Theses and Dissertations Collection

“between us,” is a study of the interplay between Donald Hall’s “third thing” and Virginia Woolf’s “thing itself” that seeks to position the body-self via the various “third things” that emerge between self and human other, self and more-than-human others, self and text, self and self. This genre-fluid essay uses reframings and reapproaches as it attempts to contain the experience of, as Rilke says, “living the questions” in the imperfect material of language. “between us,” asks how to live in ethical relationship with all those bodies and selves, how language can create a shape that becomes metonymy for the author’s body, how to create another “third thing” consciously with the reader, how to invite them into the architecture of the text and thus into the body of its maker, and documents its inquiry.

This project attempts to hold and embody concerns of space, of connection and breakage, of the quotidian tension of living in a fractured-yet-enduring self. To attempt to hold this tension, essays, poems, and fiction are broken and re-braided into conversation, framed by a daybook that is itself framed by a series of prose poems written in answer to common questions on PTSD questionnaires. “between us,” is a question about bodies, which is to say it is a question about my body, about my body’s impact on the other bodies around me, and about those bodies’ impacts on me. What makes up the “third things” that pile up in my body? What do they feel like? How do I understand and live them? How can language make space for them?

All this is so theoretical, which is to say, so disembodied. "between us," attempts to document how it all feels in here. To get so close to the feeling that you can feel it, too.