Thesis (M.A.)--Miami University, Dept. of French and Italian, 2009. / Title from first page of PDF document. Includes bibliographical references (p. 63-64).

This thesis examines the captivity narrative, Three Came Home, written in 1947 by Agnes Newton-Keith, and the poverty narrative, Without a Net: Middle Class and Homeless (with Kids) in America: My Story, written in 2005 by Michelle Kennedy. When examined together through the lens of Trauma Theory, these narratives provide evidence of how similar the survival skills and strategies are between the American female POW's and the American females experiencing downward mobility. This thesis will also show how language uncovers and decodes the presence of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder not often associated with women in poverty.

This dissertation layers trauma studies theory with feminist theories of performance and autobiography to investigate how women's autobiographically based performances of illness experience disrupt and/or reinforce master discourses of medicine, identity, and knowledge. Feminist theories of performance and autobiography share with trauma studies the distrust of traditional frames and mechanisms of representation, and seek to discover new methods of interpreting experiences that lie "outside the realm" of normative discourse. These theories are further linked by their shared focus on agency and identity construction and an understanding of autobiography that emphasizes the limitations of language and memory which allows for aporia, contradiction, and dissonance, and the belief that testimony functions as a politicized performative of truth. Employing these theoretical perspectives, Carr investigates how these performances witness to radical reconfigurations of identity through the transference of trauma into conveyable life narrative -- even when those narratives falls outside the paradigm of traditional storytelling structures. Carr questions how the structures and content of these performances reveal what traumas are inflicted not only through illness, but also through treatment and care within the western medical model. Throughout the study Carr examines the moments when the cognitive structures of trauma are transmitted into performance through a variety of feminist and avant-garde performance techniques. Carr investigates the work of specific performers and contextualizes the performances within popular culture and medical discourse. Performances analyzed include; Robbie McCauley's Sugar, Susan Miller's My Left Breast, Brandyn Barbara Artis's Sister Girl, and Deb Margolin's bringing the fishermen home and Three Seconds in the Key. Carr questions how the formerly or currently ill female body performing in public disrupts notions of fixed and stable identity while examining the myriad identity constructions embedded within illness narrative. Rather than simplistic triumphant stories of individual cure and recovery, these complex expressions of traumatic experience reveal patterns of cultural oppression that keep the ill female body isolated and silenced. This study attempts to intervene in that silence by foregrounding these politicized performances.

Title from first page of PDF document. Includes bibliographical references (p. 49-51).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2005. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 186-199). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

M.A. (French) / This thesis investigates the collective literary Project entitled Rwanda: écrire par devoir de mémoire, written by nine Francophone, African intellectuals in response to the genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda. Six of them are fictional novels or travel diaries by non- Rwandans, based on the stories and adaptations of the stories of survivors. There is one poetry anthology and two texts by Rwandans: a survivor’s testimony and an essay by a Tutsi who was in exile during the genocide. A comparison of the literary strategies, used by the authors to respond both individually and collectively to the difficulty of writing the ‘inexpressible’, forms the basis of this analysis. It explores trauma theory and its application to literature and fiction, focusing on how signs of traumatic memory are made visible in the texts. Based on Ricoeur’s notion of triple mimesis, it considers the interaction between victim, writer/text and reader/listener which re-establishes the communication interrupted by the trauma of genocide. The thesis considers the initiation, aims and challenges of the Project. It provides an overview of the origins and consequences of the genocide as observed by the writers. A literary analysis of each of the nine texts separately allows the reader to appreciate the variety of approaches: collective/individual; witness-survivor/indirect witness; fact/fiction, and the blending of these opposites. A synthesis of the recurring motifs, lieux de mémoire and emblematic characters foregrounds tensions that emerge in the postgenocide society between memory and forgetting, identity and alterity, survivors and exiles, forgiveness and justice, survival and the death experience. These elements create an intertextual, fictional world that is nevertheless anchored in the reality of genocide, a polyphonic narrative which contributes to a deeper understanding of the collective horror of the genocide.

