Mourning becomes …: The work of feminism in the spaces between lives lived and lives written (original) (raw)
Related papers
2013
In this thesis I explore the contemporary grief memoir, an increasingly popular subset within the autobiography genre, and one that primarily concerns authors' subjective recollections and responses to the rupture in the fabric of their lives caused by the death of an intimate other-typically a spouse, parent or child. In my exegesis I examine Joan Didion's grief memoir-The Year of Magical Thinking (2011 [2005])written in the year following the sudden death of her husband of forty years and fellow writer, John Dunne, and the concurrent serious illness and hospitalisation of their adult daughter, Quintana, in 2004. In particular I analyse how Didion's memoir addresses the rupturing of her reflexive individuality and especially her dispositional orientation and idealization of an agentic, informed and progressive self as key components of her self-identity. In my creative non-fiction writing-Walking Grieved: a mediation of love, loss & memory-I explore the rupture and my responses occasioned by the death of my wife in 2003. I specifically reflect on how this has impacted on my romantic, familial and other self-identities and on my understandings of the constructs (social, historical and subjective) of intimate love, dying and death, memory, enduring grief, elective sociality and the narrations of self and other. Contemporary grief narratives represent an emerging body of literary work and socio-psychological theorizing that contests the 'denial of death' (Ariès 2008 [1981]: 559) ethos prevalent in modern Western societies. They also contest the equally prevalent Freudian model of pathological grief that asserts survivors need to 'move on' from grieving to form new intimate attachments, ideally within months (Dennis 2008; Neimeyer et al 2001). These memoirs represent a contemporary, even postmodern, form of ars moriendi and promote varied forms of 'textured recovery' (Prodromou 2012: 57) that are based on subjective, nuanced and eclectic grieving processes and outcomes. These include highly personal searches for understanding and comprehension of the death, of rupture and grieving, and the fashioning of post-rupture identities, ideas, values and practices that frequently incorporate the deceased and which span a range of themes-restorative, evaluative, interpretive, affirmative, affective, transformative (Dennis 2008). As a form of autobiography, grief memoirs also address issues of self-identity as a series of constantly evolving narratives or stories that individuals tell about themselves and which, in feedback loop, both generate and reflect the evolving modalities and ethics of autobiography (Eakin 1999, 2008). Narrated self-identity is always period and socio-culturally specific. For the middle-classes and higher social strata of post-industrial societies, self-identity therefore routinely coalesces around the hegemony and practices 'reflexive individuality' (Beck 2002: 3)-especially the ideals of agentic, knowledgeable, I warmly acknowledge the constant, proactive support and astute guidance of my supervisor, Dr Ingrid Horrocks, and likewise the generous input of my fellow MCW students and Massey University's English lecturers during the residential course. To Dr Samantha Lentle-Keenan, I warmly thank you for your critical reading of early drafts of my creative, non-fiction scribblings and for many enlightening discussions on dying and death. To Carla Rey Vasquez, I thank you for your superb friendship and for your supportive, perceptive reading and editing of both my exegesis and creative writing. And to Corinna Howland, I thank you for being a wonderful daughter, an exemplary sister to your brother Estlin, and also for your constructive and critical support, reading and editing of my thesis throughout. Most of all, I acknowledge the love and passion of my late wife Karen. Clearly this work exists because of you as my life and my enrichment-for you my darling. R.I.P.
The Poetics of Loss or Imaginative Redescriptions? Narrative Strategies in Recent Memory Texts
This paper engages with current psychological and social articulations of trans-generational trauma as experienced by both the “second” and the “third” (post-war) generation. At this point, an increasing historical remove contributes to levelling poignant and incontrovertible differences between perpetrator and victim experiences of the legacy of National Socialism. Marianne Hirsch’s seminal conceptualization of transgenerational memory as “postmemory,” for instance, applies to the formation and contradictions of an inherited memory for children and grandchildren of both victims and perpetrators. Yet, I argue, we need to understand the interdependence and terms of these ‘memory symptoms,’ along with the seeming proximity of such disparate subject- positions as part of a far-reaching historical legacy without dissolving them into a convenient and potentially apologetic history of German suffering. The central question posed by the legacy of Auschwitz may be condensed to: Is it possible to express an engagement with that catastrophic legacy without repressing, denying, or nostalgically rewriting painful memories on the one hand, or circumventing complicity by assuming an undifferentiated position of ‘victim of history,’ on the other hand? This question is particularly poignant in light of the fact that such strategies were often employed to articulate war and postwar memories of the first generation tainted by affect and guilt, and as such passed on to the second and third generation. Taking my cue from recent literary studies that have underscored the ability of literature and cinema to express concealed, repressed, or uncomfortable truths about the past, I focus on the aesthetic representation of history as part of what Amir Eshel has called “the poetics of loss.” In fact, I share and want to build on Eshel’s premise that works of literature do not set out to “master” the past but instead present “imaginative redescriptions” (as used by Rorty) , new vocabularies with which to grasp the contradictions and impasses of history. Understood as such “imaginative redescriptions,” the aesthetic representations of history under consideration here no longer allow the question of a ‘proper or improper’ engagement of history and instead their analysis is driven by the desire to understand rather than to know. In a way, these memory texts dramatize history as a Schlüsselszene, as fiction sustained by what Benjamin has called mémoire involontaire, a memory fed by images, “which we never saw until we remembered.” With this premise, I propose to analyze narrative strategies as employed in recent tetxts by Hans-Ulrich Treichel (Der Verlorene) and Katharina Hacker (Eine Art Liebe) as attempts to stage what may be termed a perspective of ‚trans-generational difference’ with respect to the psychological, social and socio-economic effects of war.
Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies, 2011
In the spirit of the stated topic, “Angel of the New,” this article addresses the question of the modern—in art, politics, and social thought—in terms deriving from Benjamin’s, and subsequently Adorno’s, experience of art in its fullest truth claims in the face of catastrophe. The article explores a certain contemporary questioning of the limits of representation and the truth-value of representations, above all art works. Making reference to Agamben and the notion of “bare life” as a key figure of modern bio-politics, it addresses several contemporary issues at the limits of aesthetic, conceptual, and political “representation” (though shying away from a full engagement with contemporary political theory proper and its concerns): death, the sublime, catastrophe. Beginning with modern changes in the understanding of death (and life) and the role of technology, instrumental rational control, and economic reason, in the formation of modern society, it discusses the catastrophic limit cases of Hiroshima and Auschwitz, arguing ultimately that a modernist commitment to art truth, even with respect to the most difficult human events, is necessary still today, despite a seeming movement beyond the modern in the reigning cultural dominant.
"This paper opens up a dialogue between narrative researchers working within and between history and the social sciences. Following Israel's (this issue) account of how narratives of lives are useful subjects for historical analysis, I consider issues arising from the social sciences, particularly focusing on questions that destabilise narratological conventions around sequence, closure and agency. In agreement with Israel, I suggest that narrative research as the art of the archive foregrounds the importance of partial truths in life-writing research, offers rich knowledges and invokes intense intellectual pleasures. But also the subject in my analysis seems to transgress the discursive limitations of her textuality, foregrounding the salience of the political in narrative research. In its capacity to help shape historical and auto/biographical writings, narrativity emerges as an immensely rich way of opening up an interdisciplinary field of inquiry. However, the narratological canon also needs to be continually problematised. Keywords: the archive; narrativity; narratological canon; the subject; feminist genealogical approach"
Death Within the Text: Social, Philosophical and Aesthetic Approaches to Literature, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019
This article investigates the impossibility of bearing witness. It exposes a negative dialectics that dwells on the lacuna at the heart of every act of witnessing, an act that is made possible by its own limitation which revolves around the death of the other. One cannot bear witness to death from inside death. One can only bear witness having escaped death. Dwelling on Agamben’s concept of the impossibility to bear witness, we concentrated on a few of Lanzmann’s interviews in the documentary film Shoah and interrogated such issues as memory, solitude, death, both as they are at work in the narratives of the survivors and how they are dealt with by the art that comes in the aftermath of the Holocaust. We explored what art tells us about the meaning of solitude and how it speaks (and to what extent that speech is possible) on behalf of the other. We were interested in how art grasps the narratives of absence and death and how it interrogates and builds on the lacuna of memory and of witnessing at the same time.
B@belonline Vol 9 2022 On what remains of a life
On what remains of a life, 2022
Biography writing seems a response to a central question of philosophical anthropology: What does people do when they are unable to escape their finitude? They speak of their life or the life of others, trying to linger in human memory. Speaking of a life is joined to a question of identity and self-recognition. Biography writing covers a vast territory, stretching across literature, film, and scholarly studies, mainly historical and social. It has undergone historical shifts, gaining a new status in the modern world. These deliberations orbit around two questions: the ties between literature and biography writing and the history and ways of presenting a human life. A person, who will always be more what happens to them than what they do, remains a homo absconditus in biography writing. Yet tales of human fates allow us to better understand the human condition.