated text are all possible mediums. (Only audio is collected from interviewees.)

Through this project I seek to consider issues of gender and inclusion within a college institution, with a particular focus on the built environment of the campus as metaphor. How does the architecture of …

Conformity And Digression: Change Of Narrative In A Chinese Peasant's Personal Writing, Danping Wang

Masters Theses

Rural China has gone through dramatic transformation from the Mao era to the post-Mao era. China scholars have been studying the institutional changes closely in the past few decades. However, Chinese peasants’ living experience and their memory and understanding of the past have not yet received enough attention and discussion. By examining personal writings of a peasant named Luo Xuechang in Jiande, Zhejiang province, this paper discusses the complex interactions between the state and the individual. This paper attempts to unfold the juxtaposition of state narratives and personal narratives embedded in Luo’s unpublished memoir, almanacs from 1972 to 1980, notebooks …

A Girlhood Among Ghosts, An Experimental Project, Maple Wu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“If a woman is going to write a Book of Peace, it is given her to know devastation” – Maxine Hong Kingston, The Fifth Book of Peace.

I do not believe I know devastation. I think to be devastated means one has to experience extreme pain, and live in the aftermath of trauma. I think of this in terms of war, famine, and immigration. A little self-reflection shows that in the twenty-something years of my life, I have not encountered any of the three things listed.

What I do recall, however, is the first time I picked up Maxine …

Believing Mary Karr, Stephanie Rae Guedet

Theses and Dissertations

Believing Mary Karr examines how belief, represented in the memoirs of Mary Karr, works in our contemporary moment. This examination is supported by the argument that our identities and the stories we tell about them are always constructions of belief, and that these beliefs are ultimately relational, enacted in the intersubjective relationship between writers and readers of autobiography. This dissertation provides the fields of both rhetoric and life writing studies not only an awareness of how ideas about belief—how beliefs about belief—have already shaped our scholarly imagination but also the possibilities a rhetoric of belief can offer to future conversations …

Braving Shame: The Rhetoric Of Bravery In Contemporary Women's Memoir, Debra Gayle Parker

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation interrogates the rhetoric of bravery as a culturally-infused way of hearing certain kinds of personal narratives. As a cultural rhetoric, “bravery” has deep roots in masculine militaristic ideology in which cowardice, courage, and shame are conceptually linked to a sense of duty. The memoir industry represents one environment that archives what is valued as brave writing. As rhetoric precariously at work in the memoir industry, this dissertation investigates the cultural assumptions that drive literary bravery as it is used to assess contemporary memoirs, particularly memoirs written by women. Braving Shame invokes a new brand of bravery—one that de-emphasizes …

Swimming In A Sea Of Hypocrisy?: The Ethical Ambiguity Of David Rieff's Memoir, Carolyn Rickett, Paul T. Race, Jill Gordon

Carolyn Rickett

When noted intellectual Susan Sontag died from myelodysplastic syndrome in 2004 aspects of her illness trajectory and death were captured and curated by photographer Annie Leibovitz. The harrowing photographs of Sontag’s diseased body – and later her corpse laid out in a New York mortuary – were included in travelling global exhibitions and were further commodified in Leibovitz’s book which she titled A Photographer’s Life. The historical events of Sontag’s illness and death were therefore (re)written and (re)presented in a way that involved commercial gain. Sontag’s son, the journalist David Rieff, registered his contempt for the perceived exploitation/unmaking of his …

Swimming In A Sea Of Hypocrisy?: The Ethical Ambiguity Of David Rieff's Memoir, Carolyn Rickett, Paul T. Race, Jill Gordon

Paul Race

When noted intellectual Susan Sontag died from myelodysplastic syndrome in 2004 aspects of her illness trajectory and death were captured and curated by photographer Annie Leibovitz. The harrowing photographs of Sontag’s diseased body – and later her corpse laid out in a New York mortuary – were included in travelling global exhibitions and were further commodified in Leibovitz’s book which she titled A Photographer’s Life. The historical events of Sontag’s illness and death were therefore (re)written and (re)presented in a way that involved commercial gain. Sontag’s son, the journalist David Rieff, registered his contempt for the perceived exploitation/unmaking of his …

