Arts and Humanities Commons^™

“Beating Back The Past”: The Psychological Justifications Of Violence In Toni Morrison’S Fiction, Catherine Buhse

English Honors Theses

This thesis examines the traumatic experiences that consume characters’ lives and, in the absence of psychological healing efforts, manifest into violent actions in Toni Morrison’s three novels The Bluest Eye, Sula, and Beloved. I focus on the gendered experience of the female characters Pecola, Sula, Eva, and Sethe, except for the male character, Cholly in The Bluest Eye. Focusing on Morrison’s humanization of violent characters and her sharing of their full life stories, I establish the characters’ internal justifications for their violence to challenge the accepted depiction of all criminals as evil. The three chapters follow the manifestation of trauma …

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. …

“Speechless, Placeless Power”: Affect And Trauma In Moby-Dick And “Bartleby, The Scrivener”, Lauren Colandro

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick and “Bartleby, the Scrivener” contain affectively unsound figures such as Captain Ahab and Bartleby that seem to disrupt larger narrative functions, both developing these characteristics in response to prior trauma. However, narrators are not privy to the extent of their feelings because of their idealistic attachments to the disruptive figures. This thesis examines the commonalities of Melville’s disruptive characters in both stories using affect theory, as well as how their disruptions illuminate the effects of repressed trauma in an increasingly capital-driven society.

The Impact Of Family Environment And Religion In Purple Hibiscus And Beloved, Thoa Phan

Theses and Dissertations

This study explores the repercussions of slavery-induced dehumanization and trauma depicted in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and explores Kambili’s stifling home life characterized by her father’s rigid Catholicism in Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Morrison’s Beloved emphasizes the importance of personal engagement with the history of slavery so as to fully comprehend its horrors and overcome them. In Purple Hibiscus, the paper investigates the role religion plays in causing trauma, as Eugene’s strict adherence to Catholicism and dismissal of traditional rituals inflict both physical and psychological pain on his family. The complex and multifaceted depiction of religion in these novels …

Disorientation Of Memory: Trauma, The 9/11 Novel, And Don Delillo’S Falling Man, Julia Walsh

English Honors Theses

This paper explores the literary devices and motifs used to portray 9/11 trauma on the page as representation for survivors and depictions of trauma for non-survivors. The paper focuses specifically on Don DeLillo's Falling Man as the quintessential 9/11 novel to provide analysis on the larger genre. DeLillo is experimental in his form within the novel, using fragmentation and disorientation to explore the nuances of memory function during and after a traumatic event. These nuances of memory delve into complications of remembrance such as PTSD, memory impairment diseases, and the impact of media on memory.

Trauma Before The Name : Impersonal Violence In Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Carolin Alice Hofmann

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The dissertation studies the pre-history of trauma in US American fiction, examining how experiences of large-scale adversity are represented before the concept of psychological trauma emerges in the late nineteenth century. Distinctly modern forms of violence—diffuse, systemic, lacking direction and intent—bring forth less individual and personal experiences of grief and suffering than those imagined by twentieth-century trauma theory. Studying forms of feeling and of genre that make trauma legible historicizes the way a Western idea of modern subjectivity, as white, self-possessed, agential, and split, has shaped out understanding of how a person processes crisis. The dissertation visits three spaces that …

"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 …

Final Master's Portfolio, Alyssa Zuber

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

This MA explores the body's response to trauma, social media's impact on modern young women, the Women's Health Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and how the memoir can be used as a tool to explore radical honesty.

The Significance Of The Automobile In 20th C. American Short Fiction, Megan M. Flanery

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Midcentury American life featured a post-war economy that established a middle class in which disposable income and time for leisure were commonplace. In this socio-economic environment, consumerism flourished, ushering in the Golden Age of the automobile: from 1950 to 1960, Americans spent more time in their automobiles than ever before, and, by the end of the decade, the number of cars on the road had more than doubled. While much critical attention has been given to the role of the automobile in American novels, less has been given to its role in American short stories. The automobile has been featured …

Shame And Its Other Family Members In Philip Roth's Sabbath's Theater And Everyman And Pierre Lemaitre's Au Revoir Là-Haut, Shahrzad Izadpanah

