In writing this thesis, I plotted where the streams of whiteness theory, life-writing theory and practice, and Daphne Marlatts novel <i>Ana Historic</i> converge. In the introduction, I outline the development of my own subjectivity, focusing on my identification with multiple ethnic communities, and on my racial and working class identity. My second chapter surveys current whiteness theories, accepting some and rejecting others, and drawing significantly upon theory that is accessible and personal, a decision that undoubtedly resulted because of my working class practicality. In this chapter, I conclude that whiteness and white solipsism (theoretically comparable to Simone de Beauvoirs challenge that masculinity as the neutral and positive gender renders femininity and other gendered constructions negative), actually envelope multiple identities, but argue that the way in which whiteness is experienced by those on its margins is often monolithic. In the third chapter, I investigate Marlatts biography and her life writing theory, arguing that her experience as a once immigrant foregrounds many issues relevant to the Canadian white identity, and that because her theory is so conscious of how identity is constructed, relying on fact and fiction, <i>Ana Historic</i> provides a portrait of white Canadian identity and the context in which that identity has been constructed. In Chapters 4 and 5, I apply the theories of life writing and whiteness to the characters of Ana, Ina, and Annie, challenging that their identities as colonizer, emigrant, and immigrant, respectively, illustrate the evolution resulting in the current white Canadian identity. Further, because Marlatt chooses these characters who occupy different positions in history, she shows her reader that contemporary Canadian white identity has grown out of colonial times, creating a continuum. The history out of which each of these women emerges is never contained because aspects of their identity carry forward into subsequent generations.

This thesis investigates autobiography from the standpoint of Native Americans, using Anita Endrezze¡¦s work as my anchor text. Drawing on Hertha Wong¡¦s critical position on Native American life writing, I argue that Anita Endrezze¡¦s autobiography, Throwing Fire at the Sun, Water at the Moon (2000), widens the scope of traditional generic limitations. The first chapter is the introduction, which delineates the theme of the thesis and introduces Yaqui history and Endrezze¡¦s family and cultural background. The second chapter analyzes what characterizes Native American autobiography by borrowing Hertha Wong¡¦s standpoint. Hertha Wong is one of the first theorists who yearn to widen the scope of the well-established generic limitations. She theorizes Native American autobiography by putting its etymology (¡§self,¡¨ ¡§life,¡¨ and ¡§writing¡¨) under scrutiny. Wong¡¦s critical base is the key thread of the chapter, and other critics¡¦ positions on Native American life writing are also provided as subsidizing points. Chapter Three revolves around how Endrezee conceptualizes ¡§the self¡¨ in her autobiographical narratives. Wong argues that Native Americans never regard the self as a separate entity from their community. Correspondingly, Endrezze consciously strives to construct a communal self in her personal narratives. To reach the aim, she relates herself to her relatives, her ancestors, and the present-day Yaquis. Besides, through her homing-in journey, she makes a direct connection to her ancestral homeland. Therefore, the representation of the self is not only community-based but also localized. Chapter Four aims to show that Endrezze¡¦s life narratives go beyond the realms of humans. That is, her autobiography resists anthropocentric narratives. She tells stories about the corn, the rain, and a wide variety of plants and animals. It is through the assistance of non-humans that human life is sustainable. Chapter Five aims to argue that Endrezze¡¦s autobiography shatters the fallacy that Native American culture is in demise. On the contrary, it is burgeoning. Endrezze uses her autobiography to fight back. Endrezze attempts to hybridize the languages to pose some reading obstacles to Euro-Americans. Besides, inserting her paintings at the end of autobiography is also a political act because it subverts traditional writing system. She mocks at the mono-dimensional narratives. Chapter Six is my conclusion, in which Endrezze¡¦s cultural and literary contributions are re-affirmed. It is my deep hope that Endrezze¡¦s book can, as her book title symbolizes, become another form of fire/water to continue the life of Yaquis.