Introduction To And Bibliography For The Study Of Alimentary Life Writing And Recipe Writing As War Literature, Louise O. Vasvari

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Introduction to and Bibliography for the Study of Alimentary Life Writing and Recipe Writing as War Literature" Louise O. Vasvári defines the concept of "alimentary life writing" and locates it in the broader multidisciplinary context of alimentary history, the history of everyday life, gender studies, trauma, and war and holocaust studies. She also underlines and exemplifies the cultural and gendered significance of alimentary life writing in particular in grounding personal and collective identity formation in the female immigrant and ethnic and multicultural writing. Vasvári also compares and contrasts such life writing to wartime food memoirs, as well …

Negotiating War And Peace In Chân Không's Learning True Love And Kingston's The Fifth Book Of Peace, Christopher Kocela

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Negotiating War and Peace in Chân Không's Learning True Love and Kingston's The Fifth Book of Peace," Christopher Kocela analyzes Sister Chân Không's autobiography and Maxine Hong Kingston's memoir as examples of women's transBuddhist life writing about cultural differences and transnational communities in the wake of war. Kocela argues that Chân Không's autobiography advocates a form of community building based on a nondiscriminatory practice of empathy that supersedes the need for forgiveness or vindication among participants in the Vietnam War. Kingston's memoir, by contrast, advocates Chân Không's teaching while raising questions about the political implications of …

Post 9/11 And Narratives Of Life Writing, Conflict, And Environmental Crisis, Simon C. Estok

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Post 9/11 and Narratives of Life Writing, Conflict, and Environmental Crisis" Simon C. Estok argues that there are four seemingly disparate and disconnected topics — war, migration, ecophobia, and life writing — which need to be discussed in tandem in order to produce deeper understandings of both the production and effects of post 9/11 narratives. Estok argues that narrative landscapes changed radically since the beginning of the twenty-first century and that this results in a combined effect both of terror reportage and of environmental crisis narratives. The pace and character of reportage blurred, erased, and expanded various …

A Female Adolescent Bystander's Diary And The Jewish Hungarian Holocaust, Gergely Kunt

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "A Female Adolescent Bystander's Diary and the Jewish Hungarian Holocaust" Gergely Kunt analyzes the unpublished diary manuscript of Margit Molnár, a Hungarian Roman Catholic adolescent girl born in 1927 who kept a diary between 1941 and 1949. Kunt's analysis shows how Molnár viewed Jews, the persecution of Jews, and the anti-Jewish terror in Budapest. As the diary documents, Molnár's views of the Jews temporarily changed during the Arrow Cross's reign of terror in October 1944 when she received news of the Arrow Cross murdering Jews en masse in Budapest. However, once the war was over, Molnár's deep-seated …

"Being Singular Plural" In Chi's 巨流河 (The Great-Flowing River), Tsu-Chung Su

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "'Being Singular Plural' in Chi's巨流河 (The Great-Flowing River)" Tsu-Chung Su explores the way Pang-yuan Chi organizes her life stories in her 2009 autobiography. Born in Mainland China, Chi is a renowned Taiwanese editor, scholar, and writer who started her autobiographical novel at age 81. In her text Chi describes life stories in a war-torn era, features her migration from the north to the south (1930 to 1950), her experiences in the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) and the Chinese Civil War (1927-1950) culminating in her successful academic career in Taiwan (1950-). Chi's life stories are infiltrated with …

Women Writing For Other Women In Colombia’S Current Armed Conflict, María Mercedes Andrade

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Women Writing for Other Women in Colombia's Armed Conflict" María Mercedes Andrade compares Patricia Lara's Las mujeres en la guerra (2000) and Patricia Tovar's Las viudas del conflicto armado en Colombia: Memorias y relatos (2006). Andrade's objective is to compare how these texts of testimonios deal with the question of representing women's experience and of turning oral testimonies into writing. Lara, writing for a popular audience, edits her material in order to make it more literary and mixes fictional accounts with the testimonios she collects. In contrast, Tovar writes for an academic public and reflects about the …

