Freya diMonteverdi has spent her entire life trying to piece together the story of her family. Interspersed amongst three generations of women, this fiction piece attempts to answer questions of home and absence through the narrative mediums of mushrooms, the tale of Atlantis, opera and excessive use of footnotes.

From Ruins to Ruin is a family saga told as a collection of linked short stories, not in chronological order. When Gonçalo and Beatrice meet near their respective hometowns in Portugal, they are driven by impulse and romanticism. The collision of these characters proves to be less than romantic. Beatrice feels trapped by her overprotective parents and is looking for an opportunity to leave, but Gonçalo is not the ticket she’d hoped for. Hardened by an early life of loss, loneliness, and poverty, Gonçalo is cruel and abusive. From Ruins to Ruin is an exploration of the way pain and suffering, when left to fester, are inherited by our children. Beatrice and Gonçalo’s three children each absorb the hostility their parents displayed towards each other and themselves: Raquel struggles to love her body, Olivia struggles in abusive relationships, and CJ struggles handling relationships with women in his life. Their individual conflicts are, of course, informed by their experience as first-generation children growing up in America, the same way their parents’ conflicts were influenced by their own respective upbringings. From Ruins to Ruin is still missing several perspectives that I have begun working on. I plan to include stories exploring Beatrice’s parents, siblings, and extended family, which further inform Beatrice’s character as well as her children’s. The environment that shaped each character—time period, location, political climate—informs each character’s story, which led to my decision to format this narrative as a collection of short stories. The inspiration for this collection began in 2016, when I noticed that our country’s increasing embrasure of the far-right had not only removed the inhibitions of the most bigoted people in the United States, but also begun to inform the way the students I tutored at my undergraduate university’s writing center understood and reacted to the world around them. Those in positions of power embraced this normalization, and often times used the fascist rhetoric of “family values” to defend their hatred. It reminded me, horrifyingly, of the rhetoric shared by people half a decade older than me (my sister’s classmates), who were old enough to have their worldviews informed by the toxic post-9/11 atmosphere. Both sides of my family immigrated to the United States from Portugal, but at different moments. My own parents were only young children by the time António de Oliveira Salazar was no longer Prime Minister, but those who raised them early in their lives were influenced by his motto: “Deus, Pátria, e Família,” or “God, Fatherland, and Family.” While my mother’s parents believed primarily in supporting their community, and therefore felt supported in return by their neighbors during hard times, my father’s experience in his early life was not as fortunate. His family was as isolated and insular as they were unkind, and without a warm support system to turn to, he became bitter and resentful. Much of this translated into his treatment of the women in his life—his mother, his grandmother, and ultimately his wife. When we lack social safety nets and a larger community to rely on, we internalize any potential hatred, hostility, and mistreatment as normal, and often that translates to inherited trauma. From Ruins to Ruin is not necessarily based on true events, but it is inspired by this small trend in inherited familial traits. Tracing the roots of what makes a person (their inability to forgive, their quickness to anger, their tendency to accept mistreatment) has always fascinated me. I purposely wanted to write a collection of linked short stories rather than a novel to allow individual focus on each character when I felt it was needed. While this collection is currently incomplete, and mainly includes one half of the family tree, I felt that giving these characters their own space and own story was important. My hope is that each of these stories can stand alone, but that reading them as a collection further informs the reader’s understanding of the characters. My decision to write this family saga in short stories stems, too, from my belief that most people experience their own lives as a series of vignettes. As I worked on this collection and interviewed family members to gather details that would texturize it, I found myself drawn to create characters that both frustrated me and demanded sympathy—or at least understanding. In his essay “On Defamiliarization,” Charles Baxter writes about the importance of recognizing ourselves in character who are ultimately different from us: Defamiliarization is finally more about the way in which we recognize ourselves in an action and simultaneously see someone we don’t recognize… Recognition is re-cognitions: not finding ourselves when we expected to be but where we did not expect to be found, and at a moment when our defenses are down. (38) While the characters in this collection are deeply flawed, I hoped readers could see themselves in the mistakes they make. My desire to explore these characters was, ultimately, an investigation into understanding not only myself, but the self in general. I believe fiction is a great tool to understand people we otherwise thought different from ourselves. I don’t think this necessarily requires us to forgive or like these sorts of people, but knowing them feels more conducive to crafting a better world that we hope to live in.

Thesis (M.A.)--Miami University, Dept. of Communication, 2008. / Title from first page of PDF document. Includes bibliographical references (p. 72-79).

No description available.

