This thesis is a response to the abstract phenomenon of bereavement as well as to the death of an actual beloved. It situates mourning as ethically and politically significant, reading it as an instance of crisis for the bereaved subject as well as for the culture in which she is located. Via theorists as diverse as Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Jacques Derrida, Dominick LaCapra and Donald Winnicott, the thesis considers the enabling potential that is implicated in this crisis. It suggests that mourning has the capacity to manifest productively as a form of localised intervention or "revolt" that simultaneously invigorates the inner life of the subject and subverts certain ideological aspects of contemporary, Western culture. In particular, the thesis suggests that the significance of productive mourning lies in its capacity to attenuate, via an anti-elegiac approach to narrative, the normative discourse of "identity", a crucial element of the discursive network that sustains a socio-political system mired in the "truth" of liberal individualism. Productive mourning facilitates an interrogation of the self-other/subject-object dialectic embedded in Western culture. This interrogation might be conceived as a deconstruction of the subject in its privileged status relative to alterity, the deconstruction of, in other words, "identity" and its processes. The thesis is informed by the author's experience of bereavement and mourning following suicide. Utilising a fictocritical approach, it performs a commentary in addition to an argument, evincing a unique approach to delineating the personal, cultural and ethical significance of loss.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/215697 |
| Date | January 2007 |
| Creators | Curran, Rebecca Alison, English, Media, & Performing Arts, Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences, UNSW |
| Publisher | Awarded by:University of New South Wales. |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | Copyright Rebecca Alison Curran, http://unsworks.unsw.edu.au/copyright |
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