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis is going to provide a comparative study of three novels: Sabbath’s Theater (1995) and Everyman(2006) by Philip Roth and Au revoir là-haut(2013) by Pierre Lemaitre. Although at first glance these three works seem to bear little or no resemblance to each other, certain crucial parallels can be drawn between and among the dominant themes in these novels. This study considers how death, loss, and their implications affect the main characters: Mickey Sabbath in Sabbath’s Theater, the nameless character in Everyman, and Édouard Péricourt in Au revoir là-haut. How bodily decay and trauma affect …

“We Developed Solidarity”: Family, Race, Identity, And Space-Time In Recent Multiethnic U.S. American Fiction, Kimber L. Wiggs

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In Diversity in Families, sociologists Maxine Baca Zinn, D. Stanley Eitzen, and Barbara Wells assert, “At a very personal level, families are crucial shapers of who we are and what our opportunities have been and will be” (xvii). The novels in this dissertation—Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979), Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange (1997), and Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita’s Lunar Braceros 2125-2148 (2009)—examine the role of family in the development of individual identity and the practice of social justice. These authors foreground characters from various ethnic backgrounds and depict how the characters form new, multiethnic families. My dissertation explores the …

Survivor’S Guilt And The Ethics Of Remembering In Isaac Bashevis Singer's The Slave And Cynthia Ozick’S “The Shawl”, Ryne Menhennick

All NMU Master's Theses

The focus of this thesis is an analysis of post-Holocaust Jewish-American literature with a specific emphasis on texts set in Europe. In particular, I examine how Jewish-American authors who lived in the United States during the Holocaust address issues of trauma and survivor’s guilt through fiction. Informed especially by Theodor Adorno and Elie Wiesel, I examine the ethics of fictionalizing the Holocaust. Furthermore, this thesis considers both trauma theory and the psychology of grief to investigate the ways in which the Jewish-American community at large responded to the cultural destruction perpetrated by the Nazis during the Holocaust. Chapter One analyzes …

Vulnerability, Trauma, And Testimony In American Women’S Literature: A Long History, Jennifer L. Fife

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

This study examines the effects of vulnerability and trauma in American women’s literature across the intersections of genre, race, and time. In this dissertation I have applied a feminist long history approach to examine women’s literature from the seventeenth through twenty-first centuries together inspired by Mary Beard’s theory that compartmentalizing women’s history ignores long-range patterns and contributions. I have assembled the beginnings of a canon of women’s trauma literature that allows women writers to form a multi-century discourse community wherein trauma and recovery may occur. This analysis applies twentieth century medical research about trauma and recovery, particularly that of Judith …

American And Iraqi Prose Fiction Of The Iraq War: Traumas Of The Self, Traumas Of The Nation, Ghyath Manhel Alkinani

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

War is so omnipresent in our contemporary world that the story of war is too important to be left to fiction writers to frame and give meaning for. This dissertation provides an analysis of two dominant patterns in contemporary Iraqi and American prose fictional representations of the Iraq War: the individualistic trauma hero narrative and the nationalistic, collective narrative. I argue that the trauma hero myth that dominates American representations of the Iraq War psychologizes and de-politicizes war experience alienating the victim of trauma by decontextualizing their experience and negating the Other. On the other hand, the sweeping nationalistic narrative …

Stepping Beyond The Veil And Breaking The Pittsburgh Cycle: The American Dream, Otherness, And Generational Trauma In August Wilson's Cycle Plays, Kaitlin Stellingwerf

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle is a series of ten plays that aims to “amend, to explore, and to add to our African consciousness and our African aesthetic” (Wilson qtd. in Gantt 5). Each play is set in a different decade but all share incredibly similar protagonists; all of them are African American men in their mid to late adulthood. The stories are separated by years but all articulate the generational trauma embedded in the African American consciousness in the twentieth century. Wilson’s plays span between the generations of African Americans living in the wake of the Emancipation Proclamation to a …

Spiteful Houses, Sweet Homes: Analyzing Denver's Traumatic Space In Beloved, Tyler Dick

Honors Undergraduate Theses

This thesis aims to explore and evaluate the traumatic space of Denver in Toni Morrison's Beloved. Currently, a lack of critical discourse exists to link together Denver, trauma, and theories of spatiality. This thesis evaluates three types of trauma that inform and develop Denver's traumatic space: direct, indirect, and insidious trauma. Paired with spatial theories, the origins of Denver's trauma are mapped throughout the various places of the novel. The result of this analysis reveals a complex and layered traumatic space, with lasting ramifications on Denver's sense of safety, identity, and stability in a post-slavery United States.

