This study presents a work of theatre art in the form of an autobiographical monodrama, supported by three exegeses: a review of informing literature, one of the writing process, the third of the critical reactions to the play at different stages of its development by readers and audiences. The thesis considers the two questions, How can theatre depict my autobiography? and How can monodrama be used to express this autobiography? The first question implies an examination of the process of writing and producing an autobiography for the theatre. The second question is answered through the process that developed in this study towards the choice of the form of a monodrama. The methodology emerged as the play was written and a journal recorded. At times the approach, particularly as it affected the writing of the play, was more like action research in which the play was reacted to and then amended in a cyclical manner, the writer also developing new understandings in the process. The reflective process was used to help in understanding the development that was taking place. A survey, and interviews with audience members were conducted as part of the investigation once the artwork was presented. In addition, after the piece had been developed to the point of presentation, it was subjected to critical evaluation, The data from the audience assisted in the development of the artwork as well as developing an understanding of the research question and the possible answers or further questions. The Generic Exegesis arose out of the reading, and developed as an exegesis accompanying the writing of the play once the form of the play had clearly become a monodrama. The Generic Exegesis is designed to show background reading that has informed directly the writing and performing of the play, 'The Changeling'. A principal objective for writing the play developed from a desire to help others to understand something of the conflicts and dilemmas facing adoptees towards the search for self identity and its relationship to acting. Part of the conflict for an adopted person was crystallised in Derridas concept of erasure and the use of the trace to recognise the coexistence of both sides of a binary, which rationalised the splitting of the central character into the two traces, Dominic and Frank. My need for control of the outcome affected the selection from the autobiography, the development of some scenes, and was one of the reasons for the use of fiction. The data for the Process Exegesis came from the journal that was kept during the writing, production, performance and rewrites of the play. The role of the audience had emerged in the interview data and one of the interview questions asked what kind of audience the respondent thought the play suitable for. The Process Exegesis shows that part of the answer to the research question is arrived at through the systematic recording and analysis of the processes that were involved in the writing of the autobiographical play. These have shown that artistic worth was increased as a factor of the distance achieved. The Critical Exegesis showsthat the issues that the play addressed such as adoption and a search for identity were also perceived as important by the readers and the audience. Significant contributions to the development of the play were made by the Dramaturg (Dl) and some cogent points were made by a second dramaturg. The respondents who were interviewed reacted to the content of the play, namely adoption, identity and the issues associated with them, as well as the performance. This study investigates the processes of the development of an autobiographical performance from the generation of the script to the public presentation. It shows that theatre can artistically depict an autobiography and that the perceived appropriate contemporary theatre formis the monodrama. The main issue to be recognised as arising out of the play and the process is that the whole project has been a search for identity. That identity is defined in the range of characters portrayed in the play as well as the process of writing it. The outcome of the investigation was a piece of dramatic performance text that I had written and performed, accompanied by a critical commentary on the creation, production and reception processes.

Doctor of Philosophy / This thesis explores the sense of place formed during childhood, as remembered by adult Australians who reconstruct their youth through various forms of life writing. While Australian writers do utilize traditional tropes of Western autobiography, such as the mythology of Eden and the Wordsworthian image of the child communing with Nature, these themes are frequently transformed to meet a uniquely Australian context. Isolation and distance from Europe, and the apparent indifference of our landscape towards white settlement, have received much critical attention in Australian studies generally and, indeed, broadly influence the formation of children’s sense of place across the continent. However, writers are also concerned with the role of place on a more local level. Through a comparison of writing from Western Australia, Queensland and Victoria, this thesis explores regional landscape preoccupations that create an awareness of local identity, variously contributing to or frustrating the child’s sense of belonging. Western Australian writing is dominated by images of isolation, the fragility of white settlement in a dry land lacking fresh water, and a pervasive beach culture. A strong sense of the littoral pervades writing from this region. Queensland’s frontier mythology is of a different flavour: warm and tropical, nature here is exuberant, constantly threatening to overwhelm culture, already perceived as transient due to the flimsy aspect of the “Queenslander” house. Writing from Victoria, to some extent, tends to more closely follow English models, juxtaposing country and city environments, although there is a distinctly local flavour to many representations of urban Melbourne and its flat, grid-like organization. As Australian society becomes more concentrated on the coastal fringe, the beach is an increasingly significant environment. Though more prominent in writing from some regions than others, coastal imagery broadly reflects the modern Australian’s sense of inhabiting a liminal zone with negotiable boundaries.

