Because of woman's peculiar relationship to language, and therefore to the means of comprehending and expressing her experience, female autobiographical writing is a problematic undertaking. An exploration of several premises about Western culture can help to illuminate the difficulties the female autobiographer encounters in creating her life/text. Among these premises are the following: (1) that the culture that provides the context for female experience is what feminist theorists call "patriarchal," that is, a culture dependent upon and reinforced by the supremacy of male interests, pursuits, and values. (2) that the habit of mind of this culture is essentially dichotomous, and that this bifurcation, although it serves very well to enable one person or group to gain power over another, fails to account for the sense of relatedness characteristic of female moral development as demonstrated by recent feminist psychologists. (3) that one lives through telling oneself the story of one's life (that is, that living itself is an essentially autobiographical act); that this narrative conforms to certain cultural conventions; and that these conventions present distinct problems to the narrator who is female. (4) that the human being constructs its self through language, and that the language of a patriarchal culture is problematic to female authenticity. In order to confront these theoretical problems in practice, twelve essays explore some experiences of a middle-aged, middle-class white American woman in the second half of the twentieth century. These include illness, both physical (multiple sclerosis) and emotional (depression, agoraphobia); suicide; relationships with men, strangers, and cats; motherhood; and above all, writing. They form a feminist project whose purpose is so to merge theory with praxis, nonfiction with fiction and poetry, scholarship with creation, that such distinctions become meaningless and the female writer can get on with the real business of making and contemplating her text. An annotated selected bibliography lists works in feminist theory and criticism, some of which inform the essays, thus providing a program for extensive feminist study, especially in literature, anthropology, and psychology.

This thesis considers the critical implications of a cross-cultural reading of First Nations women’s writing in this time of sensitivity to the issues of appropriation and power inequities between dominant and minority cultures. A genre-based study, it is written from a deliberately split perspective: reading as both a white academic implicated in the dominant culture's production of meaning and value, and as a lesbian alienated from these same processes, I both propose and perform several modes of response to First Nations texts. Interspersed with a conventional commentary is a secondary, personal commentary that questions and qualifies the claims of the critical. Then, another level of response, in the form of fiction and poetry based on my own experiences growing up with my Assiniboine sister, also proposes the appropriateness, in this critical power dynamic, of a third response of simply answering story with story. Chapter One examines the construction of individual identity and responsibility in Maria Campbell's Halfbreed, particularly as the text demands an emotionally-engaged response conventionally discouraged in critical discourse, and as a result redefines the genre of autobiography. Chapter Two considers the possibility of a communal and spiritual, as well as an individual, emotional, response to First Nations texts, examining the community of stories that comprise each of the novels Slash, In Search of April Raintree, and Honour the Sun. From this consideration of narrative as eliciting emotional and spiritual reading practices, Chapter Three discusses the nature of language itself as a vehicle of spiritual transformation and subversion, specifically in the poetry of Annharte and Beth Cuthand. Chapter Four, on the mixed-genre The Book of Jessica, shifts focus from the discursive strategies of First Nations writing, to examining the way these practices redefine time and history as newly accessible to First Nations spiritual construction. Finally, the Conclusion re-examines the reading strategies developed throughout the thesis, noting the pitfalls they avoid, while discussing their limitations as cross-cultural tools. The ultimate effect is to propose the very beginning of the kinds of changes the academy must consider for a truly non-appropriative cross-cultural interaction.

Typescript. / Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 1977. / Bibliography: leaves 168-184. / Microfiche. / vi, 184 leaves

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1995. / Typescript. "Bibliography of publications by 70 African American women writers in New Jersey": leaves 209-227. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 154-166).

