Semester of Graduation
Spring 2022
Degree
Master of Fine Arts (MFA)
Department
English
Document Type
Thesis
Abstract
A Tendency to Forget and Other Minor Failures is an elegiac memoir about strange attachments. As she chronicles her relationships with pioneering queer theorist, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and her grandfather, a periodontist who died of Alzheimer’s, Kennedy pursues the unexpected in grieving and forgetting. This collection of critical and personal essays form a kind of meta-novel, which follows its narrator’s reading practice across time and space as she asks after absences particular to Alzheimer’s and answers with the kinds of love one can only find at a distance.
Drawing on the work of Roland Barthes, Italo Calvino, Renee Gladman, and Ocean Vuong, Kennedy invites her reader to participate in the making of this text through the repeated imperative, “Imagine a book…” With each refrain Kennedy offers an attempt at an ideal book, which might allow her grasp what is beyond her reach. As these attempts fold into failure, Kennedy seeds again and again the possibilities of something else.
Recommended Citation
Kennedy, Sophie Parke, "A Tendency to Forget and Other Minor Failures: Essays" (2022). LSU Master's Theses. 5555.
https://repository.lsu.edu/gradschool_theses/5555
Committee Chair
Ruffin, Maurice
DOI
10.31390/gradschool_theses.5555