Sara Tuvel Bernstein’s The Seamstress and Rena Kornreich Gelissen’s Rena’s Promise: A Story of Sisters in Auschwitz, both Holocaust memoirs, offer insight into the rise of violent anti-Semitism prior to World War II and the authors’ experiences in concentration camps. The purpose of this project is to better understand the unique trauma women experienced during the Holocaust and the impact of that trauma on their literary responses.

This project centres on the continuing relevance of the 1947 Partition of India in texts that engage with the national landscape of Pakistan. This approach proposes that Partition cannot be understood outside of a discussion of Pakistan, as Partition emerged through demands for liberty and enfranchisement for India’s Muslims that became articulated through the discourse of the nation-state; my analysis of cultural texts asks what the implications are of this proposal. This study moves beyond looking at Partition as an isolated series of events in 1947 and contextualises its processes, interrogating why Partition and Pakistan became such a persuasive demand, and what the ongoing ramifications are of its happening. This thesis also considers what the 1971 secession of Bangladesh suggests regarding the attempts of the original cartographic articulation of Pakistan to maintain a unified nation. This project seeks to understand Partition in new ways by utilising a framework that takes into account the broader context of Partition both temporally and spatially. It moves beyond work that solely focusses on texts that discuss the moment of Partition directly, by examining texts that approach the time that preceded Partition, and that which succeeded it. In so doing this thesis charts how texts articulate the arguments for Pakistan’s creation against the events and commemoration of its becoming. I aim to be broad temporally, geographically, and in how I engage with the notion of violence, extending this to include the bureaucratic violence of drawing borders and colonial withdrawal. This study maintains a focus on women’s narratives, arguing that due to the gendered experience of violence at the time of Partition, such as rape, abduction, and honour killing, women’s stories have a particular intervention to make. As such this thesis proposes that there is a pattern of specifically gendered trauma that emerges which disrupts dominant nationalist remembering of Partition. This work takes an interdisciplinary focus by analysing fiction, feature film and documentary. Central to the study is the deployment of a number of theoretical methodologies, such as affect, cultural memory and trauma. Engagement with this critical material enables a discussion of the cultural texts that considers the role of affects in generating and maintaining national belonging, the impact of trauma on individuals who lived through Partition and on the nation writ large, and the implications of how trauma and affect are negotiated when texts imagine reparative futures.

Posthumanist rhetoric is informed by developments in the sciences and the humanities which suggest that mind and body are not distinct from each other and, therefore, claims of humans’ superiority over other animals based on cognitive differences may not be justified. Posthumanist rhetoric, then, seeks to re-imagine the human and its relationship to the world. Though “post-” implies after, like other “post-” terms, posthumanism also coexists with humanism. This dissertation develops a concept of posthumanist rhetoric as questioning humanist assumptions about subjectivity while remaining entangled in them. The destabilization of the human subject means that new identifications between humans and nonhumans are possible, and the ethical implications of the rhetorical strategies used to build them have yet to be worked out. Identification, a key aim of rhetoric in the theory of Kenneth Burke and others, can persuade an audience to value others. However, it can also obscure the realities of who does and does not benefit from particular arguments, particularly when animal suffering is framed as human-like trauma with psychological and cultural as well as physical effects. I argue that a posthumanist practice of rhetoric demonstrates ways of circumventing this problem by persuading readers not only to care about others, but also to understand that our ability to comprehend another’s subjectivity is limited and that acknowledging these limitations is a method of caring. his dissertation locates instances of resistance to and/or deployment of posthumanist critique in recent works of literature; identifies language commonly used in appeals that create identifications between humans and animals; and analyzes the implications of these rhetorical strategies. To that end, I have selected texts about human and animal suffering that engage particular themes of identification that recur in posthumanist rhetoric. The chapters pair texts that develop each theme differently. Most undermine human superiority as a species, but many reify the importance of certain qualities of the liberal humanist subject by granting them to nonhumans. The points of identification created between humans and nonhumans will inform how we re-imagine the human subject to account for our connections, and therefore our responsibilities, to other beings.

<p>The medium of performance art locates both the art-making subject and the art object in the body of the artist. Performance art thus serves as an appropriate medium for integrating the complex, repetitive, and often unconscious somatic knowledges developed by two distinct experiences: the practice of religious ritual and the overwhelming conditions of trauma. In this dissertation, I explore the foundational idea that the artist's body can become a site of both theological significance and traumatic memory. I examine the connections among the forms of performance art, bodily worship practices, and traumatic experience in the work of three contemporary U.S. performance artists with devout religious backgrounds. Born between the1940s and the 1960s, Linda Montano, John Duncan, and Ron Athey have all consistently positioned their work in religious contexts. This trans-generational set of artists represents a spectrum of Christian traditions in the United States: Athey's improvisational Pentecostalism, the liturgical tradition of Montano's Catholicism, and mainstream Protestantism in the form of Duncan's Calvinist Presbyterianism. At the same time, all three artists struggle with the persistent affect of traumatic experience, from domestic violence to sexual assault. These artists' works represent their traumatic experiences as mediated through the bodily, visual, intellectual, and aural forms of their respective Christian traditions. My dissertation identifies religion as a neglected foundation of performance art and as a fundamental motivating factor and force in shaping its forms, content, and significance.</p> / Dissertation

