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Creative Component: The creative component of this thesis consists of a transmutation of events from the raw material of my life experience into a work of creative non-fiction - 'Broken-Off Pieces: A Memoir'. The act of writing - drafting, careful, considered revision and redrafting - continues to be exploratory research that emerges from, and complements, the creative and critical processes. Auto-ethnography may be expressed as an approach to research and writing that seeks to describe and systematically analyse personal experience to understand cultural experience. This approach challenges canonical ways of doing research and representing others and treats research as a political, socially-just and socially conscious act. A researcher uses tenets of autobiography and ethnography to do and write autoethnography. Thus, as a method, autoethnography is both process and product. I am exploring the physical and psychological damage that illness can inflict, asking questions on the ability to survive trauma; to find meaning in writing about these experiences. I am interested in how personal memory fuses with historical record. There is potential in what is obtainable by working with narrative, results that can be difficult to achieve with questionnaires and quantitative scales alone. Critical Component: In 'Where Nobody Can Follow: An overview of the self as process and product', I demonstrate how my creative work engages with, and contributes to, broader conceptual or theoretical issues in trauma theory and narrative medicine. I am examining my own critical decisions in writing the memoir, the defining characteristics of self-narrative and the nature of therapeutic writing. Taking control, confronting illness and trauma in the form of creating a narrative of the self, allows for ownership of illness and provides understanding which is empowering. Throughout the critical essay, I discuss and evaluate the work of leading experts on trauma theory and narrative medicine like Cathy Caruth, Judith Herman and Rita Charon, in relation to my own experiences of living with chronic illness and the consequences of trauma. And I look at how memoir has been used by other writers with different experiences of trauma.

From the box office successes of Philomena (2013) and Calvary (2014) to the social media driven viral success of short films such as We Face This Land (2015) and Terminal (2018), the emergence of trauma as an area of interest for Irish filmmakers indicates its popularity as a topic within Irish society. Recent social, political, and legal changes have provided a new space in which the telling of unheard stories on both a personal and societal level has become possible. Contemporary cinema in Ireland has developed a means through which these previously marginalised and obscured voices may be heard. Despite this, until recently, scholars have neglected to examine cinema's usefulness as a tool for the excavation and unearthing of personal and societal trauma in Irish history and culture. Drawing on Kristeva's notion of the abject as that which 'disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules,' this thesis considers how cinema's examination of the abject in cultural and personal contexts enables it to assume a significant role in the process that leads from traumatic rupture to reconciliation (Kristeva 4). Key to this exploration of the representation of trauma in cinema in Ireland is the notion of liminal space. Liminal, stemming from the Latin word 'limen', meaning 'a threshold', may be broadly defined as a transitional place or period, a state of flux between two different states of being. It can refer to spatial and physical thresholds, such as borders, shorelines, and doorways, and rites of passage and transition. Through an examination of the representation and intersection of physical liminal spaces, such as Magdalene Laundries, Mother and Baby Homes, Industrial Schools, Reformatory Schools, and Direct Provision Centres, the liminal legislative spaces in which such architectures of containment operate, and the othering and scapegoating mechanisms that constitute rites de passage whilst also perpetuating cyclical and transgenerational trauma, this thesis engages with contemporary cinema in Ireland to order to explore the ways in which liminal space has been used to both silence and restore voices to Ireland's marginalised 'Others'.

This thesis attempts to take seriously the claims made by many postapocalyptic zombie narratives to represent the world as it truly is, analyzing and then assessing the theological value of their depictions of the human predicament. The approach is both formal and what Gary Wolfe calls transmedial, examining the recurring narrative structures and themes of texts across several media and eras as part of 'a popular aesthetic movement and not just a body of works of fiction on similar themes', with special attention given to the films and television of the new millennium. The aim is twofold: to extend the relevance of postapocalyptic zombie fictions beyond the relatively narrow vogue of a cultural moment, and to prompt a richer appreciation of the significance of the Christian faith within contemporary society. To this end, Chapter One contextualizes the complexity of these texts' relationship to Christianity by examining first the most prominent obstacles and then the implicit promise of these texts for theological reflection. It places special emphasis on the interior tension in many of these fictions between, on the one hand, aggressively emphasizing the apparent absence of the supernatural, while on the other, frequently claiming to disclose a dimension of human experience in excess of what can be ordinarily perceived by the senses. Chapters Two and Three extend this analysis to the complex content of what these stories depict. Chapter Two considers the multilayered symbolism of decline in their conspicuous spectacles of disaster, disintegration, and death. Chapter Three examines the countervailing symbolic motifs of residual integrity and regeneration that are exhibited most prominently by characters who attempt to live genuinely human lives in spite of these circumstances. The first half of the thesis concludes by proposing a composite postapocalyptic view of the human predicament, which represents the world as ambiguous, dramatic and quite possibly, although not certainly, absurd. Chapter Four begins the theological reflection upon this kind of postapocalyptic perspective, proposing how such depictions might be illuminated by Christian theological descriptions, particularly the absurd existential circumstances brought about by the original sin. Chapter Five, reciprocally, suggests some of the ways the dramatic images of these texts might enrich theological reflection by eliciting fresh insights into the significance of the central mysteries of Christianity, especially the paradoxical already-and-not-yet of eschatological expectation. The thesis concludes by offering a final evaluation of whether, all told, the world can be truly considered postapocalyptic from a Christian perspective, arguing that although there are significant differences, postapocalyptic fictions and Christianity put forward strikingly similar pictures of the deeply self-conflicted circumstances of the common human predicament.

