This paper examines the relationship between memoir and truth, and the implications of that relationship for the rhetorical work that memoirs do. It uses the grounding example of Tara Westover's 2018 memoir Educated and looks at how the recreation of events within her life works both in conjunction with the way she portrays them in the text and juxtaposed against other competing narratives, such as her mother's 2020 memoir Educating. This essay continues the work done by literary theorists such as Phillipe LeJeune, applies the critical framework developed by Katherine Mack and Johnathan Alexander in their article "The Ethic of Memoir," and encourages the reader to consider the ways in which memoirs are rhetorically acting upon the culture at large through their narrative and emotional aspects. / Master of Arts / This paper looks at the relationship between memoir and truth in memoirs. Using rhetoric as its basis, it examines memoirs in their contexts using Tara Westover's 2020 memoir Educated as a case study. It looks at the way that memory is used to build narratives, and more specifically, the way that lived personal experiences are represented in the form of the memoir genre. In considering these ideas, this paper explores questions of objective "truth" and how lived experiences can be affected by internal emotional narrative, and by extension, how that emotional narrative is depicted in memoir.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VTETD/oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/115159 |
| Date | 23 May 2023 |
| Creators | Young, Collen |
| Contributors | English, Webster, Travis, Cassinelli, Silas M., Reed, Ashley |
| Publisher | Virginia Tech |
| Source Sets | Virginia Tech Theses and Dissertation |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | ETD, application/pdf |
| Rights | Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ |
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