Thesis advisor: Alan Richardson / The purpose of this project is to examine how text and image function cognitively in the graphic narrative paying particular attention to its manifestation in Satrapi’s "Persepolis." The structure is such that each chapter will progressively become more specific, from medium to genre to text, drawing on specific examples from Persepolis for support. Chapter 2 will first categorize the various relationships between text and image as they function in the graphic narrative as a medium. They are described in terms of the reader’s cognitive experience of the verbal narrative line’s juxtaposition against the visual narrative line. Chapter 3 will examine how a multimodal narrative—a dual verbal/visual narrative—affects the genre of nonfiction in the graphic narrative medium. It will define not only the tensions that text and image necessarily bring to the authenticity of nonfiction, but also the benefits. Chapter 4 will focus on Persepolis as a cognitive product in its own right. Stemming from theories of autobiography which suggest that an autobiographic text is a self-construction or self-understanding of identity, one can examine Persepolis as a material product and personal construction through this lens. I offer a cognitive approach which suggests that Persepolis functions as a material anchor of a conceptual blend—cognitive theories developed by Mark Turner, Gilles Fauconnier, and Edward Hutchins which are further explained in Chapters 2 and 4. While the primary goal of this project is specific to the research goals explained above, the secondary goal is advocacy. Both cognitive literary theory and comics criticism are marginalized in current literary studies. The former—whose scientific method looms over literature—threatens to overshadow the beauty and philosophy behind prose and poetry, while the latter—as a product of mass consumption and popular culture—threatens to undermine the legitimacy of literature. However, this project will show the viability of both cognitive literary theory as a method and the graphic narrative as a subject for serious academic inquiry. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2010. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: College Honors Program. / Discipline: English Honors Program. / Discipline: English.

Review of Women ’s Nonfiction : A Guide to Reading Interests. Santa Barbara, CA: Libraries Unlimited (an imprint of ABCCLIO), 2009. 442p. $55.00, ISBN 978-1591586586.

“I Remember Myself” is a hybrid memoir told through poetry and prose. It tells the story of a young woman struggling to establish herself as an adult whose life is interrupted by chronic pain. The reader follows her relationships, along with her physical, mental, emotional and spiritual journeys through illness and grief. The work explores identity, the nature of the self, and the boundaries between reality and imagination.

This is a book-length, creative nonfiction collection of essays with a critical introduction. These essays are illustrating the conflict of fitting within socially-formed identities. In theme, this collection explores class, gender, and sexuality of the self. Each section is introduced with a brief reflection which links the essays together.

“To the Creek” is a creative nonfiction work in which place and identity play integral roles. Following a series of family revelations, the narrator embarks on a rebuilding project both of herself and a 100-year-old corncrib, the only standing structure on a Kentucky farm she and her husband inherited a few years before. However, farm life isn’t a natural fit for a first generation Cuban American, so this work touches on identity as well. The corncrib’s new function as a retreat and writing space leads the writer to explore similar efforts by other writers to convert existing sheds into creative spaces, with particular emphasis on Virginia Woolf and Thomas Merton.

This text highlights the small Japanese community in New Orleans, along with its cultural traditions.

The poetry collection in four sections features pieces concerned with memory, particularly of the author’s childhood in Ireland. Difficult family relationships as well as early romantic failures are prominent obsessions. Landscapes and careful portraits of characters recur. Travel to Eastern Europe and within the author’s adopted United States give the opportunity to meditate on larger issues and spans of time. Domestic pleasures and the struggle to be a good parent and husband provide the ultimate trajectory of the work. The nonfiction memoir consists of eight essays which tackle among other topics a failed first marriage, a return visit to the author’s high school in Dublin, an analysis of how the dead come back to haunt us in the everyday, and a mirroring of colonial exploration in contemporary lives. The common thread is the many ways “home” can be understood and run away from.

AMBIENT LIGHT: ESSAYS ON MARRIAGE, MOTHERHOOD, AND MENTAL HEALTH is a collection of ten personal and lyric essays interspersed with poems that speak to the subject or tone of the essay that follows. These essays examine the narrator’s experiences as mother, wife, and daughter, and explore the manner in which the different roles bleed into one another. The narrator’s impending divorce and the events that coalesce around it shape these essays into a coherent whole. In the spirit of Brenda Miller’s lyric essays, the essays collected in AMBIENT LIGHT: ESSAYS ON MARRIAGE, MOTHERHOOD, AND MENTAL HEALTH, use rich, imagistic language to tell of places and times both reflective and speculative in nature. They speak to the all-too-common dilemma of balancing motherhood with a demanding professional life, while also considering less ordinary issues, such as one child’s mental health challenges and another’s run-ins with the law.

This thesis consists of five chapters including a traditional introduction and four chapters, which investigate cultural interpretations of motherhood within the genre of memoir and personal essay. In the introduction, I discuss my research as it relates to the larger collection and detail how this work is different from other works within the "mother memoir" genre. Chapters II thru V, then, are all essays which begin to explore the major themes of cultural motherhood: ambivalence, loss, legitimacy, morality, and sin. These chapters, especially chapter II, identify and detail the traits of true motherhood as patience, compassion, sacrifice, and strength. Chapter V, as the culminating chapter, places me, as writer, in a different position--as a reader--and I begin to understand my history as a parent and as a writer through these texts. Using literature as an area of personal research and recovery, I reconstruct my past as a child and a parent and begin to understand what it means to be a mother--or at least, to better understand the expectations of those who surround me.

This thesis looks into autobiographical representations of disability and illness in life writing, a flexible form of creative nonfiction, and Contact Improvisation, a postmodern dance form, to argue how the structure of representation must incorporate the physical and emotional/intellectual in order to convey the necessary overlap between the mind and body. Chapter One looks at Plaintext, by Nancy Mairs, to analyze the way her sporadic writing style mirrors the unpredictability of her multiple sclerosis. Chapter Two focuses on Autobiography of a Face, by Lucy Grealy, and examines how the irregularity of the author's face--and the various roles that she takes on throughout her life--undermine the idea of any singular self in life-writing and otherwise. Analysis of Grealy's text is paired with Truth and Beauty, a memoir written by the author's best friend, Ann Patchett, in order to demonstrate the linguistic/cultural distinction--but significant overlap--between dependency and independence. Chapter Three expands upon this idea in relation to disabled dance companies, and highlights Contact Improvisation--a dance form based on the transfer of weight--as a revolutionary forum that incorporates mind and body in an "intratext" of representation. Because it is based on exchange of impulse and a blurring of bodies, CI allows for a fluid negotiation between multiple identities, accommodating the moment-to-moment nature of living with or without a disability.