Aiming to make an intervention in both emerging Slow Cinema and classical Trauma Cinema scholarship, this thesis demonstrates the ways in which the post-trauma cinema of Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz merges aesthetics of cinematic slowness with narratives of post-trauma in his films Melancholia (2008), Death in the Land of Encantos (2007) and Florentina Hubaldo, CTE (2012). Diaz has been repeatedly considered as representative of what Jonathan Romney termed in 2004 “Slow Cinema”. The director uses cinematic slowness for an alternative approach to an on-screen representation of post-trauma. Contrary to popular trauma cinema, Diaz’s portrait of individual and collective trauma focuses not on the instantenaeity but on the duration of trauma. In considering trauma as a condition and not as an event, Diaz challenges the standard aesthetical techniques used in contemporary Trauma Cinema, as highlighted by Janet Walker (2001, 2005), Susannah Radstone (2001), Roger Luckhurst (2008) and others. Diaz’s films focus instead on trauma’s latency period, the depletion of a survivor’s resources, and a character’s slow psychological breakdown. Slow Cinema scholarship has so far focused largely on the films’ aesthetics and their alleged opposition to mainstream cinema. Little work has been done in connecting the films’ form to their content. Furthermore, Trauma Cinema scholarship, as trauma films themselves, has been based on the immediate and most radical signs of post-trauma, which are characterised by instantaneity; flashbacks, sudden fears of death and sensorial overstimulation. Following Lutz Koepnick’s argument that slowness offers “intriguing perspectives” (Koepnick, 2014: 191) on how trauma can be represented in art, this thesis seeks to consider the equally important aspects of trauma duration, trauma’s latency period and the slow development of characteristic symptoms. With the present work, I expand on current notions of Trauma Cinema, which places emphasis on speed and the unpredictability of intrusive memories. Furthermore, I aim to broaden the area of Slow Cinema studies, which has so far been largely focused on the films’ respective aesthetics, by bridging form and content of the films under investigation. Rather than seeing Diaz’s slow films in isolation as a phenomenon of Slow Cinema, I seek to connect them to the existing scholarship of Trauma Cinema studies, thereby opening up a reading of his films.

This project centres on the continuing relevance of the 1947 Partition of India in texts that engage with the national landscape of Pakistan. This approach proposes that Partition cannot be understood outside of a discussion of Pakistan, as Partition emerged through demands for liberty and enfranchisement for India’s Muslims that became articulated through the discourse of the nation-state; my analysis of cultural texts asks what the implications are of this proposal. This study moves beyond looking at Partition as an isolated series of events in 1947 and contextualises its processes, interrogating why Partition and Pakistan became such a persuasive demand, and what the ongoing ramifications are of its happening. This thesis also considers what the 1971 secession of Bangladesh suggests regarding the attempts of the original cartographic articulation of Pakistan to maintain a unified nation. This project seeks to understand Partition in new ways by utilising a framework that takes into account the broader context of Partition both temporally and spatially. It moves beyond work that solely focusses on texts that discuss the moment of Partition directly, by examining texts that approach the time that preceded Partition, and that which succeeded it. In so doing this thesis charts how texts articulate the arguments for Pakistan’s creation against the events and commemoration of its becoming. I aim to be broad temporally, geographically, and in how I engage with the notion of violence, extending this to include the bureaucratic violence of drawing borders and colonial withdrawal. This study maintains a focus on women’s narratives, arguing that due to the gendered experience of violence at the time of Partition, such as rape, abduction, and honour killing, women’s stories have a particular intervention to make. As such this thesis proposes that there is a pattern of specifically gendered trauma that emerges which disrupts dominant nationalist remembering of Partition. This work takes an interdisciplinary focus by analysing fiction, feature film and documentary. Central to the study is the deployment of a number of theoretical methodologies, such as affect, cultural memory and trauma. Engagement with this critical material enables a discussion of the cultural texts that considers the role of affects in generating and maintaining national belonging, the impact of trauma on individuals who lived through Partition and on the nation writ large, and the implications of how trauma and affect are negotiated when texts imagine reparative futures.

Daughter in Waves is a cross-genre creative critical dissertation exploring female narrative inheritance and mother-daughter subject formation in families organizing around domestic violence. The project asks how bodies inherit, inhabit, and shape the language, memories, and stories that cling to them. It weaves together family stories, speculative memoir, poems, fairy tales, collage drawings, interview transcripts, and academic essays on trauma, memory, and embodiment to create a kaleidoscopic portrait of mother and daughter figures as they slip across time and in and out of realism. The writing is multi-genre, experimenting with unconventional citational practices and making use of forms that seek to mirror or echo the pain, tenderness, and fragmentation of traumatic experience. I work from and write alongside critical theories of trauma, embodiment, girlhood, affect, everyday life, memory, and grief, as well as a host of contemporary memoirists, poets, and experimental writers whose work enacts a poetics of daughterhood. Daughter in Waves’ multivocal form builds surprising passageways between the experiential fragments, deferred emotions, and compromised memories that comprise familial trauma, all the while unsettling false dichotomies such as victim/perpetrator, truth/fiction, and past/present. Daughter in Waves enhances an important conversation around the uses of genre-expansive autotheoretical and fabulist writing to collapse the conceptual binary of research/imagination and reanimate embodied subjectivity in projects engaging histories of trauma.

