Abstracts Category : Other

Nostalgia Literature

by Miranda Limonczenko

The Nostalgia Literature project is the first ever creative project in Sonoma StateUniversity humanities to present as a full website in its final form. The Nostalgia Project was designed to be accessible by both a casual and scholarly audience, serving as both an introduction to nostalgia conceptually and a deeper exploration of nostalgia's influence in literature.The Nostalgia Project focuses on three novels: The History of Love (2006), Watchmen(1986), and The Great Gatsby (1925), which are seemingly unrelated texts that are bound by their shared nostalgic tones and their many interlinking themes , which include loneliness, fear of the future, and cynicism toward the American Dream. The stories share in nostalgically-charged imagery, including photographs and snow globes. These stories depict main characters who reminisce somebody who is either physically or spiritually dead. Ultimately, the Nostalgia Literature project serves to explore how nostalgia is used as a coping mechanism in the wake of loneliness to reform connections with other characters in a story and to understand how nostalgia makes us human.Advisors/Committee Members: Kroll, Cathy, Ph.D. (advisor), Limonczenko, Miranda (sonomaauthor), Goldman, Anne, Ph.D. (committee member).