Thesis (MA (VA)--Stellenbosch University, 2011. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The thesis investigate the family narrative. While engaging specifically with my female family narrative, it essentially questions how and why we create and perpetuate this narrative of absence and presence. The acts of memory, autobiography, testimony and the subsequent creation of the archive are probed. Such probes attempt to enter the sphere of the unsayable and unsaid, partially lifting the female existence, identity and body from the silence surrounding the private and intimate realm she dwells in. The creation and recreation of meaning through the use and manipulation of time and language is examined through-out whilst continually reading absence as presence. This is done in order to locate and access the silent and forgotten. The thesis problematises the notion of the ‘I’ and the ‘initial’ through looking at the repercussions of the employing linearity. Ultimately, this writing process reveals the contradictions and dualities we both create and aim to obliterate within the individual and collective composition of the family narrative. / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Hierdie tesis ondersoek die familienarratief. Terwyl dit spesifiek die vroulike familienarratief bespreek bevraagteken dit hoe en hoekom ons die narratief van afwesigheid en teenwoordigheid skep en voortsit. Die dade van onthou, outobiografie, getuienis, en die daaropvolgende ontstaan van die argief, word gepeil. Hierdie ondersoeke poog om die sfeer van die ‘ongesêde’ en die ‘onsêbare’ binne te dring, en so die vroulike bestaan, identiteit en liggaam te bevry uit die stilte van die ‘private’ en die intieme terrein waarbinne sy woon. Die skep en herskep van betekenis deur die gebruik en manipulasie van taal en tyd word deurlopend ondersoek, terwyl afwesigheid as aanwesigheid gelees word. Dit word gedoen in orde om die stilte en vergete te vind en toegang daartoe te bewerkstellig. Die tesis problematiseer die begrip van die ‘ek’ en die ‘initiële’ deur na die reperkussies van die toepassing en gebruik van lineariteit te kyk. Uiteindelik onthul die skryfproses die kontradiksies en dualiteite wat ons beide skep asook poog om uit te wis binne die individuele en kollektiewe komposisie van die familie narratief.

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / A tese se insere nos estudos sobre o gótico literário. Seu objetivo principal é mostrar o lar como lugar crucial para o desenvolvimento das temáticas caras ao gênero, destacando o corpo feminino como pivô. Na primeira parte, foram analisados estudos teóricos sobre o romance inglês, apontando para uma possível mudança na maneira como o gótico vem sendo tratado. Na segunda parte, obras ficcionais importantes para a discussão do lar e do corpo feminino dentro da tradição gótica foram analisadas, promovendo a articulação de tais obras com as diretrizes teóricas pertinentes. Finalmente, a terceira e última parte terá os romances Ciranda de Pedra, Daughters of the House e Lady Oracle como foco, a fim de apontar o modo como a narrativa gótica contemporânea assimilou as questões tratadas anteriormente / The present work is a study about the literary Gothic. Its main objective is to show the house as a crucial place for the development of themes related to the Gothic, highlighting the female body as a central figure. In the first part, theoretical studies related to the English novel are analyzed and a possible shift in the way the Gothic is dealt with is described. In the second part, relevant fictional works for the discussion of the house and of the female body in the Gothic tradition are analyzed in dialogue with pertinent theoretical ideas. Finally, the third and last part brings forth the novels Ciranda de Pedra, Daughters of the House and Lady Oracle in order to show how contemporary Gothic fiction deals with the issues previously discussed

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / A tese se insere nos estudos sobre o gótico literário. Seu objetivo principal é mostrar o lar como lugar crucial para o desenvolvimento das temáticas caras ao gênero, destacando o corpo feminino como pivô. Na primeira parte, foram analisados estudos teóricos sobre o romance inglês, apontando para uma possível mudança na maneira como o gótico vem sendo tratado. Na segunda parte, obras ficcionais importantes para a discussão do lar e do corpo feminino dentro da tradição gótica foram analisadas, promovendo a articulação de tais obras com as diretrizes teóricas pertinentes. Finalmente, a terceira e última parte terá os romances Ciranda de Pedra, Daughters of the House e Lady Oracle como foco, a fim de apontar o modo como a narrativa gótica contemporânea assimilou as questões tratadas anteriormente / The present work is a study about the literary Gothic. Its main objective is to show the house as a crucial place for the development of themes related to the Gothic, highlighting the female body as a central figure. In the first part, theoretical studies related to the English novel are analyzed and a possible shift in the way the Gothic is dealt with is described. In the second part, relevant fictional works for the discussion of the house and of the female body in the Gothic tradition are analyzed in dialogue with pertinent theoretical ideas. Finally, the third and last part brings forth the novels Ciranda de Pedra, Daughters of the House and Lady Oracle in order to show how contemporary Gothic fiction deals with the issues previously discussed

Families are conceptualized and accomplished in increasingly diverse ways in the 21st century. A constructionist framework was utilized to examine a widespread contemporary family form, the interspecies family. This mixed-method approach relied on both quantitative survey data and qualitative interview data. First, survey data from the 2006 Constructing the Family Survey were analyzed to understand who in America counts pets as family. Many social demographics were associated and predicted counting pets as family but gender was one of the strongest associations. However, marital status moderated the relationship between gender and counting pets as family at a statically significant level. Men who are currently or have ever been married are less likely to count pets as family than never married men. Second, I conducted 32 semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 39 people during 2014-2015 in Central Florida to understand how people who count their cats and dogs as family members narrate this process. Narrative strategies documenting exactly how cats and dogs become family members within interspecies family narratives include: time-related narratives, timeless narratives, and patchwork narratives. Additionally, all participants considered their cats and dogs family but only some of them felt like pet-parents. Narratives of childless participants are compared with narratives of parents to examine the impact of family form on the construction of pet parenting narratives. Implications for the family change literature are discussed.