Though there have been many approaches to the book of Job throughout the years one approach that has been overlooked in modern scholarship is a reading strategy that centers Job’s experience of trauma and addresses the ramifications of such an experience on the biblical text. This project suggests that the field of trauma theory provides an avenue of interpretation that focuses on Job’s experience and addresses how that experience has shaped the text. Using the framework of a trauma narrative, this project demonstrates that many of the suggested redactions, inconsistencies, and contradictions within the book of Job can be addressed by reading with an awareness of, and sensitivity to, the impact of trauma on an individual and the function of a trauma narrative in the cognitive resolution of a traumatic experience.

Trauma has been an important facet of literature and German studies since the romantic era, and just as people grow and change, so do the ways trauma is represented in different times. Trauma studies has already been applied to many different forms of literature including crime fiction and romantic era novellas. This analysis expands trauma study into the realm of film and television. By defining the Netflix original series Dark as a trauma narrative, the therapeutic function of its structure, repetitions, characterizations of emotional attachments, and resolutions become apparent. The narrative style of Dark mirrors the effects of trauma on the brain while the characters in the series propose dramatized aspects of symptoms of trauma that can help the audience reflect on aspects of their own lives. The characters in Dark create a representation of Tannhaus’s trauma by showing different aspects of Tannhaus’s grief. This aspect of the show distances the audience from Tannhaus while also creating an emotional attachment towards other characters. At the end of the series, the removal of the characters displaces the emotional grief, caused by loss, from Tannhaus to the audience. German forms of literature have been playing with these tropes of displacement, of fractured identity, haunting of the past, death, and new beginnings, for over two centuries. They appear in the romantic period, e.g. in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s works and find further reflection in Freud. This analysis will show how film and a modern made-for-TV series like Dark can also help their audiences to attempt healing through reflection.

“Hushed Articulations: Theorizing Representations of Black Women’s Post-Violence Sexuality” interrogates representations of Black women’s sexuality in the aftermath of sexual violence - what I term “post-violence sexuality.” Following feminist and anti-rape activism of the 1970s and 1980s, the prevalence and ramifications of sexual violence gained public, activist, and intellectual attention. However, neoliberal subject formation and entrenched public reliance on personal empowerment rather than social, political, or institutional intervention have converged and contributed to increasingly polarized conceptualizations of victimhood and survivorship in the 21st century. Black women’s relationship to these post-violence identities is especially fraught. “Hushed Articulations” intervenes in rape crisis and anti-rape feminist debates by considering Black women’s specific cultural relationship to the prevailing linear conceptualization of trauma recovery that delineates transformation from victim to survivor or discursively prioritizes survivor over victim when addressing people who have experienced sexual violence. Adding to a growing body of Black feminist literary and cultural criticism that theorizes the relationship between violence, autonomy, and Black women’s sexuality, this dissertation examines the murky overlap of arousal, trauma, and compulsory performative heroism in Black women’s articulations of post-violence sexuality to demythologize both victimhood and survivorship. “Hushed Articulations” argues that a fuller range of Black women’s post-violence sexuality and possibility is represented in Black women’s fiction and memoir – a range that is not reliant on dichotomized social constructions of victimhood and survivorship, and that other forms of media created for and about people who have experienced sexual violence often leave unacknowledged. Chapter one is a broad overview of anti-rape activism in the United States, establishing how the nuances of post-violence sexuality and identity are underrepresented. By examining several peaks of anti-rape activism in the U.S., beginning with the Congressional testimonies of five Black women following the 1866 Memphis Riots, and culminating with the #MeToo Movement, this chapter establishes how Black women lead national conversations on bodily autonomy. The second chapter features a close reading of Charlotte Pierce-Baker’s anthology Surviving the Silence: Black Women’s Stories of Rape, alongside Aishah Shahidah Simmons’ NO! The Rape Documentary, Surviving R. Kelly, and Surviving R. Kelly II: The Reckoning limited series executive produced by Tamra Simmons and dream hampton to identify if, when, and how these sources grapple with post-violence sexual and identificatory complexity. The third and fourth chapters of this project are literary analyses of Gayl Jones’s Corregidora and Roxane Gay’s Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body as representations of a fuller range of post-violence sexual and identificatory possibility that disrupt formulas of linear recovery and `redemption’ after rape. These sites reflect the interlocking social institutions and social scripts that shape how Black women’s post-violence sexuality is popularly discussed, imagined, and constructed.

Esta disertación parte del análisis de 4 casos de violencia masiva ocurridos en el siglo XX chileno y cómo estos casos se han reconstruido en la cultura popular. Son episodios que se han vuelto “emblemáticos” en la memoria colectiva y han sido reconstruidos desde diversos medios, como la televisión, el cine, la literatura o el teatro. Mi propósito es indagar cómo estas “reconstituciones de escena” han generado nuevas interpretaciones y perspectivas en torno a estas masacres. Aproximarme a varias masacres claves del sigo XX permitirá poner en relieve las dinámicas específicas a través de las cuales se va construyendo la emblematicidad de un suceso, aquellas dinámicas que contribuyen a la sedimentación de una memoria colectiva. La memoria colectiva no es estática: se recrea o repiensa en sucesivos presentes en los que hay, por tal o cual motivo, una urgencia para recordar ciertos eventos del pasado. Al estudiar estas cuatro masacres, también espero ofrecer una lectura de cómo una historia —muy larga— de la violencia en Chile se ha ido escribiendo y rescribiendo en el ámbito cultural. Los episodios que serán objetos de investigación en los cuatro capítulos de mi disertación son: la masacre de la Escuela Santa María de Iquique de 1907, la matanza de Ránquil de 1934, el caso Caravana de la Muerte de 1973 y el caso Alto Hospicio de 1998-2001. Estas masacres se han convertido en casos emblemáticos del siglo XX chileno debido a las consecuencias políticas, económicas, colectivas y/o personales que trajeron. En mi investigación quiero ir más allá de estos aspectos solamente, para considerar también cómo la producción cultural participa en y contribuye a “volver emblemática” una memoria. Así, espero mostrar el poder que tienen los medios, masivos o no masivos, en la formación misma de una memoria y cómo aquello que entendemos por “memoria” ha cambiado gracias a nuevas tecnologías y medios que tenemos a disposición.

