Date of Award
6-18-2021
Publication Type
Master Thesis
Degree Name
M.A.
Department
English Language, Literature, and Creative Writing
Keywords
Coming of Age Narratives, Cure Narratives, Disability Studies, Short Stories
Supervisor
Nicole Markotić
Rights
info:eu-repo/semantics/embargoedAccess
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Abstract
Offbeat is a collection of interconnected short stories that follows Annabella Tocco, a young flute player with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), from ages eleven to eighteen. These seven stories explore the effects of Annabella’s OCD on her relationship with her family, her school, her job, her Catholic faith, and her music, both before and after she receives a formal diagnosis and begins therapy. While each story remains structured around an epiphany that Annabella experiences in relation to her OCD, her music, or her own self-perception, the interconnectedness of the collection allows these epiphanies to evade a sense of “closure” at the end of each story as they demonstrate their long-lasting effects on Annabella in subsequent stories. Notably, the lack of narrative “closure” alongside each epiphany resists the traditional literary trope of the “cure” of disabled characters and/or characters with mental illness. After Annabella realizes her desire to seek treatment to counter her growing distress, subsequent stories set post-therapy feature the fluctuation of her “progress” with managing her symptoms. Offbeat presents a coming-of-age narrative in which Annabella learns to accept that her management of her OCD symptoms will remain continuous and, like the music she plays, will emotionally affect her beyond the final moment in which the story rests.
Recommended Citation
Bordonaro, Marisa, "Offbeat" (2021). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 8591.
https://scholar.uwindsor.ca/etd/8591