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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Ghosts’ Stories: Addictive Behaviors And Complicated Grief In George Saunders’ Lincoln In The Bardo, Jc Leishman
Ghosts’ Stories: Addictive Behaviors And Complicated Grief In George Saunders’ Lincoln In The Bardo, Jc Leishman
Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism
When experiencing the natural motions of the grieving process, some individuals encounter an inability to pass this process by a phenomenon known as complicated grief. To deal with the cyclical trauma this causes, the human mind seeks to engage in addictive behaviors (both substantive and behavioral) that work to artificially and momentarily circumvent grief. This process, as it appears in George Saunders' experimental novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, reveals a depth of commentary on human attachments and grieving processes through the lives and narratives of ghosts found in the bardo.
Kindness In The Bardo: Empathy As A Catalyst For Healing In Victims Of Dissociation, Julia Dorothea Chopelas
Kindness In The Bardo: Empathy As A Catalyst For Healing In Victims Of Dissociation, Julia Dorothea Chopelas
Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism
In George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo, a host of undead characters find themselves in a spiritual limbo based on the bardo. Although they won’t admit it to themselves, Roger Bevins III and Hans Vollman are most certainly dead. Despite their supernatural makeup as ghosts, Bevins and Vollman bear strong psychological resonance with the living: they are human, heartbroken, and lost. For the ghosts of Oak Hills Cemetery, the inefficient coping mechanism of dissociation perpetuates their afterlife imprisonment in the bardo. Bevins and Vollman suffer from a variety of dissociative symptoms, their minds’ psychological defense against the trauma that has …
Nosotras, Ciera Galbraith
Silence And Self-Harm: Understanding Unconventional Voices, Sarah Cannon
Silence And Self-Harm: Understanding Unconventional Voices, Sarah Cannon
Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism
This essay explores the connection between silence, self-harm, and communication in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. It shows how viewing silence and self-imposed violence as modes of communication contributes to a more productive understanding of trauma and increases the opportunity for healing.
To The Boy In My Second Grade Class, Sarah J. Meyers
To The Boy In My Second Grade Class, Sarah J. Meyers
Inscape
I know you were just joking, back in our classroom, about our Fruit-Roll-Ups burning where we left them in the gymnasium lunchroom. Because of the fire drill. I know you probably weren't thinking about your father at all when you said the joke, even though it was your first day back at school. After everything happened. Were you? Were you thinking of your father when you joked about our Fruit-Roll-Ups burning? I couldn't think of anything else after our teacher told us-the horribleness of a father burning-the horribleness of a father sleeping and burning. I know I should have thought …