The works of creative writing which culminate in this thesis explore themes of everyday trauma, the gendered body as rendered in writing, and writing as propelled by the aural senses above factors such as logic and plot. Dysphoria of identity through gendered, geographical, and institutional means pervades each work in instances that range from the subtle to the all-consuming. Rhythm and intuition bond at the sentence level in each work, rendering a wildness to the pages. Moved by sensation rather than a drive to make something abundantly clear, the revelations of reading arrive at a level of the associative, the dreamy, and the sound of certain syllables and words as juxtaposed with deliberation posing as spontaneity. Grappling with a simultaneous urge to assimilate and to reject societal and geographical cultural norms, there is a fraught tension and a charged friction to the entire thesis herein.

Charles Baxter, in his essay “Dysfunctional Narratives: or: ‘Mistakes Were Made,’” implies that all trauma narrative is synonymous with “dysfunctional narrative,” or narrative that leaves all characters unaccountable. He writes: “In such fiction, people and events are often accused of turning the protagonist into the kind of person the protagonist is, usually an unhappy person. That’s the whole story. When blame has been assigned, the story is over.” For Baxter, trauma narrative lets everyone “off the hook,” so to speak. He would say that we write about our bitter lemonade to make excuses for our poor choices, and “audiences of fellow victims” read our tales, because their lemonade and their choices carry equal bitterness, and they require equal excuses. While trauma narrative can soothe us, as can other narrative genres, we should not dismiss trauma fiction because of a sweeping generalization. Trauma fiction also allows us to explore the missing parts of our autobiographical narratives and to explore the effects of trauma—two endeavors not fully possible without fiction. As explained in more detail later, the human mind requires narrative to formulate an identity. Trauma disrupts this process, because “trauma does not lie in the possession of the individual, to be recounted at will, but rather acts as a haunting or possessive influence which not only insistently and intrusively returns but is, moreover, experienced for the first time only in its belated repetition.” Because literature can speak what “theory cannot say,” we need fiction to speak in otherwise silent spaces. Fiction allows us to express, analyze, and comprehend what we could not otherwise.

Lion in Summer & Other Beasts is an investigation into point of view, place and the fragment. Many of the characters are searching for a sense of home outside of their birthplace, in cities such as New York City, Charleston, Portland and Tel Aviv. Major themes include alienation, love and trauma.

Teacher, Detective, Witness, Activist: On Pedagogy and Social Justice in Asian Canadian Literature undertakes a critical consideration of the relationship between pedagogy, social justice, and Asian Canadian literature. The project argues for a recognition of Asian Canadian literature as a creative site concerned with social justice that also productively and problematically becomes a tool in the pursuit of justice in literature classrooms of Canadian universities. The dissertation engages with the politics of reading and, by extension, of teaching social justice in the literature classroom through analyses of six high-profile, canonical works of Asian Canadian literature: Joy Kogawa’s Obasan (1981), SKY Lee’s Disappearing Moon Café (1990), Kerri Sakamoto’s The Electrical Field (1998), Madeleine Thien’s Certainty (2006), Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being (2013), and Rita Wong’s forage (2007). These texts are in many ways about the reproduction of national, colonial, and neo-colonial pedagogies, a reproduction of teachings informing subject formation and citizenship from which higher education is not exempt. The dissertation analyzes the texts’ treatment of familial and national reproduction, and the narrative temporalities this treatment invokes, in order to think through the political and social reproduction that occurs in classrooms of Canadian post-secondary education. This project raises a number of questions: Do literature instructors engage their students as investigators in the pursuit of justice? And, if so, what type of justice do we seek to reproduce in doing so? What happens when instructors engage students in the work of witnessing fictional testaments of historical trauma, albeit indirectly, as readers? How might we acknowledge and work through the resistance to learning that traumatic testimony can invoke? And finally, might it be productive to think of the work that literature instructors do as a form of activism? Can social justice be conceived of as a pedagogical project that unfolds in the literature classroom? / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This dissertationt turns to the literature of Asian Canada to think through how we learn and are resistant to learning from historical injustice and about social justice. Chapter One argues that Joy Kogawa's Obasan, Kerri Sakamoto's The Electrical Field, and SKY Lee's Disappearing Moon Cafe each play with the detective fiction genre in their treatments of anti-Japanese and -Chinese racism in Canada to upset a definition of justice as stable and finite. Chapter Two examines Madeleine Thien's Certainty and Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being as works of trauma fiction that can tell us a lot about the resistance difficult knowledge can provoke. Chapter Three turns to a book of poetry, Rita Wong's forage, to contemplate the temporal and emotional dimensions of everyday, anti-racist and ecological activism; this chapter highlights the limits of discourses of social justice predicated on risk and anxiety.

