[sic]: A Critical Memoir on Remembering the City of Forgetting

Author

Emily L. Moeck, University of Tennessee, KnoxvilleFollow

Date of Award

8-2025

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

English

Major Professor

Margaret L. Dean

Committee Members

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.

Recommended Citation

Moeck, Emily L., "[sic]: A Critical Memoir on Remembering the City of Forgetting. " PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 2025.
https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/12745