Since devolution there has been a wealth of stimulating and exciting literary works by Welsh and Scottish women writers, produced as the boundaries of nationality were being dismantled and ideas of nationhood transformed. This comparative study brings together, for the first time, Scottish and Welsh women writers’ literary responses to these historic political and cultural developments. Chapter one situates the thesis in a historical context and discusses some of the connections between Wales and Scotland in terms of their relationship with ‘Britain’ and England. Chapter two focuses on the theoretical context and argues that postcolonial and feminist theories are the most appropriate frameworks in which to understand both Welsh and Scottish women’s writing in English, and their preoccupations with gendered inequalities and language during the pre- and post-devolutionary period. The third chapter examines Welsh and Scottish women’s writing from the first failed referendum (1979) to the second successful one (1997) to provide a sense of progression towards devolution. Since the process of devolution began there has been an important repositioning of Scottish and Welsh people’s perception of their culture and their place within it; the subsequent chapters – four, five, six and seven – analyse a diverse body of work from the symbolic transference of powers in 1999 to 2008. The writers discussed range from established authors such as Stevie Davies to first-time novelists such as Leela Soma. Through close comparative readings focusing on a range of issues such as marginalised identities and the politics of home and belonging, these chapters uncover and assess Welsh and Scottish women writers’ shared literary assertions, strategies and concerns as well as local and national differences. The conclusions drawn from this thesis suggest that, as a consequence of a history of sustained internal and external marginalization, post-devolution Welsh and Scottish women’s writing share important similarities regarding the politics of representation. The authors discussed in this study are resisting writers who textually illustrate the necessity of constantly rewriting national narratives and in so doing enable their audience to read the two nations and their peoples in fresh, innovative and divergent ways.

This thesis considers the critical implications of a cross-cultural reading of First Nations women’s writing in this time of sensitivity to the issues of appropriation and power inequities between dominant and minority cultures. A genre-based study, it is written from a deliberately split perspective: reading as both a white academic implicated in the dominant culture's production of meaning and value, and as a lesbian alienated from these same processes, I both propose and perform several modes of response to First Nations texts. Interspersed with a conventional commentary is a secondary, personal commentary that questions and qualifies the claims of the critical. Then, another level of response, in the form of fiction and poetry based on my own experiences growing up with my Assiniboine sister, also proposes the appropriateness, in this critical power dynamic, of a third response of simply answering story with story. Chapter One examines the construction of individual identity and responsibility in Maria Campbell's Halfbreed, particularly as the text demands an emotionally-engaged response conventionally discouraged in critical discourse, and as a result redefines the genre of autobiography. Chapter Two considers the possibility of a communal and spiritual, as well as an individual, emotional, response to First Nations texts, examining the community of stories that comprise each of the novels Slash, In Search of April Raintree, and Honour the Sun. From this consideration of narrative as eliciting emotional and spiritual reading practices, Chapter Three discusses the nature of language itself as a vehicle of spiritual transformation and subversion, specifically in the poetry of Annharte and Beth Cuthand. Chapter Four, on the mixed-genre The Book of Jessica, shifts focus from the discursive strategies of First Nations writing, to examining the way these practices redefine time and history as newly accessible to First Nations spiritual construction. Finally, the Conclusion re-examines the reading strategies developed throughout the thesis, noting the pitfalls they avoid, while discussing their limitations as cross-cultural tools. The ultimate effect is to propose the very beginning of the kinds of changes the academy must consider for a truly non-appropriative cross-cultural interaction. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

