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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Can The Wound Be Taken At Its Word?: Performed Trauma In Don Delillo's The Body Artist And Falling Man, Brett Thomas Griffin
Can The Wound Be Taken At Its Word?: Performed Trauma In Don Delillo's The Body Artist And Falling Man, Brett Thomas Griffin
English Theses
Two of Don DeLillo’s recently published novels, The Body Artist (2001) and Falling Man (2007), feature performance artists performing trauma. Through the bodies of these performers, DeLillo restates the central concern of trauma studies: if trauma is that which denies mediation, how may we speak about traumatic experience? DeLillo’s stagings of traumatic (re)iterations illustrate how the missed originary moment of trauma precludes directly referential content in traumatic representation. But I propose that performed trauma – the knowledge of forgetting addressed to another – recapitulates the structure of traumatic experience itself, thereby revealing trauma to be wholly constituted in repetition, and …
Illuminating The Queer Subtext: The Unmentioned Affairs In Willa Cather's O Pioneers!, Nora Neill
Illuminating The Queer Subtext: The Unmentioned Affairs In Willa Cather's O Pioneers!, Nora Neill
English Theses
Willa Cather contests the contemporary notion that identification links to a natural or original order. For example, that man equals masculine and femininity comes from an essential connection to woman. Cather deconstructs normativity through her use of character relationships in order to redefine successful interpersonal alliances. Thus, Alexandra, the protagonist of O Pioneers! builds a home and friendships that exemplify alternatives to stasis. My readings of O Pioneers! display the places in the novel where Cather subtly contests the ideology of naturalization. I make lesbian erotic and queer social interactions visible through a discourse on Cather’s symbolism. I favor queer …
Boot Camp For The Psyche: Inoculative Nonfiction And Pre-Memory Structures As Preemptive Trauma Mediation In Fiction And Film, Jacob Michael Hodgen
Boot Camp For The Psyche: Inoculative Nonfiction And Pre-Memory Structures As Preemptive Trauma Mediation In Fiction And Film, Jacob Michael Hodgen
Theses and Dissertations
While some theorists have hinted at various social functions served by the gothic genre—such as providing an outlet for grief, anxiety, and violence in their various forms—recent research within the last few decades into sociology, military science, and trauma studies supplies compelling new ways of rereading the horror genre. In addition to providing an outlet for grief, anxiety, and violence in their various forms, horror media can now be read as a preemptive measure in an effort to mediate the immediate and long-term effects of the trauma and horror faced by humanity. I argue that in much the same way …