This thesis attempts to examine how fictionality in life writing and light writing forges a liberating space to read the self-making in Gerald Vizenor¡¦s Interior Landscape: Autobiographical Myths and Metaphors. The feasibility of setting a dialogue between life writing and light writing derives from Timothy Adam¡¦s discussion in Light Writing and Life Writing: Photography in Autobiography. Adams demonstrates how autobiography and photography, inherently thought as referential, actually possess the indeterminate characteristic of language; hence their juxtaposition displays an intriguing effect of dissolving the artificial distinction of the two media and their interplay presents the writer¡¦s fictive impulse of making himself. Chapter One provides a survey on how life writing and light writing can be productive media to present a self-making process. The residence in language of the two media deprives the presumed referential masks they wear and the constructed ideology disguised as truth behind, primarily the illusion of the unity of the self and the identification through lineage found in photographic representation. Chapter Two explores how the verbal narrative and visual images complete each other in Vizenor¡¦s Interior Landscapes. Photography in an autobiography forms an interesting dialectics between image and text: photography serves not only as a mnemonic device but as the material base for imagination and creation to thrive in words, and the autobiographical text rewrites what has been put in the photocopy of a historical document. Chapter Three discusses the trickster discourse that Vizenor incorporates in his life writing and light writing and analyzes how the writer associates his autobiographical self with trickster figures from the tribal myth and hence creates a trickster mixedblood identity. The dialogue between Vizenor¡¦s life writing and light writing reveals the possibility that both autobiography and photography could be not only the site of memory but also that of imagination and creation in self-life-making.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:NSYSU/oai:NSYSU:etd-0718111-173748 |
| Date | 18 July 2011 |
| Creators | Cheng, Hsiao-wei |
| Contributors | TEE Kim Tong, Hsin-ya Huang, Rose Hsiu-li Juan |
| Publisher | NSYSU |
| Source Sets | NSYSU Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Archive |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.lib.nsysu.edu.tw/ETD-db/ETD-search/view_etd?URN=etd-0718111-173748 |
| Rights | withheld, Copyright information available at source archive |
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