Dissertation Reading and Ideas

Creative Ideas
Material memoir: angry young parents, addicts, addict young adult, growing up, no care, physically changes the body, changes environment, trinkets poor people things, relationships, sex as self harm, body changing again.
Scott being mean to me because he hates women

Landlord walking past my window like a ghost
like the lady walking up and down the parking lot

This dream I had about being drunk at a dinner party and I wake up and the party is over and I have to retrace my steps through the ruin to figure out what I have done

Chapters that can be read linearly, as fragments, or in modular combinations

Woman-as-haunted-house trope

• The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard (1957)
• Rhymes Rooms by Brad Leithauser
• The Haunted House in Women's Ghost Stories
• House of Monstrous Women by Daphne Fama
• White is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi
• Tell me I'm Worthless by Alison Rumfitt
• The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter
• Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado
• Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
• The Passion According to G.H. by Clarice Lispector
• The Good House by Tananarive Due
• Hell Followed With Us | You Weren't Meant to Be Human
• The Red Room by HG Wells
• The Red Room by L.M Montgomery
• Fragment piece by Tolkien
• The memory of rooms and other places by Annie Ernaux
• Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar
• /Cuts by Ana Maria Caballero
• Melusine in The Penguin Book of Mermaids
• The Metropolis and Mental Life by Goerg Simmel (1903) - environment as extension of the body

The Names of Things by Susan Brind Morrow
A Lonely Place by Dorothy B. Hugues
The Art of Memory by Frances Amelia Yates
The Built, the Unbuilt, and the Unbuildable by Robert Harbinson
The Changing Light of Sandover by James Merill
Wild Grass on the Riverback by Hiromi Ito
In My Time of Dying by Sebastian Junger
Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde f Dying by Sebastian Junger
Proto by Laura Spinney

Material Memoirs
The Cancer Journals by Audre Lorde
Body Toxic by Susanne Antonetta
Living Downstream by Sandra Steingraber
Elegy for Appalachia by Bell Hooks
Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels

Haunted House + Trans-corporeal eco-horror
Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield

Critical Theorists
Dawn Keetley: writes about "bad oikos," or, the toxic sentient house. Argues that haunting is a literal material entanglement. Ghosts of patriarchal and colonial violence as airborne pathogens.

"Uncanny Waters" by Astrida Neimanis

"Et Verbum Caro Factum est: Monstrosity and Transcorporeality in Mexican Gothic" by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Brick Architecture Craft in Nineteenth-Century South India: Reading Buildings as Archives (2025) - Priya Joseph

The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Literature and the Environment (2026) Dennis Denisoff

“Women’s time” by Kristeva

Trauma: Explorations of Memory by Cathy Caruth

Autofiction Memoirs

Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels
Austerlitz by W.G. Denali
Fragments: Memories of a Childhood by Binjamin Wilkomirski