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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.

Mosaique et memoire studies paradigms that contribute to the construction of identity in the writings of thirteen Tunisian women novelists writing in French: Emna Bel Haj Yahia, Aicha Chaibi, Annie Fitoussi, Behija Gaaloul, Annie Goldmann, Souad Guellouz, Jelila Hafsia, Souad Hedri, Turkia Labidi Ben Yahia, Alia Mabrouk, Nine Moati, Katia Rubenstein, and Fawzia Zouari. Drawing upon post-colonial and feminist perspectives, this thesis analyzes texts through their poetics and in linguistic, cultural and literary contexts. Novels by women offer an inside view of women's evolution through a variety of characters representing three generations, just as they explore alternate ways of entering modernity based upon harmonizing traditional values (cultural roots, family, faith, community solidarity, a Mediterranean warmth of spirit, thinking "in Arabesques") with 'modern' values such as sexual equality and individual freedom. / Multiple women's voices protest patriarchal and colonial or racist discourse, but also reveal spaces of happiness in women's lives. Jewish voices at times reinforce views by Muslim authors but at others present opposing viewpoints, deconstructing concepts such as 'Arab identity' and questioning nationalist claims to Islamic tolerance and multiculturalism. / In these French-language novels, images and metaphors, as well as expressions in dialectical Arabic, recall the rich cultural heritage underlying national consciousness, the memory and the mosaic which form both individual and national identities. The juxtaposition of Arabic and French suggests both the cross-fertilization of cultures and the impossibility of naming the inexpressible, just as it contributes to deconstructing identity through the medium of the novel.

This study offers additional nuance to the garden topos and trope within nineteenth- and twentieth-century Canadian women's writing and extends the critical discussion of landscape and the garden as archetype in Canadian literature. This dissertation cross-fertilizes literary analysis with garden theory, using the work of such garden historians as John Dixon Hunt, Mark Francis, and Randolph Hester. The argument emphasizes that gardens in literature, like their actual counterparts, are an art of milieu, reflective of their socio-physical contexts. Both real and textual gardens are rhetorical: their content and formal features invite interpretation. A textual garden performs similarly to an actual garden by providing a spatial frame; a means of naturalization; a vivid exemplar of growth, fertility and beauty; a mediation of the artificial and the natural; a space of paradox; and a site of social performance. / The specific focus of this study is "domestic gardens": gardens that are intimate, immediate to the home, and part of daily life. Chapter one separates the garden from archetypal models by studying the garden as an actual place (specifically, the backwoods kitchen garden) described in the works of Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill. Chapter two examines how the garden influences Moodie's and Traill's writing of the "transplanted" female emigrant. Chapter three presents the bower as an important precursor to the domestic garden through Gabrielle Roy's Enchantment and Sorrow (1984) and "Garden in the Wind" (1975). Through the bower, Roy mediates the female artist's ambivalence toward home in her pursuit of independence. Chapter four explores Carol Shields' sanctification of the domestic in her fiction through the concept of paradise as both an ideal setting and a mode of being. Chapter five provides a "garden tour" of the poetry of Lorna Crozier, culminating in the garden as a model for the text itself and for the genre of palimpsest. For these writers, literal and figurative gardens are ways of "planting" their characters and personae, "plotting" their narratives, mediating social conventions, and providing an interpretative lens through which readers may perceive the texts as a whole.

Abstract not available. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2007.

This dissertation has two parts. Part one is a manuscript for a novel, entitled Tenement, and part two is a critical self-reflection on the processing of writing. Tenement is a story about death, narrated from the perspective of a dead woman, and its themes are mortality, fragility, the urban environment, caring and social isolation. The narrator, who never discloses her own name, discovers her life may have ended, but not her awareness. Not immediately, anyway. For six days, she watches her own physical decomposition and the reactions of other people and creatures to this termination of life. The responses of the nonhumans who share her body and flat are intimate and oddly affirming, but those of her human neighbours less so. In the derelict tenement, full of invisible or forgotten people with nowhere else to go, there’s a stony indifference to the narrator’s death. But not to the empty apartment. In considering these reactions and the struggle for the vacant flat, the narrator reveals the world of which she was a part. Rising sea levels, illegal dumping and poverty are daily realities of life in the unnamed city in which Tenement is set. City officials may have sloughed off the areas most affected by the encroaching sea, declaring them abandoned and forcibly removing the slum dwellers, but others have returned to the area. Christened the flatlands, the zone is neither abandoned nor uninhabited. The struggle for survival is uncompromising, and the opportunities for fragility, creativity and care eroding as quickly as the land. Yet it is in death, and the new rituals that have emerged to deal with it, that the missed opportunities of individual and collective action are most evident. This, then, is part one of the dissertation. In part two, a reflexive account of the process of writing is offered. Key elements of the novel are discussed, including the use of a Möbius strip for temporal representation, along with its implications for the treatment of narrated and narrating time. The choice of narrator and the conceptualisation of her voice are explained, and the question of genre highlighted, along with the merits of African gothic and its iii contribution to postcolonial literature. Given that Tenement is a story set in a polluted, drowning city of the future, the challenges associated with focalising environment and the risks of using allegorical spaces in postcolonial novels are recognised. Tenement is juxtaposed with specific trends in contemporary South African fictional literature, and its differences and similarities considered. Finally, the contribution of empirical and desktop research to the creative writing process is highlighted, and the varied sources of influence and feedback acknowledged. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2010.

