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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

Honeysuckles & Irises: Effigies Of The Land, Ami` L. Hanna-Huff Dec 2023

Honeysuckles & Irises: Effigies Of The Land, Ami` L. Hanna-Huff

English Creative Writing Theses

Here is a memoir of my paternal line through the lens of my Great-Grandmother and myself. A reclamation of the land I hail from and a connection to a history previously felt distant, this examination of race and gender explicitly focused on the African American Southern female experience; I try to make sense of the juxtaposing positions in our lives. The culture built from its creation through Tennessee personified. Here, I integrate history and theory with lyrics and prose to experience the eighty-one years of progress brought between our births and the lingering anxiety of slavery. My great-grandmother, Hazel Irene …


Tandem Travel: Reconsidering Road Narratives And Tactics For Subversive Travel, Nicole Emanuel Nov 2023

Tandem Travel: Reconsidering Road Narratives And Tactics For Subversive Travel, Nicole Emanuel

The Goose

Roads are frequently conceptualized as shared spaces that symbolize freedom, despite the fact that they are also tightly monitored sites where laws and public policy hold sway. The fundamental tension between movement on the one hand and restrictive regulation on the other makes the road a particularly paradoxical expression of “the commons.” Another contradictory aspect of roads is that they are often understood as atopic—places that are not really places, but merely a means of conquering time and space to connect a point of origin to a destination. What does it mean to live one’s daily life in such a …


Off By Heart Lake, Gayle I. Sacuta Nov 2023

Off By Heart Lake, Gayle I. Sacuta

The Goose

Memoir, history and critique of girlhood on a farm on the Alberta prairie in the 1970's and 1980's.


Using Memoir To Explore And Heal Trauma Inflicted By Emotional Abuse, Accompanied By Excavating Me, A Memoir, Amy G. Partain Oct 2023

Using Memoir To Explore And Heal Trauma Inflicted By Emotional Abuse, Accompanied By Excavating Me, A Memoir, Amy G. Partain

Masters Theses

"Using Memoir to Explore and Heal Trauma Inflicted by Emotional Abuse, accompanied by Excavating Me, A Memoir" by Amy G. Partain details the use of the memoir's literary genre to process trauma resulting from emotional abuse incurred during childhood and adulthood. The paper includes comparisons of three published memoirs about abusive childhoods. It culminates with the author's memoir recounting emotionally abusive experiences with both her parents and her former spouse.


The Politics & Poetics Of Audience Creation In Contemporary Epistolary Memoir, Sarah M. Davis Jun 2023

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, …


Exploring The Connection: The Scale Of Time And Effort Within American Baked Goods, Grace Guindon Apr 2023

Exploring The Connection: The Scale Of Time And Effort Within American Baked Goods, Grace Guindon

Honors Program Theses and Projects

Through the use of memoir and historical occurrences this paper will discuss the spectrum and correlations that all baked goods lie on. There are two scales: the spectrum of labor versus leisure, and the spectrum of specialness versus overindulgence. They have a positive correlation relationship. Often when something is on the high end of the leisure scale, it is also high in the overindulgence scale. Then that means the opposite end is true- high in labor can significantly relate to being higher in specialness. These relations of labor and specialness and leisure and overindulgence can tell us something about who …


The Secret Life Of A Black Aspie: A New Form Of Slave Narrative, Justin Rizzi Apr 2023

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.


Language As Resistance: An Exploration Of The Use And Implications Of Spanish In Three Memoirs By Female Chicana Authors, Ella Ross Franzoni Jan 2023

Language As Resistance: An Exploration Of The Use And Implications Of Spanish In Three Memoirs By Female Chicana Authors, Ella Ross Franzoni

Honors Theses and Capstones

No abstract provided.


The Crossroads We Make: Intergenerational Trauma And Reparative Reading In Recent Asian American Memoirs (2018-2022), Josh-Pablo Manish Patel Jan 2023

The Crossroads We Make: Intergenerational Trauma And Reparative Reading In Recent Asian American Memoirs (2018-2022), Josh-Pablo Manish Patel

Honors Projects

This project extends reparative reading practices to recent Asian American memoirs, specifically trauma memoirs from the past five years (2018-2022) that detail personal trauma and communal, intergenerational trauma. Reparative reading is explored within five memoirs: Stephanie Foo’s What My Bones Know (2022), Esmé Weijun Wang’s The Collected Schizophrenias (2019), Phuc Tran’s Sigh, Gone (2020), Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings (2020), and Nicole Chung’s All You Can Ever Know (2018). In considering the reparative turn in Asian American memoirs, this thesis draws on and extends Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s reparative frameworks and bell hooks’ theories on pedagogy and love. A critical analysis …


Yes, Baby: Essays, Amy Gault Jan 2023

Yes, Baby: Essays, Amy Gault

MSU Graduate Theses

This creative thesis includes thirteen flash nonfiction pieces and one fiction short story exploring emotions and experiences that have changed who I am today. These writings are personal experiences or are inspired by personal experience. These creative works interrogate deeply transformative events and situations, such as familial relationships, trauma, poverty, living in the Midwest, patriarchy, and the beauty in existing. In the thesis’s critical introduction, I examine how my flash nonfiction pieces employ Milan Kundera’s theory of the appeal of play and Charles Baxter’s concept defamiliarization. I analyze how the succinct form of the flash essay allows my nonfiction writing …