The effectiveness of first-person narration for self-transformation and social change is indicated by exploring connections between three emergent discourses: illness narratives and memoirs by rape survivors in which the subject speaks from a privileged yet socially marginalized position about life-altering experiences; clinical discourse that elaborates treatment methods for empowering trauma survivors and helping them reconnect with the social world; and scholarly discourse that reflects on the relationship between trauma, self-representation, witnessing, and recovery. Post-Foucauldian theories of life-writing illuminate how the author-subjects of survivor narratives discursively reconstruct their shattered subjectivity in a therapeutic relationship with themselves and their readers. Cognitive and pedagogy theory illuminate how first-person narratives can foster multiple intelligences. Data from the author's own teaching experience illustrates the strengths and potential pitfalls of first-person pedagogy. An abundance of memoirs have been written by rape survivors and by subjects with critical illness since the 1980s; in these texts, subjectivity is reconstructed, often with the result of empowering, validating, and reconnecting the writing subject to the social world from which she has become disenfranchised. College students analyzing these texts often feel sympathy for the autobiographical subject. In this way, first-person narratives foster a compassionate classroom environment, and are valuable tools for developing a student's emotional and cognitive capacities.Chapter One introduces my study and examines theoretical discourse concerning contemporary trauma narratives and autobiography theory. Chapter Two investigates sixteen rape memoirs using Judith Herman's Trauma and Recovery to trace how writing about trauma helps the subject heal from its effects. Chapter Three studies fifteen memoirs about critical illness to see how the subject employs warfare metaphors to describe the effects of illness on her body, and to portray herself as a hero figure. Chapter Four investigates the theoretical basis for employing first-person narratives in the college classroom to foster self-study, well-being, and empathy. Chapter Five presents data from my own teaching experience to demonstrate how incorporating first-person narratives into the college classroom does indeed foster self-study, well-being and empathy. As students come to see themselves as subjects of their own discourse, they also recognize and support another's right to work toward self-transformation.

This study analyzes the techniques that Canadian comics life writers develop to construct personal histories. I examine a broad selection of texts including graphic autobiography, biography, memoir, and diary in order to argue that writers and readers can, through these graphic narratives, engage with an eclectic and eccentric understanding of Canadian historical subjects. Contemporary Canadian comics are important for Canadian literature and life writing because they acknowledge the importance of contemporary urban and marginal subcultures and function as representations of people who occasionally experience economic scarcity. I focus on stories of “ordinary” people because their stories have often been excluded from accounts of Canadian public life and cultural history. Following the example of Barbara Godard, Heather Murray, and Roxanne Rimstead, I re-evaluate Canadian literatures by considering the importance of marginal literary products. Canadian comics authors rarely construct narratives about representative figures standing in place of and speaking for a broad community; instead, they create what Murray calls “history with a human face . . . the face of the daily, the ordinary” (“Literary History as Microhistory” 411). My research finds that contemporary Canadian graphic narratives create mundane personal histories using a medium that is inherently attuned to exaggeration and fragmentation. My reading of graphic narrative is based on “autographics,” a recent field of scholarship that analyzes the interactions between visual and verbal forms of communication in works of life writing. I draw on visual rhetorical studies and communication design in order to describe “the distinctive technology and aesthetics of life narrative that emerges in comics” (Whitlock 965). The medium of comics playfully manipulates the discourses of documentary evidence and testimonial authority. At the same time, it gives Canadian authors tools for depicting the experiences of ordinary individuals through a rich collection of emotional, sensorial, and perceptual information. Focusing on the work of such authors as Chester Brown, David Collier, Julie Doucet, Sarah Leavitt, and Seth, I suggest that Canadian comics authors exploit the unique formal properties of the medium of comics in order to interrogate dominant nationalist discourses. They also develop an alternative method for analyzing narratives about the past.

This project investigates the English-language life writing of diasporic Iranian Jewish women. It examines how these women have differentially imagined their diasporic lives and travels, and how they have in turn been imagined and accepted or rejected by their audiences. In the first chapter, I use “home” as a lens for understanding three distinct life writing texts, showing how the authors write about what it means to have a home and to be at home in contrasting and even contradictory ways. I show how, despite potential hegemonic readings that perpetuate unequal relationships and a normative definition of the ideal home, the texts are open to multiple contestatory readings that create spaces for new formulations and understandings. In the second chapter, I look more closely at the intersections between trauma stories and the life writing of Iranian Jewish women, and I argue that readers use life writing texts about trauma to support an egocentric reconstruction of American democracy and dominance. I also show how a critical frame for understanding trauma can yield interpretations that highlight, rather than ignore, relationships of power and privilege. In the final chapter of the thesis, I present a case study of two online reading groups, and I show that communal reading environments, though they participate in dominant discourses, are also spaces where resistance and subversion can develop. / Thesis (Master, Gender Studies) -- Queen's University, 2011-09-08 22:54:33.728

