This dissertation examines the complex and multi-faceted ways in which contemporary minority women's fictions may be thought of, both generically and individually, as practices of bearing witness to silence---practices of giving testimony to the presence of lives, experiences, events and historical realities which, otherwise, have been absented from the critical terrain of North American literary studies. For the most pact, the texts included in this study all tell tales of various, and often extreme, forms of sexual, racial, gender, colonial, national and cultural violence. Through readings of select works by Toni Morrison, Shani Mootoo, Arundhati Roy, Louise Erdrich, M. K. Indira, Mahasweta Devi and Leslie Feinberg, I argue for the ways in which these fictions may be understood as situated within the bounds of a genre---a genre that attempts to provide an account of what we might call "the half not told." I examine these fictions, both generically and specifically, as texts which have the ability to make several important critical interventions in the field of literary studies. Firstly, these texts have the potential to negotiate the impasse that feminist and postcolonial literary scholarship finds itself in around debates about the relationship between theory, activism and experience---as well as in debates about the relationship between violence, beauty, culture, subjectivity and desire. Secondly, the fictions under study help to challenge our very definitions of witnessing. Witnessing, in these works, is not simply a matter of "speaking out" against violence, but rather the issue of making space for the affective and emotive dimensions of various kinds of silences and silencings. Finally, in attempting to chart more precise vocabularies with which to assume readings of these narratives, my thesis also helps to think about the ways in which reading, writing and storytelling may, themselves, be seen as profoundly ethical undertakings that seek to give evidence

Gabrielle Roy kept up, throughout her literary life, a regular correspondence with relatives, friends, business relations and readers: to date, more than 2000 letters have been preserved in different archive collections. The 482 letters she wrote to her husband, Doctor Marcel Carbotte, between 1947 and 1979, form the largest subset of the correspondence; a critical edition of these hitherto unpublished letters is presented in the second part of the thesis. / Surprisingly, the correspondence contains few reflexions of an aesthetic nature, and few explicit traces of the novelist's published work, apart from occasional references to the texts she is working on at the moment she is writing to Marcel. Instead, it is the details of her day-to-day life that Roy describes most abundantly. In the first part of the thesis, we study the letters to Marcel in the light of a possible connection with Roy's canonical work: we start by examining the link between the letter and autobiographical genre; we then show that the letters to Marcel can be read as a personal diary; finally, we suggest that the "autobiographical turn" taken by Roy in both her published work and her letters to Marcel indicates that the letters form part of the same system as the autobiographical works.

Thesis (M.A.)--Georgia State University, 2007. / Title from file title page. Janet Gabler Hover, committee chair; Paul Schmidt, Robert Sattelmeyer, committee members. Electronic text (75 p.) : digital, PDF file. Description based on contents viewed Jan. 7, 2008. Includes bibliographical references (p. 72-75).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Georgia State University, 2007. / Title from file title page. Thomas L. McHaney, committee chair; Pearl McHaney, Beth Burmester, committee members. Electronic text (330 p.) : digital, PDF file. Description based on contents viewed Jan. 7, 2007. Includes bibliographical references (p. 314-330).

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Adelaide, Dept. of Women's Studies, 1992. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 127-134).

Thesis (Ph.D) -- University of Adelaide, Dept. of English, 2001. / Bibliography: leaves 466-497.

Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Western Sydney, Nepean, 1998. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (D.Phil.)--University of Oxford, 2008. / Supervisor: Dr Jo McDonagh. Bibliography: leaves 281-304.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Texas Christian University, 2008. / Title from dissertation title page (viewed Nov. 10, 2008). Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1992. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [284]-294).