The applicability of trauma studies within an examination of postcolonial literature has been a contested topic for scholars in both fields. Additionally, scholarship regarding Amitav Ghosh’s postcolonial science fiction novel The Calcutta Chromosome encourages various readings of the novel but does not currently offer a cohesive examination of all its thematic disciplines and stylistic elements. Through an examination of this postcolonial novel, I will provide a more holistic reading of the novel through an application of trauma studies that explores its representation of the internal postcolonial conflict regarding Western and non-Western historiographies. My analysis will focus on the lexical, character, and narrative levels of the novel through its dominant medical, technological, postcolonial, and political themes for inclusions of Caruth’s aporia related to the manifestation of trauma in literature.

Graphic Intimacies: Identity, Humor, and Trauma in Autobiographical Comics by Women of Color examines works of comics art about the lived experience of the comics’ creator. These graphic narratives address racialized difference and the construction of identity while also using humor to negotiate their narrations of traumatic events. I argue that these creators employ the structure of comics to replicate the fragmentary nature of memory. Comics allow for the representation of trauma as being intimately linked to corporeality. The comics medium allows creators to make visible and present fractured versions of the self, a product of traumatic fragmentation. Drawing traumatic memories becomes a symbolic enactment of transformation. Comics become a way of coping with the fragmentary nature of traumatic memory, permitting a consolidation of memory even when a totality is impossible. Graphic Intimacies examines representative texts by four autobiographical cartoonists: Lynda Barry, Belle Yang, MariNaomi, and Whit Taylor. Each of these cartoonists engages in critiques of social issues through the negotiation of a multilayered identity. For instance, Barry’s One Hundred Demons (2002) explores her identity as a white-passing Filipino American growing up in a low-income neighborhood. In Forget Sorrow: An Ancestral Tale (2011), Yang a Taiwanese born Chinese American artist, tells the story of her father’s family in order to heal from the trauma of intimate partner abuse. Biracial Japanese American artist MariNaomi explores her disconnection from her Japanese heritage while chronicling her experiences working in Japanese-style hostess bars in Turning Japanese (2016).

Two of Don DeLillo’s recently published novels, The Body Artist (2001) and Falling Man (2007), feature performance artists performing trauma. Through the bodies of these performers, DeLillo restates the central concern of trauma studies: if trauma is that which denies mediation, how may we speak about traumatic experience? DeLillo’s stagings of traumatic (re)iterations illustrate how the missed originary moment of trauma precludes directly referential content in traumatic representation. But I propose that performed trauma – the knowledge of forgetting addressed to another – recapitulates the structure of traumatic experience itself, thereby revealing trauma to be wholly constituted in repetition, and providing a means of speaking about the unspeakable. I hope to illustrate how restoring trauma to language revives the ethical and political efficacy of traumatic representation.

Still House is a poetry manuscript that explores the relationship between traditional gender roles and traditional poetic forms. The poems in this collections seek to revise the role of the homemaker and interrogate whether it is okay to take comfort and pleasure in tasks that are often labeled as feminine (i.e. cooking, baking, decorating, organizing, shopping, choosing outfits) while rejecting other parts of the homemaker archetype, such as subservience to and dependence upon men. Limited gender roles, patriarchy, sexist comments, capitalism, toxic masculinity, the cis-hetero-white-male gaze, trauma, physical pain, illness—these all can make it feel like we are not fully in control and ownership of our bodies, like something is encroaching. The poems in Still House are invested in using the poetics of embodiment (a poetics centered around telling stories about the body through immersive sensory details) to reclaim the body from trauma, patriarchy, and chronic pain and illness.

<p>  </p> <p>This dissertation enriches the field of Comparative Literature by examining the trauma narratives of Chinese women in wartime through a cross-cultural and cross-medium lens. It focuses on their experiences as they are articulated in a variety of texts and visual media, in the process offering an exploration of the intersection between gender, trauma, and war. By incorporating theoretical frameworks from Western trauma studies into an analysis of Chinese and Asian contexts, the study further contributes to Comparative Literature by fostering an intercultural dialogue. This unique approach uncovers shared patterns of human suffering and resilience, providing new insights into the universality and particularity of trauma representation. The dissertation extends the boundaries of Comparative Literature by examining the influence of gender on the construction and reception of trauma narratives. It also gives a novel contribution by addressing broader social and political issues both in the context of China, Asia, and globally. The four chapters examine the portrayal of women’s experiences produced generations after the war, focusing on the following topics, respectively: the witness of sexual violence, the challenges of representing feminine pain, repetition of traumatic memory, and the complexity of individual and collective experiences in relation to wartime traumas. By analyzing mostly novels, as well as films and testimonies, the dissertation emphasizes the importance of considering both historical records and shared personal memories, as well as the role of artistic expression in fostering empathy and understanding. This research offers a valuable contribution by illuminating the enduring and complex impact of war on women’s lives. Furthermore, it provides a strong foundation for future studies, ultimately contributing to a more nuanced understanding of the representation of traumatic experiences of individuals and communities affected by trauma. </p>

No description available.