This dissertation documents an arts-based peace education doctoral study that employed narrative métissage as both a pedagogical and a research tool. The research question asks: Does practicing narrative métissage in an intra-conflict society foster empathy and understanding of self/other? This question is explored with a total of seven Arabic and Kurdish students representing both male and female genders and Muslim and Christian faiths. All the participants were in their second year of study in a two-year English preparatory program at the University of Kurdistan-Hawler, (UKH) in Erbil, Kurdistan, Iraq. The students wrote autobiographical narratives around the theme of “Boundaries,” then participated in workshop forums sharing and weaving their individual narratives together into a longer text—the métissage—and afterwards performed their métissage. The researcher has also woven her own personal narrative of living, teaching, and carrying out research at UKH in Kurdistan, Northern Iraq into the fabric of the dissertation. The participants’ and the researcher’s experiences and insights are documented through autobiographical and story-telling genres in the data representation. The key contributions of this research are practical, theoretical, and methodological. Practically, this research contributes to peace education initiatives in intractable conflict societies, which is an under- researched and under-reported area within peace education studies. Narrative métissage has obvious application as a peace education initiative and as a curricular vehicle for teaching, discussing, and healing around social justice issues in the classroom, however it has not been explored as such. This research contributes to the dialogue of social justice pedagogy. Theoretically, this research contributes to the area of arts-based learning and the power that writing and sharing autobiographical stories has in awakening to self/other, stimulating collective knowledge construction and empowering individual and collective change. The research employs narrative métissage both as a pedagogical tool and a research tool and by doing so lays new ground in terms of methodology. / Graduate

abstract: ABSTRACT The early twentieth century saw changing attitudes in gender roles and the advancement of the "New Woman." Despite the decline in the availability of homesteading land in the US West, homesteading still offered a means for women to achieve or enact newfound independence, and the letters of Elinore Pruitt Stewart, Elizabeth Corey, and Cecilia Hennel Hendricks offer a varied view of the female homesteading experience. This dissertation focuses upon the functionality of epistolary discourse from early twentieth century homesteading women within a literary and historical framework in order to establish the significance of letters as literary texts and examine the methodology involved in creating epistolary identities. Chapter one provides background on the history of the letter in America. It also as introduces a theoretical framework regarding life writing, feminism, and epistolary discourse that inform this study, by scholars such as Phillipe LeJeune, Leigh Gilmore, Janet Altman, Julie Watson, and Sidonie Smith. Chapter two delves into the published letters of Elinore Pruitt Stewart and the way in which her writing, when situated within a US western literary framework, serves as a reaction to the masculine western hero. Chapter three considers the epistolary relationships evident in the letters of Elizabeth Corey and the construction of gender identity within epistolarity. Chapter four focuses upon Cecilia Hennel Hendricks and the historical and feminist context of her letters, with a particular emphasis upon the "love letter." The conclusion examines the progression of the letter in the twentieth century and forms of online discourse that can be directly linked to its evolution. Far from being simply a form of communication, these letters reveal the history of a time, a place, a people, function as narrative literary texts, and aid in developing identities. For readers and scholars they tell offer a glimpse into life for women in the early twentieth century and highlight the significance of letters as a literary form. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. English 2010

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This pedagogy of weaving the Nigerian Tiv a'nger into life writing, mobility and place blends in my experiences, cultures, geographical locations and stories. As I travel through and within countries as an international student, I draw from postcolonial and feminist scholars such as Anzaldua (1987), Bhabba (1994), Rushdie (2011) and Trinh (1994) in negotiating a hybrid space where my sense of belonging and home is continuously unsettled and negotiated. In this thesis, I use the a’nger as a metaphor for blending, merging and blurring text, identities, and questioning the conditions which produce stories, memories and events. In this auto/ethno/graphic pedagogy of weaving the Tiv a'nger into my encounters as a traveller, sojourner and mother, I am seeking to link my cultural background with my scholarship in the faculty of education and the faculty of law as a literary metissage that allows me to situate my narrative within broader sociopolitical discourses that query gender race and class issues (hooks, 2003; Fanon, 2008). I am guided by a desire to show that stories are research and that stories influence our movements as Africans in diaspora (Achebe, 1973; Wa Thiong’o, 1986). In drawing from the stories of my Tiv ancestors through African indigenous a’nger, I am guided by a quest to decolonize a space in academia to include other ways of knowing and being in the world. In retelling my stories, I open up conversations about the experiences of international students from Africa who relocate to other countries in the quest for continuous education. I use qualitative research methodologies such as auto/ethno/graphy (Douglas & Carless, 2013), bricolage (Kincheloe, 2005), metissage (Lionnet, 1991), multimodality (Morawski et al., 2016); and life writing (Hasebe-Ludt, Chambers & Leggo, 2009) to linger, tarry and trouble the sites between history and culture, home and abroad, us and them.