TY - JOUR TI - Spectacular transients DO - https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/t3-34hn-gr26 PY - 2019 AB - This dissertation considers narrative representations of the child as it exists in contexts of conflict. The project looks specifically at contemporary speculative fiction in order to conduct this examination: Guillermo del Toro's El laberinto del fauno, Tarsem Singh's The Fall, Benh Zeitlin's Beasts of the Southern Wild, Rosario Ferré's "La muñeca menor," Octavia Butler's Kindred, Phyllis Alesia Perry's Stigmata, Yvonne Vera's Under the Tongue, Bessie Head's A Question of Power, and Helen Oyeyemi's White Is for Witching. Bringing together theories of the gothic and the fantastic, psychoanalysis and trauma theory, and visual and memory studies, the dissertation proves that speculative narrative functions as a unique genre where that which resists representation is imagined, articulated, and explored. Furthermore, the project contends that the relationship between childhood, trauma, and the fantastic is one of shared imaginative space and experience within the pages and frames of these narratives. The dissertation first argues that trauma-inducing events posit children at the margins of their fictional worlds, where they inevitably encounter the also-marginalized fantastic. Then, the project demonstrates how trauma that children inherit from parents who have survived catastrophe alters the quotidian nature of their day-to-day such that it becomes fantastic. Subsequently, the dissertation asserts that in the face of mass trauma that unites entire collectives, descendants are haunted by the experience of those generations that precede them, and their experience of time and everyday life are violently disrupted by a restless traumatic past. Ultimately, the dissertation finds that the traumatic imaginary of these contemporary fictions propels fantastic narrative into a new period, one that finds the horrors of traumatic pasts and the potential of fantastic emergence in response to trauma contained within the interior of the narrative self. The children of the new millennium, unlike their predecessors, do not fear gothic monsters or feel the need to go out in search of the fantastic; they find within themselves those monstrosities that echo back the call of the unsettled and unsettling as it continues to haunt their narrative realities. KW - Literatures in English KW - Speculative fiction -- History and criticism KW - Children in literature KW - Fall (Motion picture : 2006) KW - Beasts of the southern wild (Motion picture) LA - eng ER -