A memoir is variously defined as an abbreviated autobiography; a record of events based on the writer's personal observation or knowledge; and the written story of one's own life. I set out to do those things. But when I sat back to read the first of many drafts, I discovered my story was her story-my mother's. At some level, I have always known this. But I was unprepared to see the evidence writ large. But more than that, I was dismayed that the wisdom I imagined my calendar years had conferred, was not reflected in my writing. There was still the primal wail of a weeping child. Quieter, of course. Wailing is not seemly for occasions other than childbirth, great loss, or sudden death. And railing against the past is utterly futile. Foolish. I found great comfort in the words of C. S. Lewis. They mirrored my experience. As the telling of my story deepened, the writing became, successively, an incision, a probe, and as Lewis says, a surgery of the gods. Like surgery, there was first of all fear, followed by pain, discovery, excision, loss, repair and restoration, and finally, healing and a different outlook altogether. I found great value in revisiting these memories and seeing that the giants of my young years are only human, after all, not the ogres I imagined. Like the shadow in a darkened room, the house cat stretched on the window sill looms like a great inscrutable Sphinx. A tree branch, benign by day, morphs into a grotesque claw, scratching and scraping at the window pane. Memories rear up at first like ghosts in a graveyard. But under a steady beam of light, the apparitions subside. Writing this memoir has been a window into the past, perhaps an icon, a way of seeing beyond the surface and into the soul. My own certainly, and perhaps glimpses of the others I've written about as well. Two central truths have emerged from writing my memoir. The first is the power of forgiveness in healing relationships. Forgiveness is not our natural bent; it goes completely against our natural state. But we can choose to change. Just as learning to swim is counter to our earthbound existence, but possible, learning to embrace the freedom of forgiveness is also possible. The second is something I've always sensed, but now know: the innate power of a mother to shape the soul of her child. / Graduation date: 2003

The invasion of the Western Hemisphere by empire-building Europeans brought European forms of rhetoric to the Americas. American Indians who were exposed to European-style education gradually adopted some of the cultural ways of the invaders, including rhetorical forms and operations that led, via literacy in European languages, to autobiographical writing, historical consciousness, and literary self-representation. This dissertation uses rhetorical criticism to analyze autobiographical discourse of six eighteenth-century American Indian writers: Samuel Ashpo, Hezekiah Calvin, David Fowler, Joseph Johnson, Samson Occom, and Tobias Shattock. Their texts are rhetorically interrelated through several circumstances: all of these men were educated in a missionary school; most of them probably learned to read and write in English at the school; they left the school and worked as teachers and Christian missionaries to Indians, sharing similar obstacles and successes in their work; and they are Others on whom their teacher, Eleazar Wheelock, inscribed European culture. The six Indian writers appropriate language and tropes of the encroaching Euro-American culture in order to define themselves in relation to that culture and make their voices heard. They participated in European colonial culture by responding iv to, and co-creating, rhetorical situations. While the Indians' written discourse and the situations that called forth their writing have been examined and discussed through a historical lens, critiques of early American Indian autobiography that make extensive use of rhetorical analysis are rare. Thus this dissertation offers a long-overdue treatment of rhetoric in early American Indian autobiography and opens the way to rhetorical readings of autobiography by considering the early formation of the genre in a cross-cultural context.

The aim of this dissertation is to examine how the lyrical subject is presented in Tomas Tranströmer’s poetry and prose.  Crucial concepts such as the lyrical subject, autobiography, and the memoir are thoroughly discussed and defined based on modern research. The first chapter is devoted entirely to Tranströmer’s prose. Unlike previous studies, this dissertation seeks to establish the genre to which the poet’s memoirs belong. The comparative analysis I use in my dissertation enables us to see both the differences and the similarities in the way that Tranströmer presents the lyrical subject in his prose and poetry. I have taken into account the motifs used by Tranströmer in his memoirs as well as in his poetry. The next chapter discusses the Swedish reception of modernism, a literary movement, which also according to Tranströmer himself, greatly influenced his literary debut in Sweden in the 1950s. The subsequent chapters of my dissertation are devoted to an analysis of Tomas Tranströmer’s poems, which I classify on the basis of how they express the lyrical subject. I analyze both the way the lyrical subject is expressed and its place in the poem. Even though Tomas Tranströmer often uses his own experiences in his works, he transforms them in order to make them more universal. Thus, the lyrical subject is not identical with the poet himself. At the same time, the way the lyrical subject is expressed in a poem highlights its personal character. In the conclusion of the dissertation it is argued that further research is needed to establish whether the selection of Tomas Tranströmer's poems made by the editors of various anthologies may have influenced the reception of his poetry as being objective and impersonal.

"Scenes of Reading: Forgotten Antebellum Readers, Self-Representation, and the Transatlantic Reprint Industry" argues that African-American and white working-class people participated in transatlantic antebellum literary culture in a far more central and sophisticated manner than has been assumed. Employing "scenes" of reading--self-representations of what, where, how, and why African Americans and the white working classes read--as primary texts, this dissertation asserts that these groups, in differing degrees and under distinct circumstances, were able to learn to read, to appropriate reading materials from mainstream literary culture, and, most importantly, to transform their acts of reading into acts of politicized self-representation. Their literary practice was possible because of the transatlantic reprint industry that flourished during the antebellum era resulting from the lack of a copyright agreement between Britain and America. This meant that in both nations, texts from across the Atlantic could be reprinted and sold more cheaply than domestic texts, making novels, poetry, and non-fiction available to wider readerships. Reprinted texts in multiple inexpensive formats were ubiquitous, allowing even marginalized readers to encounter them in the context of everyday life. More importantly, reprinted texts legally belonged to no one, meaning that they could be appropriated by anyone, including black and working-class groups whose political values threatened to undermine accepted social hierarchies. With no permission or payment required for reprinting, reprints were easily grafted into new ideological contexts, meaning that black and working-class newspapers had access to free literary content that they could employ toward counter-hegemonical self-representations. The practices and implications of reprinting enabled free blacks, slaves, and white workers to participate in mainstream literary culture subversively through "underground literacy": set of literary practices that were counter-cultural yet also dependent upon the apparatus of mainstream print culture in order to carry out subversive aims. Reading reprinted texts and assimilating them into the context of their everyday lives, African Americans and the white working classes in America and Britain formed similar strategies for practicing literacy beneath the surface of a transatlantic print culture. This dissertation examines scenes of reading that exemplify these underground reading strategies and represent the literacy of these groups. / McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts; / English / PhD; / Dissertation;

