[sic]: A Critical Memoir on Remembering the City of Forgetting
Date Issued
August 1, 2025
Author(s)
Advisor(s)
Margaret L. Dean
Additional Advisor(s)
Iliana Rocha, Eleni Palis, Tamar Shirinian
Abstract
In a dialectic with the American frontier narrative, [sic] is a genre-bending work of prose that maps the story of western masculinity onto three shipwrecks buried beneath the tumultuous waters of Los Angeles’s Santa Barbara Channel in a poetic interweaving of ethnography, film criticism, and personal memoir. Spanning from the asphaltum tomols that first carried prehistoric peoples down the Pacific onto North American soil to John Wayne’s Wild Goose converted WWII minesweeper yacht, these shipwrecks become poetic containers through which to process the historiographic violence of manifest destiny and our desperate need to restore public memory to a place of collective consciousness.
Disciplines
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy
Major
English
Embargo Date
August 15, 2031