Abstract

This thesis is not your traditional research project. It is, in part, a critique on the exclusive claim to “truth” that science and rationality (and academia) hold in our culture. This project approaches truth through a different perspective. Redefining truth as wholeness, I examine the ambiguities and complexities of truth through a very different perspective.

By allowing us a way to struggle with and find meaning through all aspects of life (events, culture, relationships, and emotion to name a few), narratives and stories allow us to embrace the complexity and confusion we encounter in our daily lives. This offers us space to think through all of these things and reassemble them in ways that are meaningful. It is through this that we are able to understand and experience wholeness of being, to embrace embodied truth.

In this thesis, I examine the wholeness, the embodied truth, present in the works of Zora Neale Hurston and Alice Walker, and use what I find in their stories to work through reaching out and grasping my own wholeness, my own truth. Written in two parts, I first explore the ambiguities and nuances of wholeness present in the writing of the above authors (Part 1), and then delve into my own discovery of wholeness through essays of my own, using Hurston and Walker’s texts to guide me along the way.

Advisor

Kammer, Charles

Department

Religious Studies

Publication Date

2015

Degree Granted

Bachelor of Arts

Document Type

Senior Independent Study Thesis

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© Copyright 2015 Bridget Schmidt