Abstract not available

This inquiry explores matrilineal autobiographical narratives in the contexts of family stories and memories. This self-study traces the stories of a collective of five women of a common Armenian heritage, who represent various generational, homeland and diasporic portraits and experiences. Carrying the burden of being descendants of genocide survivors, the memories we reconstruct and interpret deal with issues of inherited exile, dispossession, loss, trauma, survival and healing. In exploring these narratives, I engage in self-reflexivity as we construct, re-construct, re-present our narratives and their impact on our constructions and negotiations of self and identity. / I use the family album metaphor as a foundation for my narrative framework and weave together the participants' and my autobiographical reconstructions through the intertwined stories of memory, trauma and displacement. The self-reflexive nature of our multilayered autobiographical narratives reconnects our selves with our pasts. Within a diasporic frame, I use the narratives as interpretive tools to explore the effects of multigenerational diasporic experiences on constructions of identity and agency. / The relationships we develop using face-to-face group conversations, virtual discussions through a Web forum and emails, personal reflexive journals, photo props and collaged images, highlight a dialogic process of imagined possibilities for the transformative power of storying. The autobiographical inquiry bridges voice to self and self to voice. This authoring process is an essential medium to writing ourselves as women. The process also allows us to reclaim our vulnerabilities as sources of inner strength and to embrace this understanding as the locus of writing.

Thesis (M.A.)--George Mason University, 2009. / Vita: p. 154. Thesis director: Ricardo F. Vivancos Pérez. Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies. Title from PDF t.p. (viewed Oct. 12, 2009). Includes bibliographical references (p. 147-153). Also issued in print.

No description available.

Because of woman's peculiar relationship to language, and therefore to the means of comprehending and expressing her experience, female autobiographical writing is a problematic undertaking. An exploration of several premises about Western culture can help to illuminate the difficulties the female autobiographer encounters in creating her life/text. Among these premises are the following: (1) that the culture that provides the context for female experience is what feminist theorists call "patriarchal," that is, a culture dependent upon and reinforced by the supremacy of male interests, pursuits, and values. (2) that the habit of mind of this culture is essentially dichotomous, and that this bifurcation, although it serves very well to enable one person or group to gain power over another, fails to account for the sense of relatedness characteristic of female moral development as demonstrated by recent feminist psychologists. (3) that one lives through telling oneself the story of one's life (that is, that living itself is an essentially autobiographical act); that this narrative conforms to certain cultural conventions; and that these conventions present distinct problems to the narrator who is female. (4) that the human being constructs its self through language, and that the language of a patriarchal culture is problematic to female authenticity. In order to confront these theoretical problems in practice, twelve essays explore some experiences of a middle-aged, middle-class white American woman in the second half of the twentieth century. These include illness, both physical (multiple sclerosis) and emotional (depression, agoraphobia); suicide; relationships with men, strangers, and cats; motherhood; and above all, writing. They form a feminist project whose purpose is so to merge theory with praxis, nonfiction with fiction and poetry, scholarship with creation, that such distinctions become meaningless and the female writer can get on with the real business of making and contemplating her text. An annotated selected bibliography lists works in feminist theory and criticism, some of which inform the essays, thus providing a program for extensive feminist study, especially in literature, anthropology, and psychology.