African American Masculinity In The Wartime Diaries Of Two Vietnam Soldiers, Sharon D. Raynor

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "African American Masculinity in the Wartime Diaries of Two Vietnam Soldiers" Sharon D. Raynor discusses an unpublished diary (1967-68) written by her father, Louis Raynor with the diary (1965-66) of David Parks that was revised and published as a memoir. By contextualizing the traditions of African American autographical writing and wartime diaries, Raynor analyzes how African American masculinity permeates the autobiographical structure in the Raynor and Parks diaries as each soldier interweaves a collective experience with a unique personal experience in the Vietnam War. The Vietnam experience challenged their ideologies about racial politics, but affirmed their masculine …

En-Gendering Memory Through Holocaust Alimentary Life Writing, Louise O. Vasvári

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "En-gendering Memory through Holocaust Alimentary Life Writing" Louise O. Vasvári aims to underline the cultural and gendered significance of the sharing of recipes as a survival tool by starving women in concentration camps during the Holocaust and the continuing role of food memories in the writing of Holocaust survivor women she considers a genealogy of intergenerational remembrance and transmission into the postmemory writing of their second generation daughters and occasionally their sons. Vasvári argues that the study of multigenerational Holocaust alimentary life writing becomes important today because as direct survivors of the Holocaust disappear there is a …

The Soldier As "I"-Witness In Novels By Barbusse And Ehni, Jane E. Evans

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "The Soldier as 'I'-Witness in Novels by Barbusse and Ehni" Jane E. Evans discusses the representation of the French soldier in two first-person accounts based on life writing journals. The first, set during World War I, describes the simple ground soldier or troufion (Le Feu). The second, set during the Algerian War for Independence and later, sketches the life of the French army conscript. Three themes in Evans's analysis predominate: the narrators' reliance on life writing as sources of inspiration in both Henri Barbusse's 1916 Le Feu and René-Nicolas Ehni's 2002 Algérie roman, the narrator's …

Virtue: A Life Of Mary Wollstonecraft, Jessica Mcgivney

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis is a screenplay for an imagined "biopic" of Mary Wollstonecraft. Wollstonecraft has already been the subject of many biographies, each presenting their authors' own understanding of her life. Here, I present my view, guided -- to varying and sometimes conflicting degrees -- by my understanding of her own fictionalized autobiographical efforts; by my understanding of Godwin's attempted work in his Memoir of the Author of the Vindication of the Rights of Woman; by the idea that her beliefs about virtue and freedom drove her forward through her own life; by the needs of narrative structure and the challenges …

In The Interval Of The Wave: Prince Edward Island Women's Nineteenth- And Early Twentieth-Century Life Writing By Mary Mcdonald-Rissanen, Joshua Bartlett

The Goose

Review of In the Interval of the Wave: Prince Edward Island Women's Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Life Writing by Mary McDonald-Rissanen.

Huang's And Donaldson's Global Shakespeares And The Digital Turn, Tsu-Chung Su

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Huang's and Donaldson's Global Shakespeares and the Digital Turn" Tsu-Chung Su explores the Global Shakespeares Video & Performance Archive <http://globalshakespeares.org> founded by Alexander C.Y. Huang and Peter Donaldson. Su traces the nature and history of the Archive and its raison d'être of the two founders' concern with archives and archival performance. Further, Su examines how authority and order are exercised in the project with regards to its purposes, cybernetic laws, digital logics, and the overall organizing principles concerning the Archive, its potentials, gains, and prospects, as well as its limits, difficulties, and disadvantages. Overall, …

Storied Truths: Contemporary Canadian And Indigenous Childhood Trauma Narratives, Michelle Coupal

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation reconceptualizes generic distinctions between fiction and testimony in accounts of childhood trauma. Scholars such as Leigh Gilmore have argued that while writers of trauma stories are burdened by legalistic definitions of evidence and anxieties about truth-telling, they nonetheless push at the limits of autobiography, often scuffing the border between fact and fiction, in their effort to bring their traumatic stories into language. There has not, however, been a sustained effort to understand and legitimize the place of fiction in testimony, particularly in cases of adult narrations of recovered memories of childhood traumas. My research addresses this lacuna by …