Date of Award

1-1-2014

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Organizational Unit

College of Arts Humanities and Social Sciences, English and Literary Arts

First Advisor

Douglas Hesse, Ph.D.

Second Advisor

Adam Rovner

Third Advisor

Brian Kiteley

Keywords

Creative nonfiction, Memoir

Abstract

Covered in Dust: Coming of Age in a Gazebo Factory is a memoir that chronicles the three summers I spent working in the factories at Chestnut Hill Gazebos. The memoir focuses on three narrative strands: the day-to-day life of a factory worker, the struggles within and eventual breakdown of my relationship with my girlfriend, and how my job at Chestnut Hill helped me critique my fundamentalist Christian roots by forcing me into a deeper understanding of my faith and its relationship to the world outside the confines of my upbringing. The critical afterword uses essays by Leona Toker and other theorists as a framework for understanding how I approached several different problems when writing my memoir, such as how to present incomplete memories of events, whether or not to condense events for the sake of a more streamlined narrative, and whether or not a memoirist should use composite characters. I explain how various practitioners and critics influenced my decisions, and I also compare my approach to the practices of other memoirists.

Publication Statement

Copyright is held by the author. User is responsible for all copyright compliance.

Rights Holder

Jason A. Ney

Provenance

Received from ProQuest

File Format

application/pdf

Language

en

File Size

273 p.

Discipline

Literature

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