This dissertation explores the work of specific female autobiographers or memoirists who have written about their endured emotional or physical wounds inflicted by trauma. Throughout history, women’s writings and experiences have been commonly devalued or excluded from those autobiographical texts within the traditional canon. Further, traumatized women have traditionally been regarded as pathologically divided victims who suffer holes in their psyches. Their stories about traumatized childhood and adolescence are thus treated as insignificant or dangerous and are easily silenced. As a result, life stories of traumatized women have been commonly considered as unfit texts for students to read in class (especially because of concerns about possibilities of (re)traumatizing readers), and thus are commonly omitted from the English curriculum. Considering that the literary world still is dominated by white male writers, this study examines not only traumatized women writers but also women writers who represent “difference” as well as have suffered trauma. This dissertation’s analyzed authors and texts include: Marguerite Duras’s The Lover, Rigoberta Menchú's I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala, Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. These women writers variously demonstrate, through their embodied trauma writings, how easily a seemingly integrated/unitary self can be shattered, how unexpectedly the status quo can be destabilized by certain events in their life-writings, and how subversively the history of the female body can be rewritten. The life-writings by these women, who are non-heterosexual, non-white, and from the lower class, and/or who have lived with disabilities/illnesses, are far from that typical autobiographical writing that emphasizes tests of manhood, or beautifies the linear development of the masculine subject. In other words, they never emphasize their triumph over trauma, do not celebrate selfsufficiency or self-reliance, and are not interested in claiming any authority of their own personal experiences. Rather, they highlight the understanding of their own incompleteness, fragmentation, and self-contradiction, which serves to uncover the fictiveness or myths of self-control or self-mastery typically found in narratives by male and often white-only writers. In their life writings, the traumatized adolescent selves are continuously reshaped and discursively constructed, not as helpless victims of terrifying events, as is frequently assumed, but as those with rebellious, transgressive, and uncanny power, who can disturb patriarchal social norms or regulations in their life writing and come to terms with trauma in their own ways: Duras’s eroticizing trauma in The Lover, Menchú politicizing trauma in I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala, Kaysen’s depathologizing trauma in Girl, Interrupted, Satrapi’s and Bechdel’s visualizing unrepresentable trauma in The Complete Persepolis and Fun Home. This study employs poststructural theories that “challenge the unity and coherence of the intact and fully conscious ‘self’ of Western autobiographical practices and the limits of its representations” (J. Miller, 49) to examine traumatized girlhood. In particular, based on feminist poststructural critiques of modernist, Enlightenment assumptions about autobiographical perspectives and voices, the following questions are examined in this dissertation: What words or images do this study’s examined authors utilize as a way to (re- )construct a self out of trauma? What understandings or insights do these authors achieve — or not achieve — while working to come terms with their traumas? In what ways might — or might not — these authors’ memoirs or life writings serve or disrupt a palliative/therapeutic role in what often is termed the healing process? What places, if any, might such autobiographical works focused on women’s experiences of trauma have in the English curriculum within the secondary classroom? And lastly, what and who constitutes the English literature canon, and what debates continue to characterize efforts to expand this canon to include voices of the marginalized?

published_or_final_version / Chinese / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

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Thesis (MA)--Stellenbosch University. 2015 / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Seeking to explore modes of self-representation in women’s life writing and the ways in which these subjects manipulate the autobiographical ‘I’ to write about gender, the body, race and ethnic related issues, this thesis interrogates the autobiographies of three renegade women whose works were birthed out of the de/colonial South African context between 1854-1948. The chosen texts are: Marina King’s Sunrise to Evening Star: My Seventy Years in South Africa (1935), Melina Rorke’s Melina Rorke: Her Amazing Experiences in the Stormy Nineties of South-African History (1938), and two memoirs by Petronella van Heerden, Kerssnuitsels (1962) and Die 16de Koppie (1965). My analysis is underpinned by relevant life writing and feminist criticism, such as the notion of female autobiographical “embodiment” (239) and the ‘I’s reliance on “relationality” (248) as discussed in the work of Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (Reading Autobiography). I further draw on Judith Butler’s concept of “performativity” (Bodies that Matter 234) in my analysis in order to suggest that there is a performative aspect to the female ‘I’ in these texts. The aim of this thesis is to illustrate how these self-representations of women can be read as counter-conventional, speaking out against stereotypical perceptions and conventions of their time and in literatures (fiction and criticism) which cast women as tractable, compliant pertaining to patriarchal oversight, as narrow-minded and apathetic regarding achieving notoriety and prominence beyond their ascribed position in their separate societies. I argue that these works are representative of alternative female subjectivities and are examples of South African women’s life writing which lie ‘dusty’ and forgotten in archives; voices that are worthy of further scholarly research which would draw the stories of women’s lives back into the literary consciousness. / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: In ‘n poging om metodes van self-uitbeelding te bespreek en die manier waarop die ‘ek’ van vroulike ego-tekste manipuleer om sodoende te skryf oor geslagsrolle, die liggaam, ras en ander etniese kwessies, ondersoek hierdie verhandeling die outbiografieë van drie onkonvensionele vrouens se werk, gebore vanuit die de/koloniale konteks in Suid-Afrika tussen 1854-1948. Die ego-tekste wat in hierdie navorsingstuk ondersoek word, sluit in: Marina King se Sunrise to Evening Star: My Seventy Years in South Africa (1935), Melina Rorke se Melina Rorke: Her Amazing Experiences in the Stormy Nineties of South-African History (1938), en twee memoirs geskryf deur Petronella van Heerden, Kerssnuitsels (1962) en Die 16de Koppie (1965). My analise word ondersteun deur relevante kritici van feministiese en outobiografiese velde. Ek bespreek onder andere die idee dat die vroulike ‘ek’ liggaamlik “vergestalt” (239) is in outobiografie, asook die ‘ek’ se afhanklikheid van “relasionaliteit” (248) soos uiteengesit in die werk van Sidonie Smith en Julia Watson (Reading Autobiography). Verder stel ek voor, met verwysing na Judith Butler, dat daar ‘n “performative” (Bodies that Matter 234) aspek na vore kom in die vroulike ‘ek’ van Suid- Afrikaanse outobiografie. Die doel van hierdie tesis is om uit te lig dat hierdie selfvoorstellings van vroue gelees kan word as kontra-konvensioneel; dat die stereotipiese uitbeelding van vroue as skroomhartig, nougeset, gedweë ten opsigte van patriargale oorsig, en willoos om meer te vermag as wat hul onderskeie gemeenskappe vir hul voorskryf, weerspreek word deur hierdie ego-tekste. Die doel is om sodanige outobiografiese vertellings en -uitbeeldings te vergelyk en sodoende uiteenlopende vroulike subjektiwiteite gedurende die periode 1854-1948 te belig. Ek verwys deurlopend na voorbeelde van ander gemarginaliseerde Suid-Afrikaanse vroulike ego-tekse om aan te dui dat daar weliswaar ‘n magdom ‘vergete’ en ‘stof-bedekte’ vrouetekste geskryf is in die afgebakende periode. Ek voor aan dat die ‘stem’ van die vroulike ‘ek’ allermins stagneer het, en dat verdere bestudering waarskynlik nodig is.