In the aftermath of the Shoah (Holocaust)—the mass murder of 6,000,000 Jews—Jean-Paul Sartre wrote Reflexions sur la Question Juive (1946), in which he concluded that the fate of the Jews, the fate of the individual non-Jew, and the fate of the entire world are inextricably and reciprocally intertwined. Building on Sartre's perception, Portrait of a Jew (1962) and The Liberation of the Jew (1966) describe what the author, Albert Memmi, terms "the universal Jewish fate": that of being the paradigmatic "colonized" Other—insofar as the Jews are a particularly oppressed minority, that is, their marginalization epitomizes the fate of all humanity. Further, Memmi argues both that "to be a Jewish writer is ... to express the Jewish fate" and that a "true Jewish literature" is necessarily one which revolts against the imposition and acceptance of this fate. Sartre's and Memmi's insights posit that Jewish consciousness acts upon both national and world consciousness. Memmi suggests that one means of expressing the Jewish consciousness is through literature. In their imaginative interpretations of the post-Shoah interconnections between the Jew, the nation, and the world, modern Jewish fiction writers of the Diaspora (dispersion) —at least those whose work foregrounds tropes of Jewish sensibility, incorporating Jewish characters and themes—often delineate a world which, in the aftermath of Auschwitz, is socially and existentially even more precarious than it was before the war. This study examines post-Shoah Jewish consciousness and its relation to national/world consciousness,as represented in the English-language Jewish fiction of Australia, South Africa, and Canada, Commonwealth countries whose diverse Jewish literatures have been overshadowed by the predominant English-language Jewish literary culture of the U.S.A. The structure of this study is bipartite. Part B is an indexed Bibliography enumerating primary works by Jewish prose fiction writers of Australia, Canada, and South Africa. Part A is a critical commentary on Part B. The Introduction (Chapter 1) outlines the theoretical bases for the study. The three following chapters scrutinize Jewish Australian (Chapter 2), Jewish South African (Chapter 3), and Jewish Canadian (Chapter 4) fiction. Among the writers considered are Australians B.N. Jubal, Judah Waten, David Martin, Morris Lurie, Serge Liberman, and Lily Brett; South Africans Nadine Gordimer, Dan Jacobson, Jillian Becker, Antony Sher, and Rose Zwi; and Canadians Henry Kreisel, A.M. Klein, Adele Wiseman, Mordecai Richler, and Robert Majzels. Each of these three chapters follows a similar format: a description of the origin, history, and demography of the Jewish community; an outline of the important pre-World War II Jewish fiction writers and their work; an examination of representative post-Shoah works; and concluding remarks about the ways in which the works under consideration here contest and revise both the canons of nation and national literature and the very concepts of nation, canon, and canon-making. An Epilogue (Chapter 5) contextualizes the thematic patterns common to the Jewish fiction of the three countries and suggests ways in which this fiction can be located within the larger framework of Jewish Literature.

In the aftermath of the Shoah (Holocaust)—the mass murder of 6,000,000 Jews—Jean-Paul Sartre wrote Reflexions sur la Question Juive (1946), in which he concluded that the fate of the Jews, the fate of the individual non-Jew, and the fate of the entire world are inextricably and reciprocally intertwined. Building on Sartre's perception, Portrait of a Jew (1962) and The Liberation of the Jew (1966) describe what the author, Albert Memmi, terms "the universal Jewish fate": that of being the paradigmatic "colonized" Other—insofar as the Jews are a particularly oppressed minority, that is, their marginalization epitomizes the fate of all humanity. Further, Memmi argues both that "to be a Jewish writer is ... to express the Jewish fate" and that a "true Jewish literature" is necessarily one which revolts against the imposition and acceptance of this fate. Sartre's and Memmi's insights posit that Jewish consciousness acts upon both national and world consciousness. Memmi suggests that one means of expressing the Jewish consciousness is through literature. In their imaginative interpretations of the post-Shoah interconnections between the Jew, the nation, and the world, modern Jewish fiction writers of the Diaspora (dispersion) —at least those whose work foregrounds tropes of Jewish sensibility, incorporating Jewish characters and themes—often delineate a world which, in the aftermath of Auschwitz, is socially and existentially even more precarious than it was before the war. This study examines post-Shoah Jewish consciousness and its relation to national/world consciousness,as represented in the English-language Jewish fiction of Australia, South Africa, and Canada, Commonwealth countries whose diverse Jewish literatures have been overshadowed by the predominant English-language Jewish literary culture of the U.S.A. The structure of this study is bipartite. Part B is an indexed Bibliography enumerating primary works by Jewish prose fiction writers of Australia, Canada, and South Africa. Part A is a critical commentary on Part B. The Introduction (Chapter 1) outlines the theoretical bases for the study. The three following chapters scrutinize Jewish Australian (Chapter 2), Jewish South African (Chapter 3), and Jewish Canadian (Chapter 4) fiction. Among the writers considered are Australians B.N. Jubal, Judah Waten, David Martin, Morris Lurie, Serge Liberman, and Lily Brett; South Africans Nadine Gordimer, Dan Jacobson, Jillian Becker, Antony Sher, and Rose Zwi; and Canadians Henry Kreisel, A.M. Klein, Adele Wiseman, Mordecai Richler, and Robert Majzels. Each of these three chapters follows a similar format: a description of the origin, history, and demography of the Jewish community; an outline of the important pre-World War II Jewish fiction writers and their work; an examination of representative post-Shoah works; and concluding remarks about the ways in which the works under consideration here contest and revise both the canons of nation and national literature and the very concepts of nation, canon, and canon-making. An Epilogue (Chapter 5) contextualizes the thematic patterns common to the Jewish fiction of the three countries and suggests ways in which this fiction can be located within the larger framework of Jewish Literature. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