In this thesis, a semi-autobiographical manga, Hadashi no Gen, written by Nakazawa Keiji, is analyzed through the lens of trauma theory. By using trauma theory, I hope to shed light on in what way trauma might affect narrative techniques and in what way the narrative techniques convey trauma and emotion to the reader. For the analysis “Trauma Fiction” by Anne Whitehead was chosen and categories based on her findings were made. The categories are: Intertextuality, repetition, dispersed and fragmented narrative voice, memory place, choiceless choice and fantastic. I discovered that all these themes, observed in other trauma fiction as well, are more or less used as a narrative tool in Hadashi no Gen. Further I observed that by conveying traumatic events and emotions through a combination of images and language is a powerful tool and might even be more effective than standard prose text

The First World War has never completely disappeared from the British collective memory since the end of the conflict, but it has especially gained in importance again in the late 1980s and 1990s, both in academia and beyond. The last two decades of the last century indeed saw an explosion in historical writing about the First World War, but also in popular representations. There now exist in Great Britain two main distinct perceptions of the First World War, and their coexistence is seen by some military and political historians in terms of a war of representations that opposes two “Western Fronts”, that of literature and popular culture against that of history. While the latter strives to discover and transmit the “truth” about the past, the former are said to perpetuate what has been called the “myth” of the Great War, understood as an emotionally driven and “false” version of the war. This doctoral dissertation examines fourteen British novels and short stories that were published during the late-twentieth-century “war books boom,” and primarily aims at examining these severe claims of “mythicality,” “ahistoricity,” and lack of creative imagination. It seeks to establish in what forms, to what purposes, and with what effects the First World War has returned in contemporary British fiction. The first part investigates the allegations laid against contemporary WWI fiction by military historians. Chapter 1 first defines the multifaceted term “myth” and looks at the special place it holds in human thought as a foundational story of origins; it also explains how the historical event of the First World War has become part of the British national mythology. Chapter 2 describes the four main elements of the mythical scenario of the Great War (viz. horror, death, futility, and incompetent generalship). It examines how they have shaped the works under scrutiny; it also shows how these writers have attempted to reach beyond the language and imagery handed down by the war poets by telling the “unspoken stories” of the war and rewriting women and the working class back into the postmodern memory of the conflict. Chapter 3 looks at the intertextual dialogue that contemporary WWI writers establish with their poetic forefathers. The second and third parts focus on the recourse to, and conceptualization of, “memory” in contemporary re-imaginings of the First World War. Part Two looks at “shell shock” as the legacy of the war: memory is usually problematized as trauma, as an overwhelming, violent event that has been found impossible to deal with and that therefore lingers, unresolved, in individual and collective memory. Chapter 4 contextualizes the rise of shell shock as a fundamental element in the myth of the war and provides a theoretical framework to the close reading of five novels (i.e. Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy and Another World, as well as Robert Edric’s In Desolate Heaven) that follows in Chapters 5 and 6. These two chapters show how the five selected trauma narratives engage with the contemporary fears of the revenant quality of the past and the possibility of a contagious, transgenerational transmission of trauma. They also raise questions concerning the politics of memory, the adequacy of historical narrative, and the ethics of historical representation. Part Three investigates the questions of remembrance and the duty of memory, which are problematized in all the works under scrutiny. Most contemporary WWI narratives have placed the war in the wider perspective of the century, demonstrating their awareness of their posthistorical situation. Chapter 7 examines the fear that the past is in danger and should be rescued from the work of time and history. Chapter 8 shows how this rescue of the past takes the form of a detective investigation, a metaphor of memory which brings to the fore the agency of memory as process and the inherent textuality of the past, and thus questions the possibility of ever knowing the war. Chapter 9 looks at “sites of memory,” the (textual) traces of the past that make this investigation (im)possible. / La Première guerre mondiale n’a jamais complètement disparu de la mémoire collective britannique, mais elle a à nouveau gagné en importance à la fin des années 80 et pendant les années 90, dans et au-delà du monde universitaire. Les deux dernières décennies