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- CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture (3)
- English Honors Theses (3)
- Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies (2)
- Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects (2)
- CMC Senior Theses (1)
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- Honors Undergraduate Theses (1)
- Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024) (1)
- Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs) (1)
- The Journal of Purdue Undergraduate Research (1)
- The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English (1)
- Theses and Dissertations--English (1)
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Articles 1 - 17 of 17
Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature
“Beating Back The Past”: The Psychological Justifications Of Violence In Toni Morrison’S Fiction, Catherine Buhse
“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 …
“Speechless, Placeless Power”: Affect And Trauma In Moby-Dick And “Bartleby, The Scrivener”, Lauren Colandro
“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.
Disorientation Of Memory: Trauma, The 9/11 Novel, And Don Delillo’S Falling Man, Julia Walsh
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
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 …
Graphic Nonsense And Historical Trauma In Fred Chao’S Johnny Hiro, Jin Lee
Graphic Nonsense And Historical Trauma In Fred Chao’S Johnny Hiro, Jin Lee
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
This article introduces the concept of “graphic nonsense” to explain nonsense in Fred Chao’s graphic narrative, Johnny Hiro, which features figures of monster (Godzilla and King Kong) as well as real U.S. political figures (Michael Bloomberg and John P. O’Brien). Focusing on transpacific trauma, this article articulates a counter-history using Fredric Jameson’s terms to expose the process of silencing the other and “retextualizing” history. Although puzzling at first, if not silly at best, the nonsensical elements in the graphic narrative can prompt the reader to find out historical allusions in Godzilla and King Kong to make sense out of …
"Never Forget": Embodied Absence And Extended Relations Of Care After 9/11, Sophie L. Riemenschneider
"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 …
Twistin’ The Night Away: Perverted Nostalgia In How I Learned To Drive, Coco Mcneil
Twistin’ The Night Away: Perverted Nostalgia In How I Learned To Drive, Coco Mcneil
English Honors Theses
This paper situates Paula Vogel's 1997 play How I Learned to Drive as an American memory play that is representative of 1990s cultural and political discourses rooted in nostalgia for the 1960s. By examining each character--the Greek Chorus, Peck, and Li'l Bit--within Lauren Berlant's 'intimate public sphere,' 1960s iconography, and memory practices, I argue that Vogel offers an allegory in Drive that characterizes this nostalgia as perverted and traumatizing rather than idyllic.
Violence, Suffering, And Social Introspection: James Baldwin's Another Country, Hollis Druhet
Violence, Suffering, And Social Introspection: James Baldwin's Another Country, Hollis Druhet
The Journal of Purdue Undergraduate Research
This research examines and expands on the critical outlook concerning the scope and function of identity in the literature of James Baldwin. Looking at Another Country specifically, the essay expounds on the universality of oppressive conditions shown to operate across factors of race, gender, and sexuality. Critical discussion has largely focused on Baldwin’s construction of male identities and sexual experiences; this essay argues for the importance of the novel’s female psychological depictions and how these character profiles operate in relation to male profiles. A significant universal aspect considered is the visibility of trauma: how its appearance communicates repressed pain and …
Spiteful Houses, Sweet Homes: Analyzing Denver's Traumatic Space In Beloved, Tyler Dick
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.
"It's Oil And Water": Race, Gender, Power, And Trauma In Vu Tran's Dragonfish, Quan-Manh Ha, Chase Greenfield
"It's Oil And Water": Race, Gender, Power, And Trauma In Vu Tran's Dragonfish, Quan-Manh Ha, Chase Greenfield
Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies
ABSTRACT: This article analyzes in-depth the interplay between race, gender, power, and trauma in Vu Tran’s debut novel, Dragonfish. We argue that Dragonfish focuses on the relationships, desires, and conflicts among its three protagonists—Robert, Suzy, and Sonny—to highlight how their postwar interactions complicate race, gender, trauma, and remembrance. The three protagonists engage in an intense socio-political struggle for dominance and control, which is riddled with irony, heart-wrenching pain, and misleading appearances. They experience hardship and loss, but they rely on each other for recovery from past and present trauma, and to advance their own varying personal priorities and agendas: …
A Theory Of Veteran Identity, Travis L. Martin
A Theory Of Veteran Identity, Travis L. Martin
Theses and Dissertations--English
More than 2.6 million troops have deployed in support of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Still, surveys reveal that more than half feel “disconnected” from their civilian counterparts, and this feeling persists despite ongoing efforts, in the academy and elsewhere, to help returning veterans overcome physical and mental wounds, seek an education, and find meaningful ways to contribute to society after taking off the uniform. This dissertation argues that Iraq and Afghanistan War veterans struggle with reassimilation because they lack healthy, complete models of veteran identity to draw upon in their postwar lives, a problem they’re working through collectively …
Reader's Guide: A Foray Into Violence, Trauma And Masculinity In In Our Time, Sara-Rose Beatriz Bockian
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.
Introduction To New Work On Immigration And Identity In Contemporary France, Québec, And Ireland, Dervila Cooke
Introduction To New Work On Immigration And Identity In Contemporary France, Québec, And Ireland, Dervila Cooke
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
No abstract provided for the introduction.
Thematic Bibliography To New Work On Immigration And Identity In Contemporary France, Québec, And Ireland, Dervila Cooke
Thematic Bibliography To New Work On Immigration And Identity In Contemporary France, Québec, And Ireland, Dervila Cooke
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
No abstract provided.
Speaking And Mourning: Working Through Identity And Language In Chang-Rae Lee’S Native Speaker, Matthew L. Miller
Speaking And Mourning: Working Through Identity And Language In Chang-Rae Lee’S Native Speaker, Matthew L. Miller
Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies
In my essay entitled “Speaking and Mourning: Working Through Identity and Language in Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker,” I argue that the novel’s protagonist Henry Park finds himself at a critical juncture in his life at the novel’s beginning. I analyze the protagonist’s relationship to language acquisition and identity, which have been developed by Lee to be associated as traumas. Furthermore, these topics are complicated by the death of his son, Mitt. This loss is a trauma of the heart and of the self for the main character who sees a successful navigation of language and immigration lost by his …
Intergenerational Trauma: A Look At Sherman Alexie's Child Characters, Kiersten Sargent
Intergenerational Trauma: A Look At Sherman Alexie's Child Characters, Kiersten Sargent
The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English
No abstract provided.
Rendering The Unthinkable: (Un)Knowable Animality, Compulsory Recovery, And Heterosexualized Trauma In The Hunger Games, Jennifer Polish
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 …