Graduation Term
Spring 2025
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Department of English
Committee Chair
Ricardo Cruz
Committee Co-Chair
Joyce Walker
Committee Member
Elise Hurley
Abstract
This dissertation theorizes and enacts experimental storytelling as a method for engaging transgenerational trauma, highlighting how form shapes the ways histories are remembered, embodied, and reimagined across generations. Grounded in hope rehearsal as both a theoretical and creative framework, this project examines how BIPOC writers use experimental writing techniques to navigate the afterlives of historical trauma and reclaim storytelling as an act of meaning-making, communal care, and futurity. The dissertation begins with a critical chapter that explores these experimental techniques as strategies for recovery and resistance. The dissertations’ creative chapter, Andre Lyle: Skin and Bones, expands on these ideas through original experimental prose that interrogates memory’s instability, the echoes of transgenerational trauma, and the interwoven relationship between text, body, and archive. The dissertation concludes with considerations of how hope rehearsal can be applied to creative writing classrooms, fostering spaces where students engage experimental techniques to navigate identity, history, and collective healing.
Access Type
Dissertation-Open Access
Recommended Citation
Blue, Janine, "Skin And Bones: Transgenerational Trauma, Experimental Storytelling, And The Texture Of Hope, A Creative Dissertation" (2025). Theses and Dissertations. 2111.
https://ir.library.illinoisstate.edu/etd/2111
Included in
Creative Writing Commons, English Language and Literature Commons, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons