Date

11-13-2025

Department

College of Arts and Sciences

Degree

Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing (MFA)

Chair

James Corey Latta

Keywords

theology, realism, cruciform, silence, trauma, witness, resistance, betrayal, absence, faith, suffering, judgment, grace, structure, violence, ethics, speech, fracture, beauty, truth

Disciplines

English Language and Literature

Abstract

This thesis examines the construction of testimonial fiction as an act of moral resistance and theological witness, developed through a creative manuscript (Cold Forged) that embodies a cruciform narrative structure modelled on Isaiah 53 and the Book of Job. The project interrogates institutional betrayal, memory as liturgy, and the intersection of silence and suffering, situating itself within a literary genealogy that includes Flannery O’Connor, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Cormac McCarthy, and C.S. Lewis. The critical paper will explore the aesthetics of theological realism in trauma narrative, and the artist statement will defend the cruciform architecture of narrative silence as an ethical form.

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