Thesis (Ph.D. (English)) - Rhodes University, 2008.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2008.

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.

Thesis (MA (English))--University of Stellenbosch, 2010. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This thesis will examine representations of the Rwandan genocide and its aftermath in selected literary and filmic narratives. It aims in particular to explore the different ways in which narrative devices are used to convey trauma to the reader or viewer, thus enabling them to bear witness to it. These include language, discourse, image, structure and perspectives, on the one hand, and the framing of the genocide on screen, on the other hand. The thesis argues that these narrative devices are used to provide partial insight into the trauma of the genocide and/or to produce empathy or distance between readers and viewers and the victims, perpetrators and survivors of the genocide. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which the selected novels and films advance the human dimension of the genocide. This will shift both victims and perpetrators out of the domain of statistics and evoke emotional engagement from readers and viewers. The thesis argues for the importance of narrative in bearing witness to trauma, particularly due to its unique ability to forge an emotional connection between reader or viewer and character. The primary texts analysed in the thesis are the novels Inyenzi: A Story of Love and Genocide by South African author Andrew Brown and Murambi, The Book of Bones by Senegalese author Boubacar Boris Diop, along with the films Shooting Dogs, directed by British Michael Caton- Jones, and Hotel Rwanda, directed by American Terry George. In addition to considering the use of narrative devices to produce empathy and engagement among readers and viewers, the thesis explores also the implications of the various outsider perspectives of the writers and film-makers, and the effect that this has on their narratives, not least given the role played by the world community in failing to avert the genocide . / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Hierdie tesis ondersoek die voorstellings van Rwanda volksmoorde en die nagevolge in geselekteerde narratiewe tekste en rolprente. Die tesis poog om op verskillende maniere ondersoek in stel na die narratiewe middels om die trauma oor te dra na die leser en kyker. Dit sluit taal, diskoers, beelde, struktuur en perspektiewe aan die eenkant, en verfilming op die skerm aan die anderkant. Die tesis argumenteer dat narratiewe middels verskaf gedeeltelike insig van die trauma van die volksmoorde en/of genereer empatie of afstand tussen leser en kyker en die slagoffers, skuldiges en die oorlewendes van die volksmoorde. Aandag sal veral gegee word op welke wyse die geselekteerde romans en rolprente die menslike dimensie van volksmoord bevorder. Beide die slagoffers en skuldiges word uit die ondersoekterrein van statistieke geskuif en daar gaan gefokus word op die uitlok van emosionele betokkendheid van lesers en kykers. Die tesis argumenteer vir die belangrikheid van die narratief om as getuienis op te tree van trauma – veral as gevolg die unieke vermoë om tussen die leser of die kyker en die karakter emosionele bande te smee. Die primêre tekste wat in hierdie tesis geanaliseer word, is die romans, Inyenzi: A Story of Love and Genocide deur Suid-Afrikaner Andrew Brown, Murambi, The Book of Bones deur Senegalese skrywer Boubacar Boris Diop, en die rolprente Shooting Dogs, onder leiding van die Brit, Michael Caton-Jones en Hotel Rwanda, onder leiding van die Ierse, Terry George. Afgesien van die gebruik van narratiewe middels om empatie en betrokkenheid van lesers en kykers te genereer, ondersoek die tesis ook die implikasies van die onderskeie buitestaander perspektiewe van die skrywers en rolprentmakers en die effek op hulle narratiewe – veral die rol wat hulle speel in die wêreldgemeenskap om volksmoorde te voorkom.

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.