Dick Grayson, also known as Nightwing and Batman’s first Robin, is an important but largely unexplored character within the Batman mythos in DC Comics. There has been much scholarship done on Batman, however, this scholarship fails to address the importance of Dick Grayson. This applies not only to his additions to the Batman mythos, but also to the role he has played in comic book history; he was the first sidekick in superhero comic books, and was one of the first superheroes in all of comics, being introduced shortly after industry titans Superman and Batman. Through Grayson, this thesis will illustrate how comic book superheroes work to inspire us, teach us valuable life lessons, provide social and moral scripts, and promote the development of positive morals, healthy masculinity, and coping mechanisms amongst their audience. Dick Grayson will be used as a specific example of this, as the scope of research must be narrowed to a specific hero, as trying to analyze multiple characters would be unwieldy. This thesis provides an analysis of how Grayson is constructed as a character through the application of Joseph Campbell’s model of the hero’s journey, and psychological theory including: Sandra L. Bloom’s research in childhood and psychic trauma, Cathy Caruth’s work regarding post-traumatic stress disorder, and the theory of heroic leadership dynamic from Scott T. Allison and George R. Goethals. By using these theories and methodologies, this thesis will show how and why Dick Grayson is an exceptional example of the promotion of positive development in superhero comic books.

Still House is a poetry manuscript that explores the relationship between traditional gender roles and traditional poetic forms. The poems in this collections seek to revise the role of the homemaker and interrogate whether it is okay to take comfort and pleasure in tasks that are often labeled as feminine (i.e. cooking, baking, decorating, organizing, shopping, choosing outfits) while rejecting other parts of the homemaker archetype, such as subservience to and dependence upon men. Limited gender roles, patriarchy, sexist comments, capitalism, toxic masculinity, the cis-hetero-white-male gaze, trauma, physical pain, illness—these all can make it feel like we are not fully in control and ownership of our bodies, like something is encroaching. The poems in Still House are invested in using the poetics of embodiment (a poetics centered around telling stories about the body through immersive sensory details) to reclaim the body from trauma, patriarchy, and chronic pain and illness.

Every day, individuals must navigate how, when, and to what extent they disclose disability and/or trauma, because doing so is a risky act, weighted with consequences. For example, disclosing disability can help to counter social stigma associated with disability, but doing so can also carry negative personal consequences. These tensions are mirrored in the fields of disability studies, trauma studies, and queer and feminist theory; scholarship ensuing from such fields often positions disclosure as either an emancipatory act, through which one can counter dominant ideologies and reclaim identities, or as an act that creates new regulatory norms or problematically reifies identities and experiences. Too often, disclosure is positioned in binary terms: we disclose, or we remain silent. In this dissertation, I center participants’ meaning-making practices to counter ways in which they are silenced or interpreted through a conception of disability as pathology and individual deficit. Individuals with disabilities are often positioned as their diagnosis and their stories are told for them, rather than by them. Foregrounding participants’ voices illuminates how they push back against violence enacted by scholarly literature and medical discourses that question the narratives of disabled people. My study’s ten participants—all self-identified women with disabilities who engage in various practices of “life writing”—participated in three semi-structured interviews and five small reading and writing groups. In analyzing these interactions, I reclaim the act of storying as legitimate scholarly work, emphasize the importance of lived experience, and provide multiple entrees for readers to conceptualize disclosure in practice. Drawing on my participants’ insights, I actively resist the binary of speech and silence, analyzing silence as a rhetorical move, constitutive of and engaged dynamically with speech. I also define disclosure through a disability lens, approaching it as a potentially strategic act that is relational, context-specific, and negotiable. Drawing from participants’ rhetorical negotiations of disclosure and my own navigations of disability and trauma disclosure, I offer “masking” as a central concept, defined as a form of disclosure—and a rhetorical negotiation—that allows individuals to muddy the binary of speech and silence in seeking validation even while skirting some of the social and embodied consequences of disclosing disability and trauma. Through masking, I argue, individuals can more safely process experience and gain access to needed resources. I also theorize masking as tactics of resistance that can destabilize dominant readings of disability and trauma. This study proposes four specific rhetorical moves as forms of “masking”: disguising the specifics of one’s own story by speaking through culturally available narratives; disclosing through the guise of various genres, such as fiction, to enact safe distancing; calling on metaphor or form to elicit productive ambiguity and co-construct meaning with interlocutors; and drawing upon affective veils, such as humor, to gain access and/or soften difficult disclosures for oneself and one’s audience. I conclude that masking disclosure affords representation, legitimization, and healing for my study participants. I also reflect on ways in which tactics of masking might be adopted to foster more productive conversations across lines of difference, and ways in which grassroots community spaces might help to foster networks of care and recognition of experience.

