| This critical and creative master's thesis explores the dynamic, constructive, and reciprocal relationship between readers and texts. In 'reading the self,' a reader responds to a text by writing autobiographical self-narratives, then writes critically about that text and her self-narratives. She thereby positions herself alongside literature as a subject of literary analysis. By drawing heavily on language and ideas from a 'host' text, the reader ultimately produces an intertextual memoir that reveals as much about the self as it does about a text. Unlike reader-response theories, my emphasis is not on how readerly interiority informs one's interpretation of literature; instead, I emphasize how traditional ideas of text, self, authorship, and identity might be challenged, altered, or reinstated through reading. In this thesis, I work through texts about foreignness, identity, memory and family: Suniti Namjoshi's Goja, Michael Ondaatje's Running in the Family, and Dave Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. |
