Arts and Humanities Commons^™

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 …

Intro. To Post-Traumatic Culture, Kirby Farrell

kirby farrell

This is the Introduction to my POST-TRAUMATIC CULTURE: INJURY AND INTERPRETATION IN THE 90s. It develops the premise that trauma is psychophysiogical: an injury that is also an interpretation of an injury. Its analyses show the idea of trauma functioning as a tool that all sorts of people use for a range of purposes.