Creative Writing Commons^™

Stopped Before Beauty: Meditations On The Closed Door, Hannah Celia Harwell Fassett

Senior Projects Spring 2017

This project is an integration of nonfiction vignettes within a critical study of personal writer’s entryways into the beauty and meaning of the world. Using the religious metaphysics and aesthetic theory of Simone Weil, I will trace the intersections between beauty and shame in the genre of personal essay, diary-keeping, and memoir across various cultural moments. It will travel between Westerbork Transit Camp through Etty Hillesum’s diary, the outskirts of Bard College in Mary Gaitskill’s Lost Cat, and Virginia Woolf’s summer dwelling, St. Ives, through A Sketch of the Past. Finally, in echoing that process of writing-through, I will step …