Disposable objects: Contrived trauma and melancholic sacrifice in American literature for children and young adults.
Item
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Title
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Disposable objects: Contrived trauma and melancholic sacrifice in American literature for children and young adults.
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Identifier
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AAI3159264
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identifier
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3159264
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Creator
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Tribunella, Eric L.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Steven F. Kruger
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Date
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2005
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, American
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Abstract
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My dissertation explores the ways American children's and young adult literature turns repeatedly to a narrative in which a child is compelled to sacrifice or renounce a loved object. The striking recurrence of this pattern suggests that children's literature relies on the contrived traumatization of children---both protagonists and readers---as a way of representing and promoting the process of maturation. My project seeks to explain the resonance and utility of this narrative in American culture. I find that the experience of loss functions as a catalyst for maturation and that the psychological fortification needed to sacrifice and live without the object is taken to be a sign of accomplished maturity. Through the shared experience of loss, survivors can form social bonds, and thus this narrative involves not only psychological but also community and national formation. Repeatedly, the child is validated as mature by becoming like the disposable object, which undergoes the experience of being physically disciplined prior to its sacrifice. The child is vicariously disciplined by identifying with what is lost in order to achieve a distinctively national, gendered, sexual, and ethical adulthood. My project provides a psychoanalytic account of this cultural-political and literary phenomenon. I draw on queer and feminist revisions of Freud, who explains melancholia as a way of dealing with the loss of a loved object through the incorporation into one's own ego of an identification with that object. Such identifications not only alter the ego in ways that represent maturation, but also provide the bases for the faculty of self-criticism and for the formation of social bonds through shared identifications with those who experience similar losses. This narrative can be read as staging the experience of childhood embodiment and bodily development. It externalizes and reenacts this process to assist children with mastering their relationships to their own bodies, which are perpetually being lost to them as they mature. Novels studied include Johnny Tremain, My Brother Sam Is Dead, A Separate Peace, Bridge to Terabithia, Old Yeller, Number the Stars, The Upstairs Room, The Outsiders, and That Was Then, This Is Now.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
