| This dissertation interrogates the possibilities of a feminine and politically subversive relation to memory and seeks out a space in which the personal and political meet and are implicated in a melancholic textual modality. It argues that too much memory threatens the foundations of the social constructions that keep subjects alive, at the public and the private level, and that this threat can be transmitted through "feminine writing," a modality that challenges phallocentric social Law in its linguistic embodiment and the merits of repression. Stylistically, philosophically, and politically it seeks a way out of the binary logic of language by envisioning other possibilities for the subject.; Employing psychoanalytic concepts primarily from Sigmund Freud and Julia Kristeva, this dissertation explores the psychic positions assumed by subjects "in process/on trial," and what these mean to their role in the social contract. It argues that through artistic creations fundamentally predicated on anamnesia, there arises the danger of a rupture in the social structure, revealing the latter's fragile and fictional basis. It examines the struggle between survival and faithfulness to a chaotic mnemonic experience through works by H.D., Djuna Barnes, and Marguerite Duras, with a comparative approach informed by contemporary western culture.; Witnessing at the risk of death, not just of the characters but of the text itself, these writings break or at least threaten the laws of individuation and difference by reviving and transmitting the pain of loss, madness, and love, and by exposing the interrelatedness of self and other, individual and communal crises. While as linguistic texts these function like a barrier against the disintegration of complete in differentiation, they also demonstrate that naming and retelling traumatic experiences does not protect the text, the writer, the characters, or the reader from the power of its challenge. The nonlinear, insane, asymbolic in writing forces language to become a threat to itself and representation to undertake its own undoing, turning that most fundamental safety measure into a reenactment of an anarchic condition that disturbs the Symbolic and can effect material change. |