Thesis (PhD)--Stellenbosch University, 2014. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The thesis examines how women writers from Uganda and South Africa simultaneously offer a critique of nationalist narratives and articulate a gendered nationalism. My focus will be on the new imaginings of women in and of the nation that are being produced through the narratives of emerging women writers in post-repressive nation-states. I explore the linkages in post-conflict writing by focusing on the literary representations of women and womanhood, while taking into account some of the differences in how these writers write women in these two post-repressive regimes. I read the narratives from these two countries together because, in the last fifty years, both Uganda and South Africa have been through prolonged periods of political repression and instability followed by negotiated transitions to new political dispensations. I use the phrase post-repressive to refer to the post-civil war era after 1986 in Uganda and the post-apartheid period subsequent to the 1994 first democratic elections in South Africa. From the late 1990s, there has been a steady increase in fiction written by emerging women writers in Uganda and South Africa. The term emerging women writers in the Ugandan literary context refers to the writers who have benefitted from the emergence of FEMRITE Publications, the publishing house of the Ugandan Women Writers’ Association; in the South African setting, I use the term to define black women writers publishing for the first time in a liberated state. The current political climate in both countries has inaugurated a new era for women writers; cracks are widening for these new voices, creating more spaces that allow them to foreground, interrogate, engage and address wide-ranging topics which lacked more forms of expression in the past. This study explores how women writers from Uganda and South Africa attempt to capture women’s experiences in literary texts and seeks to find ways of interpreting how such constructs of female identity in the aftermath of different forms of oppression articulate various signs of rupture and continuation with earlier representations of female experience in these two nation states. There are three core chapters in this thesis. I approach the gendered experience as represented in the fictional narratives of emerging women writers through three different perspectives; namely, war and the aftermath, popular literary genres, and identity markers. In the process, I try to think through the following questions: How are writers reclaiming and re-evaluating women’s participation during the oppressive regimes of civil war in Uganda and apartheid in South Africa? How are women writers rethinking and repositioning the roles of women as they continue to live in patriarchal societies that marginalize and oppress them? To what extent have things changed for women in the aftermath of these oppressive regimes as represented in the texts? What new representations of women are emerging? For whom, and from what positions, are these women writing? Is literary representation a reiteration of political representation that ends up not being effective? What is the relation between literary and political representation? Do these narratives open up alternative avenues for writers to represent women’s interests? How do new female literary representations emerge in different novels such as chick lit and crime fiction? / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Hierdie proefskrif ondersoek die wyses waarop