Background: Alzheimer's disease is a disease that primarily affects the elderly but also younger people. Alzheimer's disease is a type of dementia which means that you get changes in the cerebral cortex and cells gradually die. The disease causes memory loss and things that were obvious before will be difficult for the sufferer. Alzheimer's disease also affects next of kin to a large degree; they will have to take a great responsibility. The next of kin are entitled to support from healthcare. Aim: The aim was to highlight next of kin' experiences of healthcare to their family members with Alzheimer's disease. Method : The study was based on narratives, which in this case means analysis of autobiographies. Five biographies were analyzed in accordance with Dahlborg-Lyckhage Results : Four categories and eleven subcategories emerged which were based on what the next of kin had experienced. The experiences were reflected in four categories: powerlessness, joy in caring, grief and lack of trust. This result shows gaps in knowledge and treatment of relatives. To make it easier for the next of kin caregivers should for example provide information on the course of the disease, get individual support and caregivers should take next of kin seriously. Conclusion : Alzheimer's disease affects the entire family. It is important that nurses take their responsibility by providing information and support to the next of kin so that they can better deal with the situation. The next of kin are an important part of the sufferer's life and have influence for the development of the disease.

This thesis looks into autobiographical representations of disability and illness in life writing, a flexible form of creative nonfiction, and Contact Improvisation, a postmodern dance form, to argue how the structure of representation must incorporate the physical and emotional/intellectual in order to convey the necessary overlap between the mind and body. Chapter One looks at Plaintext, by Nancy Mairs, to analyze the way her sporadic writing style mirrors the unpredictability of her multiple sclerosis. Chapter Two focuses on Autobiography of a Face, by Lucy Grealy, and examines how the irregularity of the author's face--and the various roles that she takes on throughout her life--undermine the idea of any singular self in life-writing and otherwise. Analysis of Grealy's text is paired with Truth and Beauty, a memoir written by the author's best friend, Ann Patchett, in order to demonstrate the linguistic/cultural distinction--but significant overlap--between dependency and independence. Chapter Three expands upon this idea in relation to disabled dance companies, and highlights Contact Improvisation--a dance form based on the transfer of weight--as a revolutionary forum that incorporates mind and body in an "intratext" of representation. Because it is based on exchange of impulse and a blurring of bodies, CI allows for a fluid negotiation between multiple identities, accommodating the moment-to-moment nature of living with or without a disability.

In this dissertation, I examine the practice of what I term serial memoir in the second-half of the twentieth century in American literature, arguing that serial memoir represents an emerging and significant trend in life writing as it illustrates a transition in how a particular generation of writers understands lived experience and its textual representation. During the second-half of the twentieth century, and in tandem with the rapid technological advancements of postmodern and postindustrial culture, I look at the serial authorship and publication of multiple self-reflexive texts and propose that serial memoir presents a challenge to the historically privileged techniques of linear storytelling, narrative closure, and the possibility for autonomous subjectivity in American life writing. As generic boundaries become increasingly fluid, postmodern memoirists are able to be both more innovative and overt about how they have constructed the self at particular moments in time. Following the trend of examining life writing through contemporary theories about culture, narrative, and techniques of self-representation, I engage the serial memoirs of Mary McCarthy, Maya Angelou, Art Spiegelman, and Augusten Burroughs as I suggest that these authors iterate the self as serialized, recursive, genealogically constructed, and material. Finally, the fact that these are well-known memoirists underscores the degree to which serial memoir has become mainstream in American autobiographical writing. Serial memoir emphasizes such issues as temporality and memory, repetition and recursivity, and witnessing and testimony, and as such, my objective in this project is to theorize the practice of serial memoir, a form that has been largely neglected in critical work, as I underscore its significance in relation to twentieth-century American culture. I contend that seriality in contemporary American memoir is a burgeoning and powerful form of self-expression, and that a close examination of how authors are presenting and re-presenting themselves as they challenge conventional life writing narrative structures will influence not only the way we read and understand contemporary memoir, but will impact our approaches to self-reflexive narrative structures and provide us with new ways to understand ourselves, and our lives, in relation to the serial culture in which we live.

Thesis (D. Min.)--Boston University, 2002. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 210-216).