Representing large-scale historical traumatic events can be problematic as accounts are often subjective and biased. It is difficult to determine if the subjective historical account is factually accurate or not. When discussing the Holocaust, representation is an important factor. How is the Holocaust represented? This paper shows how literature can fill in the gaps of historical representation. I focus on psychoanalyst Dori Laub’s three levels of the witness and their role in testimony in relation to Holocaust literature. For Laub, the first level witness is the primary account from the person who experienced the trauma. The second level witness is who the first level witness shares his/her story with. The third level witness observes the process of witnessing between the first and second witnesses. Laub’s ideas on witnessing and testifying are heightened when paired with Paul Ricoeur’s notion of attestation, which is the act of believing in the speech of the testifier. For many Holocaust survivors, speaking about the traumas endured was extremely difficult. Often the only evidence survivors had of their experiences was their testimony. As a survivor goes through the process of attestation, he/she asks listeners to believe in his/her testimony. I trace Laub’s three levels of the witness in Primo Levi’s memoir If This Is a Man, Elie Wiesel’s fictional Day, and W.G. Sebald’s journey novel Austerlitz. Tracing the three levels of the witness in each text, demonstrates Ricoeur’s notion of attestation, which provides new insight into the representation of large-scale historical traumatic events.

ABSTRACTActs of Recovery: Autoethnography, Performance, and Trauma in Ethnographic WorkbyMing Lauren HoldenThis dissertation aims to add the cultural weight of advanced scholarship to a description and understanding of the relationship between trauma, performance, and recovery. It does so using case studies and methodologies whose operative modes and execution both stray consciously from the confines of some of the historically traditional ivory tower’s most egregious disciplinary blind spots. Chapter One, as an introduction, lays out a definition and history of trauma; and a justification for examining it the way I do in the name of progressive scholarship. Chapter Two recounts and analyzes my experience co-founding the Survival Girls, a theater collective for Congolese refugee women in a Nairobi slum, in a meditation on the role of performance studies in a modern and responsible conception of subjective and ethnographic scholarship. Chapter Three approaches the sort of gender-based violence that the members of the Survival Girls suffered by way of literary scholarship by analyzing two plays that address the experience of such violence without re-enacting that violence upon the women I worked with, thereby positioning stage directions in a playscript as an acceptable alternative subject onto which to responsibly employ an “anthropological spyglass” in 2019 as a privileged interloper. Chapter Four uses a performance studies perspective to document over a decade of oral history interviews with an American Indigenous man who is also a Vietnam War veteran and a cancer survivor, dancing with the performance of those interviews as constitutive of an ethnography which illustrates what might be called the reverse effect of the historical anthropological spyglass. Each of these explorations use performance studies as an entry point for the effort toward decolonial methodology, epistemology, and tradition to examine intersubjective possibilities for understanding trauma and recovery as affective phenomena.

This thesis, written in English, offers a comparative analysis of communal trauma in the Post-Plantation fiction of Maryse Condé's Traversée de la Mangrove and William Faulkner's Light in August. More specifically, this piece of scholarship examines how traumas of absence, defined as those resulting from a missing experience rather than a lived one, construct communities through the acknowledgement of shared pain. By rejecting traditional narrative techniques, both authors tell the story of their fictional communities via what we call a communal recit, the totality of individual narratives collectively informing the reader's understanding of the particular community. In reading these individual recits alongside each other, the reader engages in a process we call Relational reading, which taking inspiration from Édouard Glissant's Poetics of Relation, is a method of identifying shared experiences within a literary work. This reading practice is made possible through Deleuze and Guattari's analysis of the rhizome and its advantages as a narrative device. For the reader, this style of narration yields topologies of the represented communities' thinking, thereby exposing how characters come to see themselves in relation to one another. Finally, this work considers literature's role as a functional monument to that which cannot be easily depicted.

In this essay, I review my development as a playwright in the MFA Dramatic Writing program and examine the shifting, overlapping goals of playwright-as-educator and playwright-as-entertainer. In Part One, I position my academic exploration of trauma in relation to ethics in journalism, embodied knowledge, and intersectional feminism and outline my creative experiments in staging trauma through the process of witnessing, retelling, and abstraction. In Part Two, I detail the artistic and personal roots of my dissertation play, The Great Maverick Adventure of 2007, and the structural and dramaturgical tools I employed to rebuild a sense of play and theatricality in my work.

This dissertation offers the first comprehensive historical analysis of childhood and the figure of the young “child” in Argentina’s transition from dictatorship to democracy (1983-2000). Moving young children from the margins to the center of national history and political narratives, the dissertation examines the importance of the Argentine child during this moment as a manifestation of socio-cultural and political anxieties about responsibility, memory, and citizenship. It uses historical analysis as well as literary and trauma theory to understand the ways in which a range of educators, state officials, human rights activists, and authors inscribed Argentine children, both real and imagined, as the inheritors of a violent past and saviors of a democratic future. To do so, the dissertation examines a range of materials from the late dictatorship period through the transition: educational laws and reforms, educational policy and conferences, children’s textbooks (manuales), children’s literature about the dictatorship (three works by pioneering Argentine author Graciela Montes), activist outreach on behalf of disappeared Argentines and their children (by Las Madres, Las Abuelas, and HIJOS), human rights education reports (by UNESCO, the Asamblea Permanente por los Derechos Humanos [APDH], and the Ministry of Education), and finally, professional magazines about children’s literature and pedagogy (Piedra Libre and La Mancha). Collectively, these sources shed new light about how adults during the transitional period placed Argentine childhood at the center of transitional society, moving over time from a vision of children as victims and innocents to one of knowledge and agency.

