Date of Award
Spring 5-31-2025
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Fine Arts (MFA)
Department
Digital Media
First Advisor
Mariela Yeregui
Second Advisor
Maralie Armstrong-Rial
Third Advisor
Leah Beeferman
Abstract
This thesis unfolds as a first-person memoir, an incomplete record of remembered dialogues, and a structural experiment that aims to get closer to what I perceive as emotional and philosophical truth. Prompted by a conversation with my father-in-law, writer and thinker Shen Hao, I began to reflect on how informal, everyday exchanges with mentors, family, and friends have continually shaped how I translate internal echoes—ruminations, confusions, emotional residues—into writing, spatial, material, and experience.
Rather than adhering to the conventions of academic analysis or formal documentation, I adopt a dialogic form—one rooted in memory, shaped by subjectivity, and open to contradiction. In these reconstructed dialogues, the “inaccuracies” of recollection become part of the expression itself. They reveal not only what was said, but what stayed with me—what mattered.
Recommended Citation
Ren, Crystal Jiayin, "The Ruminating Shell : A Reparative Experiment in Dialogic Writing and Sensory Resonance" (2025). Masters Theses. 1358.
https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/masterstheses/1358
Thesis Writing in Chinese
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