This doctoral thesis aims to interrogate the complexities and intersections of personal narrative, memory, and the construction of identity within the context of the self-help and New Age cultures of the 1980s and 1990s. It is an investigation into the development of critical thinking as a means to confront cultic thinking. The creative text, Marvelous Monsters, is a memoir. It is a coming-of-age story set primarily in New York and Southern California in the last two decades of the twentieth century, when various New Age cults were emerging and began to impact not just the alternative living sphere, but mainstream society as well. The narrator moves between her divorced parents: a mother who does not protect her from predatory men and a father who exposes her to various cults with different types of abusers. Marvelous Monsters looks at ideological coercion and bears witness to the traumatic nature of being manipulated and controlled by powerful gurus and guru-types. It offers a contribution to the field of literary memoir by intricately depicting a peculiar world of psychological entanglement, a world of firewalk seminars and entity removals. The narration is often humorous as it seeks to offer a counter narrative to the hoax of the positive-thinking phenomenon. Moreover, the critical component of the thesis engages with contemporary theories of totalism and trauma, of autotopogrophy and narrative ethics, as it explores the difficulties and significance of constructing a memoir that voices the experience of being indoctrinated into and, subsequently, liberated from cults and cultic thought reform.
- memoir
- literary memoir
- cults
- cultic thinking
Marvelous Monsters and Critical Commentary
McKenna, K. A. (Author). 2025
Student thesis: Doctoral Thesis › Doctor of Philosophy