This dissertation takes up the question of how authors, artists, filmmakers and others attempted to make sense and meaning in the aftermath of the March 11, 2011 triple disasters of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear accident in northeastern Japan (3.11). As the works under consideration move from the immediacy of disaster to the eventuality of aftermath, I examine how disaster becomes embedded within the everyday, and how these works render legible different scales and temporalities of trauma, which the language of the event may not capture. This project is firmly grounded in the practices of literary criticism, but also opens up to an interdisciplinary nexus including anthropological approaches to social and economic precarity, historical work on environmental disasters in Japan, and art/visual culture studies. These connections link this project to a broader conversation that understands the localized events of 3.11 to be part of emerging dialogues concerning trauma studies, affect studies, and the ethics of representation.Chapter one focuses on the initial wave of new media responses that challenged the more traditional responses found in television broadcasts linked to corporate and public service advertising. It examines the Advertising Council of Japan’s public service ads which, in the days following the disasters, offered an authoritative narrative promising that recovery was possible as long as individuals practiced self-control and self-restraint. In contrast to this normative narrative of recovery, Twitter poetry by writer and activist Wagō Ryōichi demanded the sympathetic imagination of his readers to grieve with him and bear witness to loss. The second chapter examines how writers Kawakami Hiromi and Takahashi Gen’ichirō returned to their earlier literary works in search of a language that could account for the disasters. I take the act of Kawakami and Takahashi rewriting their own previously published works, an act that redirects the illocutionary force of an established speech act, transforming it into an uncanny language of repetition, as an ethical endeavor to address the disasters. The third chapter, on post-3.11 film, examines Sono Sion’s Himizu (2011) and Hiroki Ryūichi’s RIVER (2011) to ask how images of the disasters came to be embedded in the discourses on everyday life in a way that gave rise to a visual vernacular invested with reparative potential. Both films resist an easy attachment to a hopeful futurity, but find, nevertheless, a kind of recuperative stubbornness in their characters’ decision to live with grief. In the final chapter, I examine how musician Saito Koji’s ambient, repeating musical loops, titled “Hope” and “Helplessness” (2012-13), photographer Takeda Shimpei’s project Trace (2011-13), a series of photographs of irradiated soil from the northeast, and author Kawakami Mieko’s short story “Sangatsu no keito” ([“March Yarn”] 2011), work to render legible the different scales and temporalities of the traumatic events. Kawakami, Takeda, and Saito’s works collapse past, present, and future by refusing narrative closure. In doing so, they call for a lingering with loss that may activate a sympathetic imagination and might attune one to the pain and experience of the other. In the epilogue, I consider how the events of 3.11 have been memorialized and archived nationally and locally by examining corporate ad campaigns Yahoo! JAPAN staged in the heart of Tokyo, and examining local museums and memorials in affected towns in the northeast, focusing in particular on the Rias Ark Museum in Kesennuma, Miyagi Prefecture.

In this study, I examine representational strategies revolving around extreme violence and child/adolescent protagonists in films, literature, children’s drawings, and legal/political discourses in contemporary Latin American culture from an interdisciplinary approach. I analyze the mobilizing potential and uses of representations of child protagonists affected by violence and the cultures of impunity that facilitate its circulation. Within the works selected, I explore ways in which children can become sites of memory and justice through acts of witnessing, empathy, and the universal claim of natural law, with a primary focus on transnational and multidirectional depictions of violence (i.e. a violence in circulation) in extra-juridical, politicized, or aberrant environments in Latin American works. The historical periods contextualizing this study include the Argentine military dictatorship (1976-1983) and its interconnectedness to the violence of WWII and the Holocaust in Reina Roff�’s “La noche en blanco” (Chapter 1), the impact of transnational trajectories of genocidal violence in Argentine South Patagonia in 1959-1960 as depicted by Luc�a Puenzo’s novel Wakolda (Chapter 2), Argentina’s transition to democracy (1990s) and the critical questions it raised regarding appropriated children and amnesty/justice in Dir. Gast�n Biraben’s Cautiva (Chapter 3), and the circulation of the traumatic in an orphanage in Mexican director Guillermo del Toro’s filmic interpretation of violence during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) in El espinazo del diablo (Chapter 4, Part A). My research investigates inter-discursivities from a non-traditional approach to literature, film, and archival drawings, which include fictional (diegetic) drawings by Spanish children (in del Toro’s films) and non-fictional drawings made by Argentine children in exile in the Netherlands (Chapter 4, Part B). I extensively focus on analyzing instances of children’s experiences with what I term “recycled violence.” This repetition of extreme violence is demonstrated in certain works in their trans-temporal and trans-spatial return to the pain and horrors of the Holocaust or to other unresolved periods of violence still resounding in the present moment. In the works analyzed, child protagonists are enormously affected by political decisions, wars, and the severe breakdown of law and order. Considering these extraordinary circumstances, it is important to justly address the traumas/wounds caused by the radical and systemic violence of those who should protect them – guardians who instead inflict violence. Injustices are approached in this study through an exploration of the concepts of spectatorship and witnessing, the imperative of the Good Samaritan or ethical responsibility, and possible connections of truth and testimony to justice. Finally, I postulate that child/adolescent protagonists may facilitate the establishment of a fortified empathy in an audience/readership numb from an incessant bombardment by violence, among other reasons for the use of children in works revisiting periods of extreme violence.

