Project Director
Babine, Karen, 1978-
Department Examiner
Najberg, Andrew Michael, 1979-; Coons, Jayda
Publisher
University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
Place of Publication
Chattanooga (Tenn.)
Abstract
The lyric mode can be thought of as the engine of a piece, what drives its thinking and structure forward. Memoir writing most often refers to writing based on an author's own memories. For these two reasons, I've labeled my Honors thesis a lyric memoir. The memoir consists of poems, translated into Spanish by my mother, dual essays in which I share the page with another writer, and "after" essays which consider a wide variety of topics on identity, death, religion, and language. Critically, what makes the memoir lyric is its lack of direct narrative, instead relying on the layering, associative effect of the lyric to move forward. In my craft paper, I argue the armor of the lyric mode lends itself particularly well to writing memoir, writing of family, of absent things, and things too multiplicitous to render linearly on the page.
Acknowledgments
A huge thanks to my mother, Leslie Courtad, and Jude Keef, who both did me the honor of lending their voices to this piece.
Degree
B. A.; An honors thesis submitted to the faculty of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Bachelor of Arts.
Date
5-2024
Subject
Autobiographical poetry, American; Bilingualism in literature; Death in literature; Families--History; Hispanic American poetry (Spanish); Identity (Psychology) in literature; Lyric poetry; Memory in literature; Religion in literature
Discipline
Poetry
Document Type
Theses
Extent
iii, 46 leaves
DCMI Type
Text
Language
English
Rights
http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Date Available
5-8-2026
Recommended Citation
Courtad, Seth, "Here (toma): translations between me and my mother" (2024). Honors Theses.
https://scholar.utc.edu/honors-theses/451
Department
Dept. of English