Crime fiction, despite its long chronicled history, has only recently become prevalent as ‘genre fiction’ in South Africa. Despite being an historically disparaged form, crime fiction offers a platform to engage critically with elements of contemporary society. This thesis focuses in particular on the ‘Clare Hart’ series of krimi novels written by Margie Orford, considering some of the ways in which the author mediates the conventions of the genre. (I base my discussion on Like Clockwork [2006], Blood Rose [2007], Daddy’s Girl [2009] and Gallows Hill [2011], with brief remarks, in my conclusion, on the recently-published fifth novel, Water Music [2013].) I argue that Orford seeks to exploit the thrills and tensions typically associated with the genre even as, working through a gender lens, she attempts to reconfigure genre conventions and constraints in order to tackle ethical, social, economic and political challenges in South and southern Africa, especially as they impact upon women, children, and marginalised groups of people. My study examines how Orford undertakes a possible conscientising of her readership, in a genre which is ostensibly associated with easy, entertaining pleasures. In this endeavour, of particular importance is Orford’s characterisation of her protagonist, Clare Hart, an investigative journalist-cum-profiler whom she uses to turn a “defiant observer’s eye” (Orford 2010: 187) on the naturalised violence against women and children in the country, and to up-end some of the entrenched masculinist orientations of both thriller and hard-boiled traditions. Additionally, the thesis addresses the regional situation of Orford’s novels, the expressly southern African environment. Using selected theories of space and place, I argue that while setting is often important to literary fiction, for the crime thriller, setting is much more complexly spatialised, since it may assist in carrying an author’s contextualised criticism of received spatial hierarchies as they relate (especially) to gender and race. Additionally, I point out that Orford’s novels offer her the opportunity to situate narrative in relation to troubled regional histories and geographies, and to move beyond the immediate southern African locality to map the mass-mediated, global vectors which constitute the present, and to situate history in relation to contentious, provocative contemporary concerns such as “organized crime, collapsing state institutions, [and] street gangsters” (Orford 2010: 184). In doing so, I find, Orford offers psychological insight into the complex and highly unsettled nature of the protracted political transition which has marked South Africa’s shift from apartheid to democracy. / M.A. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban 2013.

In this study, I examine the dramatization of violence against the female body in contemporary drama by women and the purpose behind their representational approaches. I concentrate on the representation of three types that I consider inclusive of other minor forms of violence: the political, the medical, and the social violations of the female body. In chapter one, I study the dramatic representation of political violence against women as their bodies become ideological expressions of their lands. This chapter analyzes Suzan-Lori Parks' Venus and Naomi Wallace's In the Heart of America. These dramas represent the violation of women's bodies to parallel the violation and rape of their lands that are effeminized by their subjugation to the dominant powers of the world. In chapter two, I examine the representation of medical violence against women's bodies as connoting the lower status of the female body within patriarchy. The dramas of this chapter, Louise Page's Tissue and Margaret Edson's Wit, illustrate how the female body is dehumanized and devalued by a patriarchal medical practice that fails to recognize the distinctive physical and mental needs of women. Finally, in chapter three, I discuss the dramatic representation of social violence as the most inclusive form of aggression against women. The plays of this chapter, Caryl Churchill's Vinegar Tom and Maria Irene Fornes' The Conduct of Life, emphasize the masculine fear of and intimidation by the female body's sexuality and productivity, which instigates all types of physical violence against women within the social context. In the conclusion, I discuss Eve Ansler's The Vagina Monologues as a piece of performance art that instigates an active type of opposition against women's subjugations and violations. The activism of this type of drama and its effectiveness in enforcing change upon women's lives makes it an excellent extension to the type of ideas and notions brought about in this dissertation. / Department of English

National Identity, Ethnic Identity, Minoritiness...These are all categories which appear to have existed always already, categories which seem to be normative by nature. They are determinative, for they position human beings on different levels of the social ladder and organize strategically human interrelations. Yet, while these same apparently transcendental categories appropriate a position of universality, they also claim to be particular to a specific place, a specific people, a specific race etc. The disjunction inherent in these categories can be realized within this ideological contradiction. It is therefore this very disjunction that calls upon the rethinking of identity in relation to nation, ethnicity and minority. In this thesis I offer a translation of nine separate excerpts from Kobayashi Aya's account on Burakumin experience in Japan. The author's contemplation on Japaneseness and Minoritiness, her questioning of national identity as a category and of this category as predetermined become the focus of my work. While outlining the structure of Kobayashi's writing and the methods she chooses to employ, I analyze the concepts of performativity, repetition and disruption as potential options for rethinking Japaneseness and Minoritiness as categories of identity.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Georgia State University, 2007. / Thomas L. McHaney, committee chair; Audrey Goodman, Pearl A. McHaney, committee members. Electronic text (247 p.) : digital, PDF file. Title from file title page. Description based on contents viewed Mar. 27, 2008. Includes bibliographical references (p. 233-247).