This thesis examines Marvel’s The ‘Nam comic series, written by Doug Murray, through the analytical lens of trauma studies. The paper looks at the early run of the comic series, and shows how the author of the comic book exposes the readers to the traumas of being a US Army infantry man serving in Vietnam. The third chapter explores how the draft and the young age of the soldiers played a role in their experience of trauma and how they reacted to it, while the fourth chapter explains how the traumas of war affected the soldiers during their time in war. The fifth chapter examines the use of the comic book as a medium and shows how the comic book was used to amerce the reader into the experiences of trauma that the young soldiers of the comic stories had to live through. Finally, the paper concludes with how comic books, specifically comics like The ‘Nam, can be used in education and as a tool to start a conversation about what it means to be a veteran of war.

Imagine if This Were in Comic Sans is a collection of poems that acts as an exploration of scripted womanhood and sexuality as well as an examination of the physical and emotional body as a site of both trauma and desire. With no formal sections, the collection is composed of poems along with sparse images and cellphone screenshots that deal with the admiration of viscera, tortured movements through the mundane, and the warped filters trauma presses upon women’s desires. As a corrective to the assumptions that equate women’s emotional expression with melodrama and sentimentality, the work adopts a deliberately melodramatic, even grotesque tonality. The conversational style of the speaker in these poems is intended to solicit the reader’s empathy and/or identification with painful, sometimes shocking issues, traumas, and desires. Visuals added throughout embody the social, sexual subconscious that surrounds the speaker.

My dissertation bridges Chinese film studies, Sinophone studies, transnational feminism, and gender and sexuality studies through a comparative study of women's cinema in post-1976 China, post-1984 Hong Kong, and post-1987 Taiwan.In my dissertation, I examine five Sinophone women's films--Huang Shuqin's Woman, Demon, Human (1987), Li Yu's Fish and Elephant (2001), Zero Chou's Spider Lilies (2007), Ann Hui's Song of the Exile (1990), and Mabel Cheung's The Soong Sisters (1997). I investigate socio-political influences on the filmmaking practices of Sinophone women directors and the receptions of these films in the global market. I argue that these films' innovative use of melodrama, re-excavation of repressed family stories, and representations of entanglements among gender, nation-state, modernization, and identity enact negotiations by these women directors of the forces of Confucianism, colonialism, socialism, patriarchal nationalisms, and heterosexual norms in China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong at the turn of the century.This project fills a lacuna in current scholarship on Sinophone women's cinema and intervenes in current debates on nationalism, gender, and sexuality in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the U.S.A.

Analyzes how 20th Century British writers and Hollywood filmmakers have adapted common features of the Gothic literary tradition - the imperiled but investigative heroine, the attractive but coercive villain, and the portrait of a female predecessor - to address massive traumas that have been repressed by, but which continue to affect, modern cultures. Argues that, in each case, the text "acts out" the repressed cultural trauma underlying its narrative through the heroine's narcissistic over-identification with a portrait of a female predecessor. However, through scenes that disturbingly mirror the heroine and the villain, each work portrays the consequence of that repression: an irruption of traumatic past violence in the present. While the works I consider thereby address the shortcomings of public narratives that strive to evade or redeem collective trauma, they also foreground Gothic ambiguity and excess to acknowledge the limits of their own representational responses.

The applicability of trauma studies within an examination of postcolonial literature has been a contested topic for scholars in both fields. Additionally, scholarship regarding Amitav Ghosh’s postcolonial science fiction novel The Calcutta Chromosome encourages various readings of the novel but does not currently offer a cohesive examination of all its thematic disciplines and stylistic elements. Through an examination of this postcolonial novel, I will provide a more holistic reading of the novel through an application of trauma studies that explores its representation of the internal postcolonial conflict regarding Western and non-Western historiographies. My analysis will focus on the lexical, character, and narrative levels of the novel through its dominant medical, technological, postcolonial, and political themes for inclusions of Caruth’s aporia related to the manifestation of trauma in literature.

This dissertation examines the role of the everyday, common object in relation to the human experience and capacity to give testimony--to communicate experiences of trauma, torture and suffering. In my research, I seek to bring together a number of subfields: theoretical interpretation of testimonial narratives, trauma theory, memory studies, spectral theory, and object-oriented philosophy, in order to "think with things" in my analysis of narratives emerging in Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile (three of the countries that make up the area known as the Southern Cone) in what is called the "Post-Dictatorship" period. Basing my analysis on testimonial narratives written by survivors in Argentina, as well as interviews I conducted with former political prisoners in Chile and Uruguay, the first part of my project considers the important role material objects had for those who were imprisoned and survived torture and mistreatment during the dictatorships. I argue that these accounts demonstrate a reliance on the material world, meaning the prisoner/detainee during his/her detention used the secret possession of objects, along with acts of artistic creation, as a means of re-building and expressing a semblance of autonomous subjectivity and resisting the total destruction of his/her world. The second part of my project moves to the period of the post-dictatorship, exploring how this changed relationship to the material world shapes the creation of new narratives that seek to remember the period of the dictatorship and transmit this information to society in Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay today. Examining the narrative logic of texts, museum expositions, and artistic endeavors that use objects from the dictatorship period to teach about the traumatic past, I examine how the material of the past (prison craftwork, corporal remains, and the former belongings of the disappeared) is endowed with a testimonial capacity and used to effect change in the present, communicating the atrocities of the past in order to ensure that human rights abuses never occur again in the future.

