Reviving the vanishing subject: the subject as abject in postmodern memoir
Loading...
Date
2017
Authors
Rich, Susan
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
My dissertation contemplates rhetorical and ontological problems of self-representation in twentieth century postmodern memoir. Many postmodernists contend the self merely deteriorates amid the fallibility of memory, instabilities of ‘truth’, a Lacanian notion of language as inexpressible of the self, and a subjectivity so multiplicitous and constructed that it is impossible to write. Yet Julia Kristeva’s psychoanalytic notion of abjection – a dialectical process that simultaneously dismantles and reinforces the self – illuminates postmodern autobiographical subjectivity as ultimately revived through literary self-alienation. As such a process of abjection, postmodern autobiography thus involves reconstruction amid deconstruction – wherein a “weight of meaninglessness . . . crushes me” (Kristeva Powers 2) while also ensuring “that ‘I’ does not disappear in it but finds, in . . . sublime alienation, a forfeited existence” (Kristeva Powers 9). This approach resituates the genre as an ethical form of heteroglossic self-renewal, wherein the recognition of self-as-other facilitates an ethical engagement with community in an increasingly pluralistic world. Postmodern autobiography is thus revealed as a relevant, productive space of renewal despite its own claims of futility. I focus on five exemplars of postmodern autobiography – texts written by Lucy Grealy, Suniti Namjoshi, Vladimir Nabokov, Robert Kroetsch, and Michael Ondaatje – to demonstrate how a view of postmodern autobiography as abject translates across such diverse social constructs as nation, gender, diaspora, physicality, memory, class, and the family.
Description
Keywords
Memoir, Autobiography, Postmodern Autobiography, Postmodernism, Postmodern, Abjection, Lucy Grealy, Suniti Namjoshi, Vladimir Nabokov, Robert Kroetsch, Michael Ondaatje, Julia Kristeva