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Graduation Term
Spring 2025
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Department of English
Committee Chair
Ricardo Cortez Cruz
Committee Co-Chair
Joyce Walker
Committee Member
Katherine Ellison
Abstract
This dissertation theorizes that creative writing can act as a medium through which authors and readers can share the burden of trauma and as a result can create healing through “enlightened witnessing.” This dissertation includes a critical preface that further defines the term “enlightened witness,” and that describes the process by which a reader or writer might engage with trauma stories in order to create space for emotional healing and testimony. Following is a chapter examining the importance and process of teaching trauma in a creative classroom with the intent of determining whether enlightened witnessing can be nurtured for undergraduates within a creative workshop space. The dissertation concludes with the creative work, a short novel called Among the Flowers of Brass, which attempts to use fiction as a method to grant readers access to a traumatized young girls’ emotional space as she experiences emotional, physical, sexual, and psychological abuse in real-time. The hope is that allowing readers insight into this character’s experience will create empathetic engagement that results in a shared indignation at her suffering and therefore helps to share the weight of her abuse and the abuse survived by real people like her.
Access Type
Dissertation-ISU Access Only
Recommended Citation
Shupe, Alicia, "Among the Flowers of Brass: Writing Through Hardship, A Creative Dissertation" (2025). Theses and Dissertations. 2114.
https://ir.library.illinoisstate.edu/etd/2114
