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Autobiography is a slippery genre, if, indeed, it is a genre. To deal with its slipperiness I use action research and qualitative inquiry to create a bricolage, an artist?s book, Tissue. Within the patchwork, stitched-together form of Tissue, digitised text and images (autobiographical stories, poetry, photographs, drawings and paintings) sit in varying relationships to each other. Also, I use poetic language and images to display aspects of the discourse of memory in digitally manipulated text/images where language and image are not illustrative of each other but are interconnected and equal, synergetic, creating new meanings. To simultaneously enhance the handleability of the pages and distance their electronic nature, I use a number of different papers and fabrics as the skins of the images. Using the ideas of Roland Barthes (principally) and others as reference points, in this exegesis Re-picturing my life, I address the ways in which the present is informed by the past; self, identity and the body; the function of memory, and its mediation and articulation in the narration of autobiography; the significance of autobiographical objects and landscapes, and the nature of an autobiographical author. I also explore the effects on myself, as a migrant, of the fragility of identity in the face of major social disruptions such as mutiple migrations, and consider whether the narration of personal experience through autobiography aids in the construction of a new identity that is more grounded in the new surroundings. In this exegesis I argue that, in this process of revisiting the past and reconstructing narrative, text and image in my artist?s book, I have both re-written and re-pictured my life. Yet, while this process of regaining and articulating my lost family information seems to have initiated some bodily changes, and, more importantly, appears to have strengthened and stabilised my sense of self, it has not alleviated my feelings of exile. Indeed, my feelings of exile and the absence of any single identifiable homeland have strengthened.

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Auto Biography is a creative nonfiction memoir: A daughter, forced to move her unlovable, ever-combustible, wheelchairbound mother cross-country in an RV, attempts to come to terms with her via the automobiles of their lives. The story explores: 1) the universal dilemma of caring for aged parents––its stress, its pain, its sacrifice, and its dark humor; 2) memory––the "peeling back" narrative style working in the same layer upon layer way of memory, its non-linearity creating not so much a one-piece narrative but essay snapshots forming a family photo album view of this thing we call memory and this thing we call meaning; and, of course, 3) cars––their subtle yet surprisingly essential role in all our modern and post-modern lives.

Thesis advisor: Paula Mathieu / The following work is a memoir that chronicles my grandmother’s battle with a rare form of frontotemporal dementia. This dementia robbed her of the ability to use and process language, though, unlike Alzheimer’s Disease, it did not affect her memory or capacity to recognize loved ones. My thesis follows my family’s journey as we learned to develop new methods of communication that did not rely on words, methods largely dependent on a vault of family memories passed down through several generations of strong women. Ultimately, my experience with my grandmother’s illness enabled me to come to new conclusions regarding the role of language in modern society, from the possibilities it creates to the boundaries it imposes. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2010. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: College Honors Program. / Discipline: English Honors Program. / Discipline: English.

Learning to read is essential, yet many children do not receive a diagnosis of developmental dyslexia (DD) until second or third grade. The aim of this dissertation is to identify brain and behavioral predictors of DD so that diagnosis and intervention can begin sooner. Experiment 1 examines infants with familial risk of DD longitudinally. Infants completed non-sedated diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) between 4- and 18-months of age and cognitive-linguistic assessment at four years. Infants at- risk of DD displayed reduced fractional anisotropy (FA) and increased radial diffusivity (RD) in the left arcuate fasciculus (AF) and reduced FA and axial diffusivity (AD) of the splenium of the corpus callosum (CC) compared to peers without a familial risk. Both the left AF and CC are implicated in reading and reading-related tasks, and atypicalities have been observed in children and adults with DD. RD may reflect myelination and AD is thought to indicate pathway complexity suggesting infants at-risk of DD exhibit reduced myelination of the left AF and reduced pathway complexity of the CC at or shortly after birth. The left AF assessed in infancy predicted four-year-old vocabulary skills while the CC predicted four-year-old print knowledge. Experiment 2 explores the association between white matter microstructure of the left AF and CC and neural activity during phonological processing assessed via functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Preschoolers with and without a familial risk of DD completed DWI and an fMRI alliteration task where children indicated via button-press whether two words started with the same initial sound. Positive correlations were observed between FA of the left AF and CC and neural activity in the left medial temporal gyrus and the left lingual gyrus, two regions implicated in phonological processing. Experiment 3 examines whether white matter microstructure of the CC assessed in preschool is associated with school-age reading fluency in children with and without a familial risk of DD. Similar to children and adults with DD, preschoolers with a familial risk of DD displayed greater FA and AD of the CC compared to controls. Furthermore, AD of the CC predicted school-age reading fluency. / 2018-12-03T00:00:00Z

Yesterday Will Come is a hybrid collection of linked short stories that focuses on the way a particular family passes down the family history through physical and emotional memories. The collection largely focuses on the process of making and preserving memories and how the lack of control over one’s memory can lead to paranoia and displacement in their life. Particular value is attached to certain memories and the value and emotion attached can at times overwrite the actual content of the memory. The stories center around the Riviera family and particularly Ana Riviera’s life as she considers the many aspects of her family history she continues to inherit and the comfort and paranoia she associates with such inheritance. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.F.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2019. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

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