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"Only A Girl Like This Can Know What's Happened To You" : Traumatic Subjects In Contemporary American Narratives, Allison Virginia Craig

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This project is primarily concerned with the difficulty of representing traumatic experience and the problem of seeing violence and exploitation as natural and inevitable functions of social life. It argues that texts attempting to expose exploitive hierarchies and structural injustices often risk having their stories subsumed and commodified by the profuseness and proliferation of countervailing messages about individual choice and personal freedom. This struggle is highlighted through historicizing five contemporary American narratives--Margaret Atwood's Bodily Harm, the films Boys Don't Cry and Monster, Toni Morrison's Beloved, and Linda Hogan's Solar Storms--with and against critical concerns and popular texts. Furthermore, by employing …