This thesis argues that a prominent concern among contemporary writers of fiction is the recuperation of lost or occluded histories. Increasingly, contemporary writers, especially postcolonial writers, are using the medium of fiction to explore those areas of political and cultural history that have been written over or unwritten by the dominant narrative of “official” History. The act of excavating these past histories is simultaneously both traumatic and liberating – which is not to suggest that liberation itself is without pain and trauma. The retelling of traumatic pasts can lead, as is portrayed in The God of Small Things (1997), to further trauma and pain. Postcolonial writers (and much of the world today can be construed as postcolonial in one way or another) are seeking to bring to the fore stories of the past which break down the rigid binaries upon which colonialism built its various empires, literal and ideological. Such writing has in a sense been enabled by the collapse, in postcolonial and postmodernist discourse, of the Grand Narrative of History, and its fragmentation into a plurality of competing discourses and histories. The associated collapse of the boundary between history and fiction is recognized in the useful generic marker “historiographic metafiction,” coined by Linda Hutcheon. The texts examined in this study are all variants of this emerging contemporary genre. What they also have in common is a concern with the consequences of exile or diaspora. This study thus explores some of the representations of how the exilic experience impinges on the development of identity in the postcolonial world. The identities of “displaced” people must undergo constant change in order to adjust to the new spaces into which they move, both literal and metaphorical, and yet critical to this adjustment is the cultural continuity provided by psychologically satisfying stories about the past. The study shows that what the chosen texts share at bottom is their mutual need to retell the lost pasts of their characters, the trauma that such retelling evokes and the new histories to which they give birth. These texts generate new histories which subvert, enrich, and pre-empt formal closure for the narratives of history which determine the identities of nations.

This dissertation undertakes a comparative study of certain works of literature concerning Vietnamese and American troops during the United States’ involvement in Southeast Asia in the 1960s and 1970s. My assumption was that during war it is possible to conclude that enemy forces behave in the same manner in order to reach the identical goal, that of victory over the ‘other’ side. I sought to ascertain how under the selfsame conditions they could be considered as enemies. Divided only by the 17th Parallel: A Study of Similarities Between American and Vietnamese Soldiers in Selected Works By close reading of six texts, three from Vietnamese and three from American perspectives, I have attempted to extract their similar views from each in order to create a context in which the likeness of each side is demonstrated. This was achieved by exploring four themes: those of landscape, time, conflict and ghosts. It was discovered that the protagonists’ behaviour was the same and that rather than being the others’ adversary their true enemies were found within their own ranks. The results indicate that a wider perspective should be adopted on war than one which regards it as a simplistic binary consisting of two opposing sides. Contrary to any supposition that enemies must remain separated, there is more than enough evidence for one to conclude that they actually occupied mutual psychological territory. Key Terms: Landscape, time, ghosts, psychological damage, Reader Response, CSR, PTSD, New Historicism, dehumanisation, conditions of war, 1954 Geneva Agreement, ideology, war literature. / English Literature / M.A. (English Literature)

