UC San Diego

Circus Circus is a novel that deals with trauma and mourning in the war veteran experience, discussed in tandem with the outsider subcultures of the carnival and the grotesque. It also explores the role of body modification as both an identity signifier and a source of ritual, and investigates popular preconceptions of how gender, race, perspective and narrative conventions are portrayed in the horror, mystery, and noir genres, set against the framework of the American pastoral. The manuscript's ultimate goal is to interrogate the tropes of these genres with regard to language, character, and linear narrative, while embracing the structures and traditions that define both the genres themselves, and the divisions that separate them from one another