| Popis: |
This thesis focuses on contemporary French and Spanish intergenerational stories in the wake of traumatic loss. Through the lens of these texts, it engages with Paul John Eakin’s theory of ‘relational lives’ and with current conceptions of what constitutes an ‘ethical’ representation of the multiple, interlocking stories in a family history. By drawing the French and Spanish traditions of life-writing into the discussion of relational lives, which has focused primarily on Anglo-American examples, my thesis expands the parameters in terms of geography as well as genre. While French women writers have been at the centre of output and innovation in European life-writing, contributions by their Spanish counterparts are considerably less prominent. The dialogue my study instigates, however, demonstrates that contemporary women writers are in fact grappling with similar questions when giving voice to traumatic experience; the Spanish texts simply tend towards more fictional strategies of representation. I argue on this basis that the fictional or autofictional staging of intergenerational stories offers as much insight into what it means to write a relational life as do more overtly autobiographical accounts. At the heart of this question are the ethical challenges that the texts in my corpus address and the narrative solutions they offer in response. These texts put questions to the notions of ownership, appropriation, displacement and ventriloquism which pervade existing discussions of ethics in life-writing and trauma theory, and which are inclined to portray the relationship between subjects as fixed and predetermined. In their place emerges a more malleable conception of ethical practice, one which perceives subject positions to be forged instead in the act of telling the story. This thesis seeks to re-describe ‘relational lives’ accordingly as a specific mode of writing and so to clarify why it should be distinguished from the claim that all life-writing is ‘relational’. |