(An) Unsettled Commons: Narrative And Trauma After 9/11, Chinmayi Kattemalavadi

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation examines fictional responses to the events of September 11, 2001. It argues for the importance of one kind of fictional response, one which focuses on representing the feeling of "unsettledness" that can be one effect of trauma, with the aim of making that unsettledness itself a locus of a shared common experience. I posit that in articulating the events of 9/11 in the context of, in relation to, and as one in a series of traumas, violences, and histories, these narratives make the unsettlements shareable. Focusing on four works of fiction that were published after 9/11 – Joseph …

Reader's Guide: A Foray Into Violence, Trauma And Masculinity In In Our Time, Sara-Rose Beatriz Bockian

CMC Senior Theses

Modernism has been called “a reaction to the carnage and disillusionment of the First World War and a search for a new mode of art that would rescue civilization from its state of crisis after the war” (Lewis, 109) Hemingway attempts this rescue by re-thinking aspects of the novel that were taken for granted in earlier periods, just as the conventions of modern life were taken for granted pre-WWI. Furthermore, his work tries to rectify the dissonance between a pre and post-war self through the exploration of social conventions relating to violence, trauma and masculinity.

How To Find What's Lost When What's Lost Is You: The Presence Of Disappearing Bodies In Vietnam, Afghanistan, And Iraq War Literature, Brandy Rachele Williams

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The focus of this study is on disappearing bodies in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq war literature. The term “disappearing body” has several connotations. Disappearing bodies refers to throwaway or neglected bodies, bodies that routinely absorb into the landscape. Women and African Americans typically fall into this category, but at times, Vietnamese, Afghani, or Iraqi people may fall into this category as well. The race, gender, and region of the author often determines how Others are posited in the literature. Disappearing bodies also occur in the form of grotesquerie. These bodies appear as dismembered, decapitated, mutilated, and wasting away. Bodies disappear …

The Meadow: A Novel, Scott Albert Winkler

Theses and Dissertations

ABSTRACT

THE MEADOW: A NOVEL

by

Scott A. Winkler

The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 2015

Under the Supervision of Professor George Clark

The Meadow considers the question of how all Americans, both civilians and military personnel alike, are affected by the United States’ military actions. Set during the Vietnam era, The Meadow tells the story of Walt Neumann, who is torn between his dream of going to college and his father’s insistence that his sons serve their nation as he did in World War II. Circumstance unexpectedly enables Walt to pursue his dream, but he also comes to realize the source …

We Eat This Gold, Christopher Drew

Theses and Dissertations

We Eat This Gold is a novel set in a small coal mining community in southwestern Indiana. Centered around a son's return to his father's house after a failed music career in Nashville, the novel explores the subtle social structures of rural America, the slow decline of modern coal communities, and the often oversimplified beliefs, worries, and biases found in small towns. It also seeks to provide a realistic portrayal of the inner workings and broader culture of an active underground coal mine, as well as explore the ramifications, both economic and psychological, of serious workplace injuries sustained in such …

Rendering The Unthinkable: (Un)Knowable Animality, Compulsory Recovery, And Heterosexualized Trauma In The Hunger Games, Jennifer Polish

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Dystopian fiction is expected to reflect deeply on the interactions between identities, bodies, and state control. Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games Trilogy is no exception. The disturbing trilogy situated animality, disability, and trauma (both of non-humans and of humans) as being firmly controlled by the power of the state (the Capitol). Through its portrayal of hunting and genetic manipulation, the trilogy constructed a state-created animality which refused definitive labeling and insisted upon facing animal subjectivity while simultaneously disregarding the needs and desires of those considered to be non-human. Similarly, the state held sway over both the creation and elimination of …

"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 …

Identity, Reality, And Truth In Memoirs From The Iraq And Afghanistan Wars, Travis L. Martin

Online Theses and Dissertations

This research uses trauma theory, memoir theory, narratology, and recent scientific research into the effects of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) to explore developments in the memoir coming from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Specifically, the author examines the works of Shoshana Johnson, Colby Buzzell, and Anthony Shaffer to uncover the ways in which identity, reality and truth present themselves in the destabilized narratives of traumatized subjects.

Travis Martin is himself a veteran of the Iraq War, using his first-hand knowledge as a compass to guide him through intricate memoirs written by his contemporaries. Beginning …