Date of Award
2016
Document Type
Open Access Thesis
Department
Art
Sub-Department
Creative Writing
First Advisor
David Bajo
Abstract
Dirt weaves together different narratives concerned with the disruption of rules governing the physical body: a new set of creation myths. This collection gives voice to a spectrum of bodily experiences and processes of transformation, evoking questions of conformity, confrontation, and self-determination. By centering stories around differing body politics and the cultural narratives inscribed upon our bodies with and without our consent, Dirt invests both content and form in important questions of self-creation and voice. Yet by defamiliarizing the bodily experience and refusing to provide or articulate answers, Dirt exposes the unstable nature of this bodily, synesthetic experience and our perceptions of the world. Each piece obfuscates and confuses the self and perception in an attempt to deny traditional narrative's “revelation” about this self-creation, and the collection instead emphasizes the instability of the truth of what we know about ourselves. In turn, these stories seek the unlimited number of possibilities within this unsteady truth—and the room for magic in our own world.
Rights
© 2016, Rebecca Landau
Recommended Citation
Landau, R.(2016). Dirt. (Master's thesis). Retrieved from https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/etd/3413