published_or_final_version / Literary and Cultural Studies / Master / Master of Arts

published_or_final_version / English / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

My thesis re-situates the diarist and fiction writer Anaïs Nin within the fields of life-writing criticism, modernist studies, and intimacy studies by reading her diaries as performing, producing and inviting various intimate affects. This thesis focuses mainly on Nin‟s edited and unexpurgated published diaries and also draws on material gathered from the Anaïs Nin Special Collection at the Charles E. Young Library, based at the University of California, Los Angeles. Chapter 1 argues that Nin figures the diary as a space for fantasies of intimacy. Using the Communion as an integral part of these fantasies, Nin imagines scenes of interembodiment and intersubjectivity with her father that rely as much on his absence as on his presence. Performing an intimate relationship with her father, Nin also uses the diary to write her subjectivity as „in-relation.‟ Chapter 2 considers Nin‟s intimate relationships with other writers and artists in the 1930s, namely D.H. Lawrence. I argue that, by writing herself into an intimate relationship with Lawrence, Nin fashions and performs an artistic identity, working within and also resisting a modernist poetics of impersonality and objectivity. As such, this chapter calls for a revaluation of Nin as a modernist writer which attends to recent critical accounts of the importance of life-writing within modernism. Chapter 3 reads Nin‟s „Father Story,‟ an account in the diary of a brief affair Nin had with her father in her early thirties. I use the figure of seduction to argue that Nin‟s story resists a close reading and to critique various critical readings of this story in the 1990s which are underpinned by critical anxiety about the „right‟ way to read incest. For many critics, Nin‟s „Father Story‟ is too literary, rendering both it, and her, as inauthentic. Chapter 4 explores the intersections between Nin‟s diary and psychoanalysis. This chapter argues that Nin confuses the languages of sexual and psychoanalytic intimacy in ways that lead us to question the distance between sex and analysis. Nin uses psychoanalysis as another tool for dramatizing her life through art and another stage on which to perform intimacy. Chapter 5 considers the publication of the edited diary in the late 1960s-1970s, which coincided with a growing interest in women‟s life-writing as a representation of authentic, collective experience. This chapter argues that Nin performed intimacy in public with her readers, whilst all the time holding her private self at a distance.

My thesis is a feminist comparative project on Japanese and English women's writing, historicised within the social discourses of the 1980s, reading the literary texts of Foumiko Kometani, Doris Lessing, Banana Yoshimoto and Jeanette Winterson. Treating these texts as contemporary, this thesis questions the rhetoric of optimism, with ideas such as “liberty” and “happiness” in the beginning decade of neoliberalism, interrogating how this rhetoric empowers and influences women's life choices in the 1980s. Simultaneously, I consider how these women writing in the 1980s respond, criticise, and explore this optimism in relation to maternity and maternal relationships: I examine the rhetoric of maternal/familial happiness in relation to the neo-liberal narrative of normativity. In this sense, happiness works as a force for normativity. I argue that neoliberalism offers women new possibilities for various kinds of labour: it opened up more labour opportunities in the public sphere both in the UK and Japan, whilst nonetheless continuing to encourage women to engage in physical labour, child birth through marriage and heteronormative relationships. These two contradictory agendas, the new opportunity for women to work in the public sphere and the requirement to stay at home to reproduce, nurture and look after family members, caused a huge tension in neoliberal lives, and the fictions that represent them at the time. Building from the works of Sara Ahmed and Lauren Berlant, I argue that happiness is the affective glue that holds together and smoothes over this tension between women's self-fulfillment in the public sphere and in the domestic sphere. To be happy, after all, women were told (and are still told) they needed to be proximate to the conventional family unit. This study thus seeks to contribute to comparative literature across the East and the West, affect studies, contemporary women's writing and feminist literary criticism.

No description available.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Open University. BLDSC no. DX234244.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Rutgers University, 2009. / "Graduate Program in Italian." Includes bibliographical references (p. 170-183).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2000. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 187-191). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

Thesis (M.A.)--York University, 2001. Graduate Programme in Women's Studies. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 122-130). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/yorku/fullcit?pMQ71644.

During the nineteenth century, the publication of letter collections, often titled “Life and Letters,” became very popular and let the public in on the private lives of public figures. Women from literary families all wrote letters with an awareness of the possibility of the world reading them. Even as letters were viewed as ostensibly private forms of communication, they were serving an intimate public as a vehicle for public feelings long before publication. Exploring the epistolary remains of three nineteenth-century women writers from literary families, I focus, in particular, on how these writers confronted illness, grief, and death, all things that kept them isolated from others and made correspondence necessary. Sara Coleridge wrote about the deaths of those closest to her in order to learn from and plan her own death. While Alice James concentrated almost entirely on her own demise, Charlotte Brontë did not write about her death, even preferring that others at least hold off speculating on it while she was still living. Instead Bronte focused on her sisters’ deaths, knowing that their deaths would shape how her life got written. Indeed, the family narrative would never lose its association with death. Throughout the study, Virginia Woolf acts as a mediating figure who both engaged in these epistolary practices of bereavement and read and wrote about letter collections from the past. The significance of these letters is how they reflect attitudes towards death and dying in the nineteenth century, particularly in how narratives get worked into an epistolarity of death in which the narrating of grief itself provides a means to manage the challenges of bereavement. The work of death and the writing of it are creative acts that build toward leaving a written corpus more permanent, or at least more durable, than the body and less vulnerable than life. / text