First Advisor

Michele Glazer

Term of Graduation

Winter 2022

Date of Publication

4-20-2022

Document Type

Closed Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Fine Arts (M.F.A.) in Creative Writing

Department

English

Language

English

Subjects

Psychic trauma -- Fiction

DOI

10.15760/etd.7805

Physical Description

1 online resource (iv, 73 pages)

Abstract

Dog Music is a ghost story. It is a decade's worth of personal experience in forming, understanding, and accepting a post-traumatic-stress disorder diagnosis through an amalgamation of relationships. It is the recursion of hauntings stemming from a dislocation of time, memory, place, and the discombobulation of identity. Revisiting these passages, many written years ago, I felt a disconnect between who I am now and who I was then. They are vignettes of a person long dead, a series of apparitions conjured with each reading, then entombed in a manuscript.

It includes the habits and hallways of obsession whetted through recurring trauma, the hauntings of those culled forth from a land of the dead through reading, and the hope sprung through grounding in the presence of the now. The fulcrum of the manuscript is hauntology, defined as "a range of ideas referring to the return or persistence of elements from the social or cultural past, as in the manner of a ghost." The text is informed by ideas popularized by French philosopher Jacques Derrida, whose works were explored by Mark Fisher. Dog Music is my attempt at a literary spirit bottle tree, filled with crushed glass, razor wire, and memories to rouse the nightmarish ghosts of my past and trap them here within, forever.

Rights

In Copyright. URI: http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s).

Persistent Identifier

https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/37417

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