Al Qaeda killings, posttraumatic stress, and the Gothic together triangulate a sizable space in recent American fiction that is still largely uncharted by critics. This thesis maps that shared territory in four novels written between 2005 and 2007 by writers who were born in America, and whose protagonists are the survivors in New York City after the World Trade Center falls. Published in the city of their tragedy and reviewed in its media, the novels surveyed here include Don DeLillo’s _Falling Man_ (2007), Jonathan Safran Foer’s _Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close_ (2005), Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s _The Writing on the Wall_ (2005), and Jess Walter’s _The Zero_ (2006). The thesis issues a challenge to the large number of negative and dismissive reviews of the novels under consideration, making a case that under different criteria, shaped by trauma theory and psychoanalysis, the novels succeed after all in making readers feel what it was to be alive in September 2001, enduring the posttraumatic stress for months and years later. The thesis asserts that 9/11 fiction is too commonly presented in popular journals and scholarly studies as an undifferentiated mass. In the same critical piece a journalist or an academic may evaluate narratives in which unfold a terrorist's point of view, a surviving or a dying New York City victim's perspective, and an outsider's reaction set thousands of miles away from Ground Zero. What this thesis argues for is a separation in study of the fictive strands that meditate on the burning towers, treating the New York City survivor story as a discrete body. Despite their being set in one of the most known cities of the Western world, and the terrorist attack that they depict being the most- watched catastrophe ever experienced in real-time before, these fictions have not yet been critically ordered. Charting the salient reappearing conflicts, unsettling descriptions, protagonist decay, and potent techniques for registering horror that resurface in this New York City 9/11 fiction, this thesis proposes and demonstrates how the peculiar and affecting Gothic tensions in the works can be further understood by trauma theory, a term coined by Cathy Caruth in Unclaimed Experience (1996: 72). Though the thesis concentrates on developments in trauma theory from the mid 1990s to 2015, it also addresses its theoretical antecedents: from the earliest voices in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that linked mental illness to a trauma (Charcot, Janet, Breuer, Freud), to researchers from mid-twentieth century (Adler, Lindemann) who studied how catastrophe affects civilian minds not previously trained to either fight war or withstand cataclysm. Always keeping at the fore the ancient Greek double-meaning of trauma as both unhealing “wound” and “defeat,” the thesis surveys tenets of the trauma theorists from the very first of those who studied the effects on civilian survivors of disaster (of what is still the largest nightclub fire in U.S. history, which replaced front page coverage of World War II for a few days: the Cocoanut Grove blaze in Boston, 1942) up to those theorists writing in 2015. The concepts evolving behind trauma theory, this thesis demonstrates, provide a useful mechanism to discuss the surprising yearnings hiding behind the appearance of doppelgängers, possession ghosts, terrorists as monsters, empty coffins, and visitants that appear to feed on characters’ sorrow, guilt, and loneliness within the novels under discussion. This thesis reappraises the dominant idea in trauma studies of the mid-1990s, namely that trauma victims often cannot fully remember and articulate their physical and psychic wounds. The argument here is that, true to the theories of the Caruthian school, the victims in these novels may not remember and express their trauma completely and in a linear fashion. However, the victims figured in these novels do relate the horrors of their memory to a degree by letting their narration erupt with the unexpectedly Gothic images, tropes, visions, language, and typical contradictions, aporias, lacunae, and paradoxes. The Gothic, one might say, becomes the language in which trauma speaks and articulates itself, albeit not always in the most cogent of signs. One might easily dismiss these fleeting Gothic presences that characters conjure in the fictions under consideration as anomalous apparitions signalling nothing. However, this thesis interrogates these ghostly traces of Gothicism to find what secrets they hold. Working from the insights of psychoanalysis and its post-Freudian re-inventers and challengers, it aims to puzzle out the dimensions of characters’ mourning in its “traumagothic” reading of the texts. Characters’ use of the Gothic becomes their way of remembering, a coded language to the curious. This thesis holds that unexpressed grief and guilt are the large constant in this grouping of novels. Characters’ grief articulation and guilt release, or the desire for symbolic amnesia, take paths that the figures often were suspicious of before 9/11: a return to organized religion, a belief in spirits, a call for vengeance, psychotherapy, substance abuse, splitting with a partner, rampant sex with nearby strangers, torture of suspects, and killing. All the earnest attempts through the above means by the characters to express grief, vent rage, and alleviate survivor guilt do so without noticeable success. True closure towards their trauma is largely a myth. No reliable evidence surfaces from the close reading of the texts that those affected by trauma ever fully recover. However, as this thesis demonstrates, other forms of recompense come from these searches for elusive peace and the nostalgic longing for the America that has been lost to them.

This dissertation undertakes a comparative study of certain works of literature concerning Vietnamese and American troops during the United States’ involvement in Southeast Asia in the 1960s and 1970s. My assumption was that during war it is possible to conclude that enemy forces behave in the same manner in order to reach the identical goal, that of victory over the ‘other’ side. I sought to ascertain how under the selfsame conditions they could be considered as enemies. Divided only by the 17th Parallel: A Study of Similarities Between American and Vietnamese Soldiers in Selected Works By close reading of six texts, three from Vietnamese and three from American perspectives, I have attempted to extract their similar views from each in order to create a context in which the likeness of each side is demonstrated. This was achieved by exploring four themes: those of landscape, time, conflict and ghosts. It was discovered that the protagonists’ behaviour was the same and that rather than being the others’ adversary their true enemies were found within their own ranks. The results indicate that a wider perspective should be adopted on war than one which regards it as a simplistic binary consisting of two opposing sides. Contrary to any supposition that enemies must remain separated, there is more than enough evidence for one to conclude that they actually occupied mutual psychological territory. Key Terms: Landscape, time, ghosts, psychological damage, Reader Response, CSR, PTSD, New Historicism, dehumanisation, conditions of war, 1954 Geneva Agreement, ideology, war literature. / English Literature / M.A. (English Literature)