Beyond autobiography: Memory and the art of forgetting in Marguerite Duras,Eileen Chang and Maxine Hong Kingston.

详细信息   

• 作者：Chen ; Yu-Min Claire.
• 学历：Doctor
• 年：2012
• 毕业院校：Indiana University
• Department：Comparative Literature.
• ISBN：9781267619198
• CBH：3527529
• Country：USA
• 语种：English
• FileSize：3850505
• Pages：315

文摘

By examining autobiographical works and works of autobiographical fiction by Marguerite Duras 1914--1996),Eileen Chang 1920--1995),and Maxine Hong Kingston 1940--),women writers who share transnational experiences and express various types of traumatic loss in their works,my work investigates interrelations between memory and identity within the changing contexts of time and space. Through autobiographical novels,women writers renegotiate socially,construct cultural identities,conceptualize,reposition or discover their silent selves. In the journey of perpetual returning into the past,writers select,lose,transcend,or fantasize about fragments of the past to represent the past. This dissertation analyzes how these women writers use various aesthetics in portraying the landscape of memories to represent,redefine,and transcend repetition,trauma,and loss,and to renegotiate the reality of the past,present,and future. The first chapter lays out a general theoretical framework of autobiography and its relation to memory. The theoretical questions for investigation include: How has autobiography evolved as a genre? What are other autobiographical narratives? What are the possible experimental writing techniques and aesthetic forms that can be contained and legitimized within autobiographical novels? How can autobiographical novels delineate various types of memory within different times and spaces? The chapter reviews autobiography as a genre that evokes debates on truth and fiction and then focuses the discussion on the three writers autobiographical novels,which share life experiences but also demonstrate a new aesthetic by varying narration style and plot details and also by complementing reality with legend and myth. The chapter focuses upon the aesthetics of rewriting,the ways in which writers look into the past,and the art of self-representation. It also examines ways in which women writers reconstruct the past as they remember,utilize,create,and transcend various losses. Chapter Two discusses trauma in the works of Marguerite Duras. Specifically,this chapter deals with the issue of forgetting as an eternal return to remembering and how this circular repetition becomes narrative entrapment and how it functions as a form to express that sense of eternal void. Using the backdrop of war and love,Duras depicts memories that are inscribed,preserved,and later evoked through the body and senses. Portraying the same love story,Duras moves her autobiographical narrative from a more traditional novelistic form to a poetic one and later to a cinematic-style narrative. Chapter Three focuses on Eileens Changs use of self-referentiality,intertextuality,and interchangeability in genres and languages in narrating memory. From first writing her life story in Chinese essays to later rewriting it into novels written in English,Chang conjures the hidden and silent past of her native language and projects it to a larger,foreign audience. Portraying a sense of loss of family life and love,Chang takes language as a space to create a linguistic and cultural gap and to endow the familiar with unfamiliarity,a sense of foreignness,detaching herself from the narrative Durasian repetition) and thus transcending the loss. Her aesthetics and perspective transform nature and transcend time. Chapter Four discusses Maxine Hong Kingstons experiences as a second-generation Asian American. Hongs use of aesthetics in imagining and recovering her lost ancestral homeland is based mainly on a postmodern mixture of legend with reality,fiction with truth. By crossing beyond cultural contexts,she recaptures the unfamiliar and transforms it into the familiar,rewriting the meaning of foreignness and silence. She uses story-telling as a narrative space to recycle and recuperate the past. By using postmodern narrative techniques,such as crossing genres and intertextuality,Kingston redefines the meaning of voice/silence. All three writers successfully expand the scope of autobiographical narrative in form,writing styles,and themes,developing their own aesthetic in autobiography studies.