Lost objects: the melancholic autofictions of Sylvia Plath and Anna Kavan
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2012
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Abstract
This thesis addresses literatures emerging from loss, taking as its theoretical basis psychoanalytic theories of trauma and melancholia. As such, it considers the work of Sigmund Freud, Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok, Melanie Klein, Julia Kristeva, Elaine Scarry, Cathy Caruth and Dori Laub. It locates a general consensus about such characteristics as repetition, belatedness, encryption, fixation, idealization, reification and the drive to mourn via adequately transforming figurations. By exploring these ideas, I strive to theorize a contemporary melancholic geme as a literature of hybridity and literary experiment. In contrast to avant-garde movements typically dominated by men, writing associated with autobiography has been portrayed (and often denigrated) as suspect, conventional and feminine. This thesis strives to assert the innovative character of many autofictional works by considering how effectively such texts develop eccentric forms to participate in melancholic and traumatic literatures. After examining several twentieth- and twenty first-century examples from among the works of Bessie Head, Paul Celan, Georges Perec, Lauren Slater and Janice Williamson, it takes as its principal subjects American writer Sylvia Plath and British novelist Anna Kavan - two writers who pre-date more obvious postmodern experimentation. Plath and Kavan are engage many of the same issues emerging from melancholia, but in quite different ways. This thesis explores Plath's melancholic as an aphasic figure driven to silence and mental illness by losses occasioned by cultural ideologies and historical events. As such, it re-examines her Holocaust poetry from the vantage of melancholia, as well as her representations of gender, race and mental illness. It then considers Kavan's melancholic as an estranged figure whose losses typically emerge from positions of subjective difference that can never be transcended. These characters struggle with internal conflict and lack as well as internalized feelings of non-belonging. Among the literary innovations these two writers produce are eccentric authorial signatures (hence deliberate metatextuality ), cultural performativity, corrosive self-irony, unauthorized identifications, achronology, uncanny repetition, elaborate psychic allegory, and parodic anthropomorphism. A major task of this thesis is to recuperate the important political role of melancholic and traumatic literatures, which endlessly mourn losses that seek public redress.
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Bibliography: p. 393-417
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Citation
Sheppy, N. D. (2012). Lost objects: the melancholic autofictions of Sylvia Plath and Anna Kavan (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/4725