Redefining the Self: Life Writing, Fairy Tale and Fantasy Fiction in Amélie Nothomb's Métaphysique des tubes.

This thesis primarily focuses on Amélie Nothomb’s Métaphysique des tubes (2000), an autobiographical rewriting of her earliest childhood in Japan. However, elements of other her novels are considered where relevant, in particular Le Sabotage amoureux (1993) and Biographie de la faim (2004). The work begins by analysing the literary genres of autobiography, ‘autofiction’ and the autobiographical novel, examining the blurred boundaries between these. I compare how various scholars, including but not limited to Laureline Amanieux, Mark Lee and Susan Bainbrigge, come to classify Nothomb’s Métaphysique des tubes as belonging to one of these above genres, before discussing why the novel evades a single definitive literary classification. Nothomb’s fractured sense of self, studied at length throughout this thesis, is mirrored into the foundational structure of the novel, as Nothomb combines fragments of each genre, mixing in fairy tale and fantasy fiction to secure her own idiosyncratic literary style. I proceed in the second chapter to compare Nothomb’s work with Beaumont’s version of La Belle et la Bête, highlighting echoes between characters in both tales and introducing the significant Nothombian themes of hyperbolic beauty, the presentation of the Beast in all its guised forms, as well as the central role of water. I also examine psychological devices of the fairy tale as explained by Bruno Bettelheim and Adam Phillips, how these aid childhood development, and potential reasons for their inclusion in Nothomb’s writing. In the third chapter I undertake a short comparative study of Métaphysique des tubes and Barrie’s Peter Pan to reveal that what appears to be an idyllic childhood is in fact tainted by loss and mourning. The lexis of adventure fuses with destruction as it becomes apparent that both Pan and Nothomb as protagonist have paradoxically lost their true childhood by attempting to remain eternally in it. In relation to this, I look at the salvational role of storytelling in both novels, and provide evidence to suggest that Nothomb as both author and protagonist come to find, understand and stabilise their identity through reading and writing literature. The conclusion begins by asking whether there are additional literary genres into which scholars have placed Nothomb’s autobiographical works, leading me to analyse briefly the possibility of postmodernist and feminist writing in relation to her work. Nothomb does not merely rediscover and redefine herself through literature, but she also questions modern society’s standards concerning physical appearance. Previously studied themes of hyperbolic beauty, ugliness and eating disorders come back into play when I re-examine these themes in connection with Nothomb’s challenging of the contemporary ideals of beauty. At this stage I consider similarities in Angela Carter’s postmodernist approach to literature and its significance to and similarities with Nothomb’s work. Furthermore, I provide additional examples of these themes relating to beauty by turning to Nothomb’s newer novel, Une forme de vie (2010), which grapples with obesity, depression and suicidal ideation, all of which appear, to varying degrees, in Métaphysique des tubes. My thesis intends to show that Nothomb intentionally writes Métaphysique des tubes so that it defies one clear-cut classification. Her work grows in richness and depth precisely through her playful de- and reconstruction of various literary genres, sub-genres and movements, as well as pastiching of fragments of fairy tales and fantasy fiction. Métaphysique des tubes becomes at once beautiful and beastly as she creatively redefines her own identity and successfully questions contemporary society and culture in a novel that all the while refuses to be tamed

Adolescent states of mind recalled in Bion’s ‘The Long Weekend’

This research examines W. R. Bion’s autobiography ‘The Long Weekend: Part of a Life (1897 - 1919)’ in which he tells the story of what happened to him during his childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood including an account of those around him and what was happening to them, especially in their relationships with him. A very painful upbringing is portrayed; one that is full of emotional deprivations. The nature of memory and the autobiographical method, including the text as a partial and selective account of his schooldays, is considered and viewed as having the potential to arrive at intimate truths given the condition of interior observation is met. Psychoanalytic conceptualizations of the adolescent states of mind that Bion recalls are made using a reverie-informed approach and drawing on contemporary psychoanalytic writing to add a further perspective to the one he chose to provide. What is presented is a personal reading of the pre/adolescent states of mind Bion describes at his Hertfordshire boarding school. The social-contextual aspects of Bion’s situation who was also a child of his time are also considered and viewed as providing the clues to the emotional atmosphere he grew up in. The focus is on the impact of this atmosphere on his interior states. A further argument is presented that Bion’s descriptions of his pre/adolescent states of mind have unique value to the understanding of wider experiences of adolescent development, both in his time and as it is relevant to adolescent development today, especially in its more deprived instances such as with child psychotherapists’ experiences. Research findings reveal the ubiquitous nature of adolescent bullying, the importance for boys to have access to helpful male figures to identify with, the dangers of socio-political censoring of adolescent boys’ sexuality and the impact of anxiety and deprivation on their capacities to relate. They also contribute to biographical understandings of the child Bion

College Students\u27 Lingering Negative Emotional Reponses to Movies Viewed During College

Although much research has been conducted on children’s negative emotional responses to movies, and even negative emotional responses to the media in general, limited research has been conducted on college students’ lingering negative emotional responses to movies they have viewed during their college years. Through a qualitative analysis using a focus group at a Florida Christian college, this thesis will examine what kinds of disturbing movie content and elements cause these lingering negative emotional responses in college students. The lingering negative emotional responses these students have will also be discussed in detail, as well as what triggers the reemergence of these responses

