English Language and Literature Commons^™

Mitigating Black Claustrophobia: Space, Trauma, And Healing Modalities In The Postcolonial Narrative., Saleema Mustafa Campbell

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines the space or spaces of blackness and the black body in the United States. This nation was shaped by the institution of slavery, and its greatest legacy is the trauma that still resonates in social structures and spaces complicating the lived experiences of many. The various responses to these traumas are documented in literary form by authors who serve as cultural witnesses. The narratives featured in this research project, collectively and individually, offer a voice to the traumatic plight of individuals in the U.S. who struggle to contemplate and rectify the traumas of this nation’s past. This …

The Vernacular As Method For Memory And Time: A Philological And Cultural Exploration Of Filipino Concepts For Memory Studies, Jocelyn Martin

English Faculty Publications

This article proposes the vernacular as a discursive methodological entry point to Memory Studies. A bottom-up approach, this article theorizes memory and time starting from a close-reading of signifiers from the Filipino language, thus allowing its culture to be considered in its own terms first. The first part of the essay examines a set of terms that show equivalences with Western conceptions of memory. The second set of signifiers—(ma)tandà(an), agam, limot/limót and panahon—reveal that they are actually more illustrative of the current trend of movement in Memory Studies; and that they translate more accurately both the non-linear and …

Critiquing Psychiatry, Narrating Trauma: Madness In Twentieth-Century North American Literature And Film, Sarah Blanchette

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation explores representations of trauma and mental distress in twentieth-century novels and films. Drawn on research that emphasizes the ways that marginalized communities—in particular women-coded, racialized, and Indigenous persons—have historically been pathologized, the thesis considers how select novels and films query biomedical approaches to mental illness and critique psychiatric contexts, which prioritize social control more than they provide substantive and humane forms of support and care. How might representations of trauma and mental distress be understood without confirming regimes of psy-authority or psy-power? The thesis takes up this core issue by building on theories drawn from Mad Studies, illuminating …

Affective Histories Of Southern Trauma: Shame, Healing, And Vulnerability In Us Southern Women’S Writing, 1975–2006, Faune Albert

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores the affective impacts of historical trauma around slavery and segregation in the US South, arguing for the importance of understanding US Southern history through the ways in which it has lived and continues to live in and on the bodies of Southerners marked by race and gender and class and within emotional life in the South. The texts in this study—Gayl Jones’ Corregidora (1975), Dorothy Allison’s Trash (1988), Ellen Gilchrist’s Net of Jewels (1992), and Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard (2006)—engage the affective impacts of intergenerational and insidious trauma through portrayals of Southern women struggling to give voice …

Engl 110: College Writing (Writing About Memory), Evgeniya A. Koroleva

Open Educational Resources

English 110: Writing about Memory is designed to help students improve critical thinking and writing skills. Fundamentals of academic writing are practiced in relation to the subject of memory examined from historical, philosophical, scientific, psychological, literary, artistic, political, and cultural perspectives.

Trauma, Violence, And Deathly Consequences: Female Justice In Contemporary Literature And Television Adaptations, Allie Owens

English MA Theses

Over the past decade, a familiar villainous character has begun to arise in television adaptation: the mentally-fractured heroine who turns to villainy: women who have been attacked, raped, or lost loved ones to villains. These attacks and losses trigger murderous rampages and other violence that often leads to their descent into villainy. Netflix’s Jessica Jones, George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, and its television adaptation Game of Thrones, feature heroines that turn to violence to get revenge. However, the violent heroines in these texts and television adaptations do not just become villains; some …

Searching For Understanding: How Hamlet And Frankenstein Inform Humanity’S Response To Trauma, Jonathan Knippenberg

English Senior Capstone

By looking at trauma narratives we are able to learn about the nature of trauma as well as the effective and ineffective ways it has been handled by literary characters. Hamlet by William Shakespeare tells of the young prince Hamlet who, in repressing his trauma, unwittingly falls victim to repeating the anger reinforced by his father’s ghost while he continually allows no one to see anything but the mask of his antic disposition. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley portrays the turmoil between Dr. Frankenstein and his monster—a rejected creation scorned by a tortured creator—which not only consumes them but also tears …

What's Past Is Prologue: Transforming Trauma, Rewriting Identity In Gloria Anzaldua's "Borderlands/La Frontera" And "Light In The Dark/Luz En Lo Oscuro", Richard Edward Riley

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands/La Frontera and Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro are widely acknowldged as groundbreaking texts across Latinx literary canons, invoking selfhood, spirituality, activism, and politics as a queer woman of color writer.

Her language around self-dispersion is still undertheorized in what it owes to traumatic experiences discoverable in the self, body, world, and culture Anzaldua hails from. The extent of colonizing and kyriarchal damage in her work has been recognized; but the exact character of how these breakages and corresponding imperatives to regenerate oneself resemble a traumatic shock remains to be written about.

This thesis sketches frameworks …

Colonial Trauma And Testimony In Mary Shelley’S Frankenstein And Jamaica Kincaid’S Autobiography Of My Mother, Leana Rene

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis will examine Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle to examine the colonial trauma and loss found in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Jamaica Kincaid’s Autobiography of My Mother, not just on a character level, but in a much larger colonial context. Some scholars have suggested that Shelley’s monster is a symbol of a colonized other (due to his appearance and certain features he has). Kincaid’s Xuela is for sure a colonized other because of the heritage of her mother. This thesis explores their abandonment by their creators as the abandonment of colonized nations from their colonizers. Even now, formerly colonized …

Translator Of Soliloquies: Fugues In The Key Of Dissociation, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

Chu, Seo-Young. “Translator of Soliloquies: Fugues in the Key of Dissociation” (chapbook). Black Warrior Review 46.2, Spring 2020.

"Sometimes Your Memories Are Not Your Own": The Graphic Turn And The Future Of Holocaust Representation, Victoria Aarons

English Faculty Research

“The legacy of the Shoah” writes Eva Hoffman, a child of Holocaust survivors, “is being passed on to … the post-generation … The inheritance … is being placed in our hands, perhaps in our trust.” We are entering an era that will witness the end of direct survivor testimony. As we move farther and farther from the events of the Shoah, subsequent generations, who see their own lives shaped by the defining rupture of the past, continue to respond to the call of memory. The current era has seen a burgeoning of Holocaust literary representation in the evolving genre of …

Maladaptive Grief: Irish And American Experiences Of Loss, Mourning, And Trauma, Abby Hey

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Literature that responds to loss and expresses mourning, a genre referred to as the elegy, traditionally follows an adaptive pattern in which a mourner reaches consolation and comfort. In the modern period, however, mourning transformed into destructive experiences that were notably private. With this phenomenon of greater social and emotional isolation, writers like Sylvia Plath, Samuel Beckett, and Elizabeth Bishop expressed rumination and irresolution. In contrast, before the twentieth century, elegies were not only more consolatory, but there was a greater emphasis on shared feeling, and this communal type of mourning is more often adaptive. By grieving together in the …