Graduation Semester and Year
2018
Language
English
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts in English
Department
English
First Advisor
James E Warren
Abstract
Shame as an emotional response in the late 2010s has been discussed in both high and low sectors, from a high level of shame with social media use in high school classrooms, to the lack of shame by the president of the United States. My thesis addresses this question by analyzing Karl Ove Knausgaard’s two autobiographical works, My Struggle and his Seasonal Quartet. Readers, critics, and Knausgaard himself have described his work as a focus on the shameful moments of his life. Using positive psychology’s term “explanatory style,” coined by Martin E.P. Seligman, I do a structural reading of explicit moments of shame. Combining this with computer text-analysis software, Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count, devised by James Pennebaker, I create a thorough reading of shame in Knausgaard’s work. The thesis addresses the question of shame’s effect on the style of writing for the multiple volumes, as well as document possible moments of pessimistic mental health. I conclude that Knausgaard operates in typical literary arcs, regardless of his self-proclaimed thesis statement, and I discuss the importance of emotional changes in Knausgaard’s work.
Keywords
Linguistic inquiry, Explanatory style, Positive psychology, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Word count
Disciplines
Arts and Humanities | English Language and Literature
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Royle, Colton Tyler, "A Staring Contest with the Self: Karl Ove Knausgaard, Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count, and Explanatory Style" (2018). English Theses. 102.
https://mavmatrix.uta.edu/english_theses/102
Comments
Degree granted by The University of Texas at Arlington