vroueskrywers uit Uganda en Suid-Afrika krities kyk na nasionalisitiese narratiewe en tegelyk ook na ‘n gendered nasionalisme. Daar word gefokus op die nuwe uitbeeldinge van vroue in en van die nasies wat spruit uit die narratiewe van opkomende vroueskrywers in nasiestate in die post-onderdrukking-tydperk. Deur te fokus op die uitbeeldinge van vroue en vroulikheid word die verbande tussen post-konflik-skryfwerk ondersoek, en word ook rekening gehou met etlike verskille in die wyses waarop vroue deur sodanige skrywers in spesifieke post-onderdrukking-regimes uitgebeeld word. Die narratiewe uit die twee lande word saam gelees, want in die loop van die afgelope vyftig jaar ondervind sowel Uganda as Suid-Afrika langdurige politieke onderdrukking en onbestendigheid, gevolg deur onderhandelde oorgange na nuwe politieke bedelings. Die term post-onderdrukking verwys na die tydperk na 1986 na die burgeroorlog in Uganda en na die post-apartheid-era na afloop van die eerste demokratiese verkiesing in Suid-Afrika in 1994. Sedert die laat-1990’s was daar ‘n geleidelike toename in fiksie deur opkomende vroueskrywers in Uganda en Suid-Afrika. In die Ugandese letterkundige konteks verwys die term opkomende vroueskrywers na skrywers wat gebaat het by die totstandkoming van FEMRITE Publications, die uitgewery van die Ugandese vroueskrywersvereniging; in die Suid-Afrikaanse opset word die term gebruik om swart vroueskrywers te beskryf wat vir die eerste keer in ‘n bevryde land kon publiseer. Die huidige politieke klimaat in albei lande het vir vroueskrywers ‘n nuwe era ingelei; vir sulke vars stemme gaan daar breër barste oop wat hulle toelaat om al hoe meer ruimte te skep waarin wyduiteenlopende onderwerpe, wat in die verlede minder uitdrukkingsgeleenthede geniet het, vooropgestel, ondersoek, betrek en aangespreek kan word. Die proefskrif ondersoek die maniere waarop vroueskrywers uit Uganda en Suid-Afrika die vroulike ervaring in letterkundige geskrifte uitbeeld. Daar word gepoog om te vertolk hoe sodanige konstrukte vroulike identiteit verwoord in die nadraai van verskeie soorte onderdrukking en uiting gee aan verskillende tekens van beide die onderbreking in en die voortsetting van vroeëre uitbeeldinge van die vroulike ervaring in die twee nasiestate. Die proefskrif bevat drie kernhoofstukke. Die gendered ervaring word uit drie afsonderlike hoeke benader soos dit in die narratiewe verteenwoordig word, naamlik: oorlog en die nadraai daarvan; populêre letterkundige genres; en identiteitskenmerke. In die loop daarvan word getrag om die volgende vrae te deurdink: Hoe word vroue se deelname tydens die onderdrukkende regimes van die burgeroorlog in Uganda en apartheid in Suid-Afrika hereien en herwaardeer? Hoe herdink en herposisioneer vroueskrywers tans die rolle van vroue soos hulle steeds in patriargale samelewings voortleef waar hulle opsygeskuif en onderdruk word? In hoe ‘n mate het sake vir vroue verander in die nadraai van die onderdrukking, soos dit in die tekste uitgebeeld word? Watter vars representasies van vroue kom onder die nuwe bedeling tot stand? Vir wie, en uit watter posisies, skryf hierdie vroue tans? Is die letterkundige representasie bloot ‘n herhaling van die politieke representasie, wat dan op niks doeltreffends uitloop nie? Wat is die verhouding tussen politieke en letterkundige representasie? Baan hierdie narratiewe alternatiewe weë oop waar skrywers die belange van vroue kan verteenwoordig? Hoe kom nuwe vroulike letterkundige representasies in verskillende narratiewe vorms soos chick lit en misdaadfiksie voor?

No description available.