This dissertation traces the recurrence of melancholia in post-1980 American culture and literature about the psychological consequences of atrocity and sudden loss. Narratives within this subset often concern Vietnam combat, slavery, rape, the Holocaust, the perpetration of violence, the attacks on September 11, or the suicide of loved ones, and critics have frequently analyzed such works within the context of trauma studies. I argue that such a critical lens, with its postmodern attention to representation, deemphasizes subjective states of ambivalence, reality-testing, mourning, and self-negation, which are major components of melancholia that Sigmund Freud described in his 1917 essay, "Mourning and Melancholia". After demonstrating how these subjective states uniquely surface in novels by Tim O'Brien, Toni Morrison, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Don DeLillo, I reveal how melancholia emerges within the contemporary cultural mindset as a symptom of postmodernism's rejection of the reality principle - a metaphysical foundation necessary for mourning. Mourning, these writers all demonstrate, is simultaneously wanted and rejected within a postmodern milieu composed of overlapping realities, infinite translation, and representational aporia. From this argument I thus bring the following postulates to the surface: that the framework of melancholia has an ethical advantage when it comes to addressing the subjectivity and complicity of victims of atrocity and loss, especially as it concerns their individual recoveries; that the framework of melancholia has an analytical advantage when it comes to theorizing mourning, loss, and the management of desire; and that the framework of melancholia reveals an underlying cultural condition of impossible mourning within the period known today as the postmodern.

This thesis applies both postcolonial and trauma theory to explore filmic responses to September 11th and the “War on Terror.” I examine the Hollywood films United 93 and World Trade Center and compare them to the omnibus film 11”09’01 and the Bollywood release My Name is Khan in order to understand the different ways in which each work portrays the trauma of September 11th as well as each film’s unique attempt to memorialize the attacks. Both trauma theory and postcolonial theory, I argue, help illuminate the different ideological responses to September 11th. I contend that the two Hollywood films both evacuate the surrounding context from the attacks and instead use the trauma of September to celebrate American heroism, ultimately reinforcing conservative notions of what motivated the attacks, as well as who can claim U.S. citizenship, and by extension, who can claim victimhood. This is contrasted with 11”09’01 and My Name is Khan, both of which return context to September 11th and also attempt to use the trauma as a means of potentially forging new alliances with disparate communities both within the United States and across the globe. It is by examining how the trauma of September 11th continues to inform discourses on terrorism that there exists the potential to contest mainstream discourses on terror and also form more potentially liberatory alliances with different groups of people across the globe.

Sara Tuvel Bernstein’s The Seamstress and Rena Kornreich Gelissen’s Rena’s Promise: A Story of Sisters in Auschwitz, both Holocaust memoirs, offer insight into the rise of violent anti-Semitism prior to World War II and the authors’ experiences in concentration camps. The purpose of this project is to better understand the unique trauma women experienced during the Holocaust and the impact of that trauma on their literary responses.

This dissertation takes issue with recent injunctions against mourning in contemporary trauma studies. The critical turn to melancholic or "resistant mourning" is based on the idea that one normalizes and assimilates loss in ethically dubious ways, either denying the loss or denying the alterity of the lost other; as a result, this criticism positions melancholia as the only viable response against a totalizing mourning. In tracing the parallels between this trend and a related valorization of anti-elegiac tendencies in twentieth and twenty-first century writing, I argue that the resurgent discourse of melancholia is based on a perceived breakdown of mourning which paradoxically conceals a desire for a time of perfect, totalizing mourning that this trend ostensibly refutes. This thesis, which most centrally addresses recent trends in trauma studies, opens up to postcolonial studies by examining how contemporary Anglophone writers, shaped by a common traumatic history of English colonialism, attempt to articulate new modes of grief work rather than simply returning to old wounds. Focusing on representations of individual loss and historical trauma in the work of Kamau Brathwaite, J. M. Coetzee, Zakes Mda, and Derek Walcott, I explore acts of literature as ways of working-through that do not actually foreclose a dialogic relationship with the past. While all four writers initially seem to participate in a valorization of melancholia, they are actually attempting to work through loss in ways that challenge a reductive binary opposition between mourning as closure and melancholia as openness.

In this dissertation, I investigate American motion picture narratives from the 1990s in which detectives encounter the supernatural. These narratives did not originate during this decade, but there were a remarkable number of them compared to previous periods. I argue that the supernatural is often analogous to personal, national, or cultural trauma. I further suggest that a detective investigating the supernatural stands in for the psychoanalyst, who studies and treats this trauma. I then trace the origins of the supernatural detective in history, as well as in British and American popular fiction. To begin, I discuss Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow (1999) as an example of a supernatural detective, who is himself traumatized but who also manages to solve the supernatural mystery in the eponymous village. That solution points to the obscured narrative of women’s rights in the early-American republic. Next, I suggest that spaces can be traumatized like people. I introduce the concept of the chronotope of the traumatized space, which I then apply to Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959) and its various film and television adaptations to argue that these influential haunted house tales have helped repress scientific research into the paranormal as a reputable field of inquiry and the paranormal researcher as an admirable calling. Next, the entire country of the United States is portrayed as a traumatized space in The X-Files, which presents its primary supernatural detective, Agent Fox Mulder, as an analyst of the state, exposing the national guilt concerning the treatment of Native Americans. Finally, I investigate several turn-of-the-millennium fake documentaries. I argue that in The Last Broadcast (1998), The Blair Witch Project (1999), and the novel House of Leaves (2000), rational investigators are more likely to meet impossible moments than they are to meet supernatural entities. These impossible moments reflect a growing desensitization to the slippage between televisual media and the world it represents. I conclude that the surprising prevalence of these narratives during the 1990s is due to a resonance between the mechanics of trauma and memory and the patterns of millennial thinking in the United States in the 1990s.

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 providing a means of speaking about the unspeakable. I hope to illustrate how restoring trauma to language revives the ethical and political efficacy of traumatic representation.