Rethinking truth after 'the age of extremes': An analysis of the chronotype of anamnesis in autobiographical narratives by Pak, Klueger, and Kogawa (Austria, Korea, Pak Won-so, Ruth Klueger, Joy Kogawa)

This dissertation critically recognizes the genre of 'literary memoirs' by survivors of extreme events and think of the implications they present in the current debate about truth and representation. Although scholars of various fields have recognized some characteristics of this genre, linguistic and disciplinary boundaries prevented them from fully recognizing that it is a geographically universal and conceptually and formally unique phenomenon. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, my dissertation bridges this gap in the current scholarship and moves it forward towards a better understanding of the genre and the concept of truth it calls for.; Drawing on theories by Eric Hobsbawm, Judith Herman, Dominick LaCapra and Mikhail Bakhtin, the Introduction presents my theory about a unique generic capability of literary memoirs by survivors of extreme events. At the center of this genre lies an unusual contradiction between a survivor's strong desire to testify to the truth of her experience and her psychological condition that strongly hampers such testimony. As a result, literary memoirs of this nature take a form characterized by the uniquely complex and dynamic nature in its concept of truth, one that interweaves facts with fiction, the past with the present, personal stories with social history, and knowledge with practice. The dynamic nature of this form often materializes also as continuous revision.; In the three main chapters, I examine how literary memoirs by three women survivors embody this same formal capability, i.e. what I call 'the chronotope of anamnesis'. Pak, Kluger, and Kogawa, survivors respectively of the Korean War, the Holocaust, and the Japanese Canadian Internment, have all written a number of autobiographical works on their traumatic experiences. Each author experiments with more than one form of traditional genre, and the trajectory of these experiments reveals continuous efforts to embody a more complex and dynamic sense of truth that they feel is involved in their experiences. While similar in their performance of 'the chronotope of anamnesis,' the three authors' works bear signatures of their different individual and social experiences during and after the original events.; This dissertation is one of the first attempts at this kind of interdisciplinary theorization of the genre of 'literary memoirs,' one that recognizes the complexity of its concept of truth, while not subscribing to relativism or opting for pure politics or ethics. The Conclusion discusses how the kind of dynamic concept of truth embodied in 'the chronotope of anamnesis' calls for a shift in the discourse about truth from a limited plane of epistemology to a more multi-dimensional one similar to 'the participative truth' proposed by Bakhtin.