du siècle dernier ont en effet été marquées par un foisonnement d’écrits historiques et de représentations populaires sur la Première guerre mondiale. Il existe à présent en Grande Bretagne deux visions de la guerre, et leur co-existence est perçue par certains historiens militaires et politiques en termes de guerre de représentations qui opposerait deux « Fronts de l’Ouest », à savoir le front de la littérature et de la culture populaire d’une part, et celui de l’histoire d’autre part. Alors que les partisans de l’histoire tentent de découvrir et transmettre la « vérité » sur le conflit, les autres perpétuent ce qu’on appelle le « mythe » de la Grande Guerre, c’est-à-dire une version erronée et émotive des événements. Cette dissertation doctorale examine quatorze des romans et nouvelles britanniques publiés pendant le « war books boom » de la fin du vingtième siècle et examine ces sévères reproches d’ahistoricité et manque d’imagination créative. Nous cherchons à établir sous quelles formes, dans quels buts et avec quels effets la Première guerre mondiale est revenue dans la fiction britannique contemporaine. La première partie examine les sévères critiques tenues par les historiens militaires à l’encontre de la « WWI fiction » contemporaine. Le premier chapitre définit le terme « mythe » et la place spéciale qu’il occupe dans la pensée humaine en tant qu’histoire fondatrice ; il explique également comment l’événement historique de la Première guerre mondiale est entré dans la mythologie nationale britannique. Le deuxième chapitre décrit les quatre éléments fondamentaux du scénario mythique de la Grande Guerre (c’est-à-dire l’horreur, la mort, l’absurdité, et l’incompétence des généraux). Il montre comment ces derniers ont modelé les œuvres de notre corpus et comment les auteurs contemporains ont tenté de se distancier du langage et des images transmis par les poètes des tranchées en racontant les récits de guerre restés inexprimés et réinscrivant les femmes et la classe ouvrière dans la mémoire postmoderne du conflit. Le troisième chapitre examine le dialogue intertextuel que les auteurs contemporains établissent avec les écrivains des tranchées, leurs « ancêtres poétiques ». Les deuxième et troisième parties se focalisent sur le concept de mémoire dans les réécritures contemporaines de la Première guerre mondiale. La deuxième partie examine le phénomène de « shell shock » en tant qu’héritage de guerre : la mémoire est en général problématisée comme trauma, comme un événement impossible à intégrer et qui subsiste et persiste comme un poids dans la mémoire individuelle et collective. Le quatrième chapitre explique comment le shell shock est devenu un élément central du mythe de la guerre et fournit un cadre théorique aux exercices de « close reading » qui suivent dans les chapitres cinq et six. Ces deux chapitres montrent comment cinq romans appartenant au genre de la « trauma fiction » (i.e. la trilogie Regeneration et Another World de Pat Barker, ainsi que In Desolate Heaven de Robert Edric) se confrontent à la peur contemporaine d’un possible retour du passé comme revenant et d’une transmission par contagion du trauma. Ces chapitres posent également les questions de la politique de la mémoire, de la pertinence de la narration historique, et de l’éthique de la représentation historique. La troisième partie se penche sur les notions de commémoration et devoir de mémoire, problématisées dans toutes les œuvres du corpus. La plupart des romans contemporains de la Grande Guerre replacent le conflit dans une perspective plus large, celle de tout un siècle, reconnaissant ainsi leur position posthistorique. Le septième chapitre examine la crainte d’un passé mis en danger par l’oubli, les effets du temps et le travail de l’histoire. Le huitième chapitre montre que le sauvetage du passé prend souvent la forme d’une enquête, une métaphore qui met en évidence la double nature de la mémoire comme contenu et process ainsi que la textualité du passé, et remet donc en question la possibilité même de connaître le passé. Le neuvième et dernier chapitre examine les lieux de mémoire, les traces (textuelles) du passé qui rendent cette enquête (im)possible.

This thesis inquiries into trauma, its historical developments, experience, and symptoms. The theoretical part lays stress on post-traumatic stress disorder and its classification and diagnosis for the readers to have an extensive knowledge of trauma. The readers are also presented with the quintessential aftermath of trauma. The practical part adverts to childhood trauma of the main protagonists of The Gathering and The Hiding Place by the authors Anne Enright and Trezza Azzopardi. The intention is to query what happened to these characters, rather than focusing on what is wrong with them. The objective is to see the person behind his or her behaviour. Many studies refer to increasing problems in terms of mental health by children and adolescents associated with early childhood trauma. The aim in what follows is to consider whether the harm to childhood trauma can be remedied or whether childhood trauma persists until old age. KEY WORDS: Childhood trauma; post-traumatic stress disorder; trauma fiction; Enright; Azzopardi; The Gathering; The Hiding Place