This thesis brings together two disciplines—creative non-fiction memoir and literary/historical critique—that seek to open avenues of discourse with regard to the legacy of the Second World War and the Holocaust for subsequent generations. Ruth Kluger’s Holocaust memoir weiter leben: Eine Jugend and its English Language version written ten years later, Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered, are analyzed for their postmodernist challenge to traditional notions of testimony and genre. W. G. Sebald’s novel The Emigrants is examined for its “imagetext” constructions that act to elucidate aspects of mourning and Vergangenheitsbewältigung (dealing with the past). This thesis is a post-structuralist approach that performs, through memoir, the construction of identity/subjectivity, but it is also a journey, performed in the spirit of belated mourning, that is part of the larger historical postwar discourse regarding the inability to mourn. / Graduate / 0311 / 0298 / vbhandar@uvic.ca

This autobiographic novella is part of longer novel, not yet written. The novel, &quotLe temps d'une vie", has three parts, corresponding to three periods in the life of the character. This novella is the first part of the novel. The story takes place in a small village south of France, between the Mediterranean Sea and the vineyards. A child, then a teenager, comes to his grand parents' house for holidays: Christmas, Easter and the long summer break. He meets grand parents, aunts, and an uncle. For him and his friends, the whole village and the countryside around are their playground. He experiences a life there quite different from his regular one in the city of Bordeaux with his parents. The novella was first written in French, then translated into English by Dr Siobhan Brownlie. The translator and I discussed various problems that arose, the main issue being dealing with culturally specific terms in the French text. The novella was judged by Dr Donna Lee Brien not as a translation but as an original piece of writing, and she made suggestions for changes to the English text. I implemented some of these changes in order to produce a further version of the English text and finding some of the suggestions useful for the French text too, I implemented corresponding changes in the French text. Dr Siobhan Brownlie wrote a paper about the translation process of this thesis, &quotOriginal as Translation; Translation as Original". The paper has been published in &quotUQ Vanguard", 2003, mini-series #3. Contact: UQ Vanguard, c/o Clubs and Societies, UQ Union, University of Queensland, St Lucia 4072. uqvanguard@uq.edu.au; www.emsah.uq.edu.au/uqvanguard

A Bachelor's Family is a memoir of relationship, exploring --from a male point of view--my trajectory to a 'circumstantially childless' middle age. The thesis argues for this memoir and my concurrently written magazine column In The Male, to be read in the context of 'masculinity politics', specifically as a site of what Bob Connell terms 'masculinity therapy'. As a writer heretofore of fiction, the fact that I should find myself working in these forms of creative non-fiction--both attempts to discuss aspects of contemporary masculinity in the public sphere--reflects not only recent industry and reader interest in the form but, with its emphasis on the 'healing possibilities' of truthfulness and personal disclosure, embraces the essence of 'masculinity therapy'.

Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / How do Anglo-Australian artists paint themselves into the landscape with relevance and integrity, in spite of our complicated history? How do we submit to our own ‘small narratives’ and express an experience of land which considers but is not muted by postcolonial dialogues? How do individual artists form a visual language respondent to place and instructed by creative chance? The painting studio is where these questions are raised and where formal problems arise. Disparate ideas are tested in the search for marks and images to build an ambiguous sensation of place. Reflection, doubt, and wonder are the forces behind the paintings, but landscape is the sustaining narrative, and the inquiry is personal, equivocal. A remote valley on the Ellenborough River forms the back-ground to the current body of work, but my practice has taken me to desert communities during the past decade. Living and working in these environments where Indigenous artists paint without inherent effort, immersed in their big narratives of country, our choice to paint landscape is a continual challenge. Regular field trips to the valley and visits back to the desert, immersion in the patterns and phenomena of land, issues of belonging, impermanence and nostalgia have driven this investigation. The almost anachronistic studio practice results in an exhibition of on-site drawings and painted landscape memoirs. In the exegesis I examine my work through the prism of paintings by Indigenous artists from Haasts Bluff and Milikapiti. Non-Indigenous artists who engage with issues of landscape in a contemporary Australian context are also investigated, with a focus on cross-cultural dialogues, collaborations and formal painterly responses.

Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / How do Anglo-Australian artists paint themselves into the landscape with relevance and integrity, in spite of our complicated history? How do we submit to our own ‘small narratives’ and express an experience of land which considers but is not muted by postcolonial dialogues? How do individual artists form a visual language respondent to place and instructed by creative chance? The painting studio is where these questions are raised and where formal problems arise. Disparate ideas are tested in the search for marks and images to build an ambiguous sensation of place. Reflection, doubt, and wonder are the forces behind the paintings, but landscape is the sustaining narrative, and the inquiry is personal, equivocal. A remote valley on the Ellenborough River forms the back-ground to the current body of work, but my practice has taken me to desert communities during the past decade. Living and working in these environments where Indigenous artists paint without inherent effort, immersed in their big narratives of country, our choice to paint landscape is a continual challenge. Regular field trips to the valley and visits back to the desert, immersion in the patterns and phenomena of land, issues of belonging, impermanence and nostalgia have driven this investigation. The almost anachronistic studio practice results in an exhibition of on-site drawings and painted landscape memoirs. In the exegesis I examine my work through the prism of paintings by Indigenous artists from Haasts Bluff and Milikapiti. Non-Indigenous artists who engage with issues of landscape in a contemporary Australian context are also investigated, with a focus on cross-cultural dialogues, collaborations and formal painterly responses.

Written in first person, NOTHING NORMAL HAPPENS TO ME is a memoir in essays that traces the narrator’s journey from self-destruction to creation. Part one encompasses the narrator’s lost years, after she breaks free from the tyranny of her mentally ill mother and goes to live on her own at 17. Part two provides context for those bad girl years, exploring her childhood when she identified with her histrionic mother. Part three comprises stories about the narrator’s years of awakening when she seeks out transcendence, faith, and a family of her own. The pieces vary tonally and stylistically as they attempt to trace the maturing voice of the narrator. Like SEEKING RAPTURE: SCENES FROM A WOMAN’S LIFE by Kathryn Harrison, this collection centers on a young girl, who without her mother’s love, struggles to love herself. It is both a cautionary tale and a story of redemption.

I did not purposely set down to write this work but was compelled by a painful sense of what I should not do. What I should not write. To protect the privacy and autonomy of individuals, to avoid creating harm, and to resist, however unsuccessfully, essentializing either “mothers” or “addiction,” this work enacts a radical besideness, where one subject performs the verb of a second subject, where one subject enlist the aid of other subjects. In the aim of both producing and defying narrative structures that seem to fasten a person to their identity, this collaborative, intertextual project attempts to tell a story, both in what is re-told and in what is not-told. It invokes infelicitous performances as a way of talking back while walking forward. / Graduate

Thesis advisor: Min Song / The following work is dedicated to my family to bridge the generational, cultural, and nationalistic differences within my first-generation immigrant family. I explore two contentions that have divided my generation from my parents. First, capitalism, including our relations to work and money, and what it means to become, as Ling Ma puts it in her novel Severance, a “person of use.” Additionally, nationalism, through recording my family’s immigration journey and factors that have informed their sense of identity. The contrasting ways in which my family views work and a sense of belonging has represented the conflict between two disparate ideologies: individualism versus collectivism. While the memoir remains the dominant voice, I include threads of research and interviews with my family members. Ultimately, I recognize that these political and personal threads intertwine and shape each other. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2022. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Departmental Honors. / Discipline: English.

This thesis is a memoir that explores the evolution and disintegration of two major relationships in my life, one insidious, the other toxic, as well as the factors that led to those relationships. The first two chapters explore my relationship with Adam, a twenty-one-year-old man who forced his way into my heart, while the final chapters navigate the relationship with my college boyfriend and ex-fiance, Cameron, as well as the aftermath and slow path toward healing after his departure. The two sections are divided by a middle chapter that shows moments in my childhood that, while small, signify powerful messages about what it meant to fit in and be accepted in my world. Altogether, this thesis explores the idea of trauma. While many other memoirs touch on the same theme, my thesis differs in the type of trauma experienced, particularly in the relationship with Adam. Statutory rape is rarely talked about, and when it is, it seems to be met with derision, condemnation, and marginalization. The speaker in my thesis does not take the stance of a victim or a perpetrator, but as someone who is confused about the situation and how she feels, particularly in relation to how others tell her how she should feel. As the memoir progresses, the speaker has to grapple how to find her own voice after she's been silenced her entire life.

This is a creative thesis that contains two components: 1) a critical introduction that defends the representation of mixed-status families and deportation narratives, and 2) a memoir that depicts my experience with deportation and as a member of a mixed-status family. The second component of this thesis will consist of the first four chapters of my memoir, with the remaining chapters to be completed post-graduation. These chapters take place the years before my parents’ deportation and the year immediately after. The memoir is a coming-of-age story that explores my ethnic identity, along with themes such as insider versus outsider. This exploration is represented through the image of the red front door and is the central metaphor of this memoir.