This thesis considers elements of autobiography and autobiographical fiction in the writings of three female Modernists: Jean Rhys, Gertrude Stein and Djuna Barnes. In chapter 1, after drawing distinctions between male and female autobiographical writing, I discuss key male autobiographical fictions of the Modernist period by D.H. Lawrence, Marcel Proust and James Joyce, and their debt to the nineteenth century literary forms of the Bildungsroman and the Künstlerroman. I relate these texts to key European writers, Andre Gide and Colette, and to works by women based on two separate female Modernist aesthetics: first, the school of "lyrical transcendence"—Dorothy Richardson, Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf—in whose works the self as literary subject dissolves into a renunciatory "female impressionism;" the second group—Rhys, Stein and Barnes--who as late-modernists, offer radically "objectified" self-portraits in fiction which act as critiques and revisions of both male and female Modernist fiction of earlier decades. In chapter 2, I discuss Jean Rhys' objectification of female self-consciousness through her analysis of alienation in two different settings: the Caribbean and the cities of Europe. As an outsider in both situations, Rhys presents an unorthodox counter-vision. In her fictions of the 1930's, she deliberately revises earlier Modernist representations, by both male and female writers, of female self-consciousness. In the process, she offers a simultaneous critique of both social and literary conventions. In chapter 3, I consider Gertrude Stein's career-long experiments with the rendering of consciousness in a variety of literary forms, noting her growing concern throughout the 1920's and 1930's with the role of autobiography in writing. In a close reading of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, I examine Stein's parody and "deconstruction" of the autobiographical form and the Modernist conception of the self based on memory, association and desire. Her witty attack on the conventions of narrative produces a new kind of fictional self-portraiture, drawing heavily on the visual arts to create new prose forms as well as to dismantle old ones. Chapter 4 focuses on Djuna Barnes' metaphorical representations of the self in prose fiction, which re-interpret the Modernist notion of the self, by means of an androgynous fictional poetics. In her American and European fictions she extends the notion of the work of art as a formal, self-referential and self-contained "world" by subverting it with the use of a late-modern, "high camp" imagery to create new types of narrative structure. These women's major works, appearing in the 1930's, mark a second wave of Modernism, which revises and in certain ways subverts the first. Hence, these are studies in "late Modernism" and in my conclusion I will consider the distinguishing features of this transitional period, the 1930's, and the questions it provokes about the idea of periodization in general. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate