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- Creators: Soares, Rebecca
Description
In Memory of an Emily is a piece of creative nonfiction and a short film that together detail the author’s experience with mental illness in the collegiate environment. In its 45 pages, Jackman begins to detail the realities of living with depression, anxiety, and anorexia nervosa. The piece includes five sections of writing, including a preface and four portions describing freshman to senior year. Each section endeavors to explore simplistic and purposefully cliché events common in young adult/collegiate life and juxtapose the banal nature of these events with the experience of the mentally ill. Her story endeavors to explore the emotional truths of pain and suffering, revealing that beneath her tender façade lies a very different existence, one tangled in eating disorders, panic attacks, and overwhelming sadness. While maintaining a story-like quality traditional to creative non-fiction, Jackman ventures to warn with a cautionary tale of pathologizing abnormality and exploring the long lasting effects of childhood trauma. Weaving careful storytelling into an exploration of the mentally ill mind, Jackman keeps the reader both terrifyingly close and far away, whispering painful secrets and then desperately running away with the truth. She speaks frankly of all aspects of life, ranging from far more mundane events, such as break ups and college rejection letters, to complicated issues, such as the suicide of her grandfather and her admission into an eating disorder facility. The author attempts to establish a balanced rapport with the reader, recognizing the need to maintain distance and elicit emotion simultaneously. Jackman writes In Memory of an Emily as a heartbreaking but authentic tale, playing with stream of consciousness and paralyzing emotional description. She opens the door and invites the reader into her mind so as to share in the physical and emotional discomfort of the storyteller, but then promptly slams the door once inside.
ContributorsJackman, Emily Deprey (Author) / Soares, Rebecca (Thesis director) / Barca, Lisa (Committee member) / Economics Program in CLAS (Contributor) / Department of Psychology (Contributor) / School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-05
Description
This literary analysis thesis determines the relationship between twin characterization in Victorian novels and contemporary literature. Using Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-glass as foundational works for twin characterization with the Freudian definition of doubles as uncanny, this thesis analyzes the following twin tropes: the trickster twins, twins separated into binaries of “good” or “whole” and “damaged” or “evil,” male twins where one dies and the other marries the woman they both love, and female twins associated with shared supernatural appearance and abilities. These tropes are identified in Victorian works including Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins and Wilkie Collins’ Poor Miss Finch, then demonstrated in contemporary sources including Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement, Kim Edwards’s novel The Memory-Keeper’s Daughter, J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, and Stanley Kubrick’s film The Shining. Ultimately, this thesis analyzes these tropes of twin characterization in 19th-century and contemporary literature from a variety of genres to demonstrate how the fin de siècle fears of cultural degradation, explored through duality using the vehicle of twin characters, remain as pervasive influences in today’s literature with similar concerns about individual identity.
ContributorsKnighton, Makenna Nicole (Author) / Soares, Rebecca (Thesis director) / Farmer, Steve (Committee member) / Department of English (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-12
Description
This thesis explores how the characterization of mentally ill characters evolves in literature within the United States in order to understand if and how modern notions of mental illness have impacted American writers’ fictional depictions of insanity. For this reason, this project compares and contrasts American fiction from the 19th century and 21st century. More specifically, the thesis explores the two centuries to trace evolutions in the use of gothic tropes, the progression of the theme of identity, relevant paratexts, and public conversations about fictional mental illness in modern texts—all of which send specific messages about mental health and impact the ways in which the reader understands the characters with mental illness. Ultimately, this thesis argues that the evolved use of tropes, the theme of identity, paratexts, and public conversations suggest there has been a shift from othering characters with mental illness towards accepting these characters and normalizing mental illness as an ordinary and familiar part of the human experience. In short, an increased understanding of mental health accompanies literary choices that create a more sympathetic representation of mental illness overall, even when fiction writers might still rely heavily on 19th-century tropes regarding madness.
ContributorsHagerman, Rachel L (Author) / Soares, Rebecca (Thesis director) / Murphy, Patricia C. (Committee member) / Department of English (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2020-12
Description
This excerpt of my novel, The Letter, is about a girl named Gwen who moves across the country to deal with the loss of her father. When she moved into Palm Castle and creates a connection with Blake Everton both through a magical portal and through letters they exchange, she begins to heal from her trauma caused by grief.
ContributorsKeller, Lauren Alison (Author) / Van Engen, Dagmar (Thesis director) / Soares, Rebecca (Committee member) / Department of Marketing (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2020-12