Identity and form in alternative comics, 1967 – 2007

In the late 1960s, underground cartoonists established the comic book form as a space for the exploration of personal identity. “Alternative” comics grew out of this tradition as subsequent writers produced work independently of the major comics publishers, aimed at an adult audience and encompassing a broad range of visual styles and narrative content. Throughout the past forty years, British, US and Canadian writers and artists have used this medium to explore questions of selfhood and perception, often implicitly or overtly relating these issues to the form, history and conventions of the comic book itself. Two main threads run through this discussion of the representation of selfhood: childhood and memory on the one hand and sexuality and gender on the other. This thesis argues that for many creators there exists a useful analogy between the comic book form and mental processes, specifically between the fractured, verbal-visual blend of the comics page and the organisation of human memory. It further suggests that the historical association of comics first with childhood, and subsequently with male adolescence, has conditioned the representation of selfhood in adult comics. Comic book consumption has often centred on a community of predominantly young, white, male, socially marginal readers, buying and collecting serialised narratives. Comics creators’ awareness of this audience (either in response or resistance) has affected the content of their work. Although presented as a chronological narrative, this thesis is not a comprehensive history of Anglophone alternative comics, but centres on eight prominent authors/artists: Robert Crumb; Dave Sim; Lynda Barry; Julie Doucet; Alan Moore; the collaborative partnership of Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean; and Chris Ware. Whilst spanning a wide range of genres and themes (autobiography, fantasy, gothic horror, parody, soap opera, the grotesque and others) each confronts and negotiates with conventions regarding the representation of selfhood

Otroci in otroštvo v migracijskih kontekstih

A presentation of the difficulties of defining the childhood and children in cultural and historical studies is followed by a presentation of the different forms of positioning children in the migration process and the making of decisions about them. Each form is illustrated with examples from research projects, based on auto/biographical sources and narrative descriptions of subjective migration experience. The conclusion argues that migration researchers take into account the subjectivity of the “objects” of their research projects and humanize the migrants, especially their children. In this way, the text combines the children in the historical context of Slovenian emigration with the children in the context of immigration to Slovenia today in a united story.Predstavitvi težavnosti definicij otroštva in otrok v kulturoloških in zgodovinskih študijah sledi prikaz različnih načinov umestitve otrok v migracijskem procesu in odločitvah zanj. Vsak način je ilustriran s primeri iz raziskav, ki izhajajo iz avto/biografskih virov in narativnih prikazov subjektivne migracijske izkušnje. Zaključek apelira na raziskovalce in proučevalce migracij, da upoštevajo subjektivizacijo »predmetov« svojih raziskav in učlovečijo migrante, predvsem pa njihove otroke. S tem besedilo poveže otroke v zgodovinskem kontekstu slovenskega izseljenstva in otroke znotraj priseljenstva v Slovenijo danes v skupno zgodbo

The language of the self : translating autobiographical identity

Autobiography involves the rewriting of the self into textual fonn, and in this form, language plays a vital role in the construction of the self. In many of the memoirs written in the twentieth century, particularly those by multilingual individuals, language is not only the medium through which the textual self is fashioned, it also provides a starting point from which to explore and reflect on how language itself facilitates changes in the self. In this type of memoir, language is \u27the central motif from which the autobiographer explores the cultural world that language constructs around each community of speakers, and in tum, the ramifications of that constructed world on the individual autobiographer. This thesis focuses on two autobiographies, Eva Hoffman\u27s Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language (1990) and Alice Kaplan\u27s French Lessons: A Memoir (1994), in an exploration of how these authors, as bilingual women, reflect on and use language in order to construct an understanding of the self through time-a time that spans differing cultures and languages. Both Hoffman and Kaplan include a multitude of stories-­ personal, familial, ancestral, etc.-in their textual representation of their lived experience. But each author must fashion her own integral narrative of personal identity within the context of a new and unfamiliar culture encountered during adolescence and adulthood. Each writer must translate her story of self into a new language

Girls and their families in an era of economic change

The paper uses autobiographical accounts by 227 working women alongside a larger sample of men's life stories to compare girls’ and boys’ experiences of first jobs, schooling and family life in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It asks whether girls were disadvantaged in seizing the opportunities and fending off the threats to wellbeing occasioned by economic change. Girls were more likely than boys to experience sexual harassment and this constrained the ways in which they could earn a living and live their lives. Fathers as breadwinners merited respect and often affection, but it was mothers with whom girls identified

In the Shadow of the Family Tree: Narrating Family History in Väterliteratur and the Generationenromane

While debates over the memory and representation of the National Socialist past have dominated public discourse in Germany over the last forty years, the literary scene has been the site of experimentation with the genre of the autobiography, as authors developed new strategies for exploring their own relationship to the past through narrative. Since the late 1970s, this experimentation has yielded a series of autobiographical novels which focus not only on the authors' own lives, but on the lives and experiences of their family members, particularly those who lived during the NS era. In this dissertation, I examine the relationship between two waves of this autobiographical writing, the Väterliteratur novels of the late 1970s and 1980s in the BRD, and the current trend of multi-generational family narratives which began in the late 1990s. In a prelude and three chapters, this dissertation traces the trajectory from Väterliteratur to the Generationenromane through readings of Bernward Vesper's Die Reise (1977), Christoph Meckel's Suchbild. Über meinen Vater (1980), Ruth Rehmann's Der Mann auf der Kanzel (1979), Uwe Timm's Am Beispiel meines Bruders (2003), Stephan Wackwitz's Ein unsichtbares Land (2003), Monika Maron's Pawels Briefe (1999), and Barbara Honigmann's Ein Kapitel aus meinem Leben (2004). I read these texts as examples of genealogical writing, in which protagonists seek to position themselves in relation to their family histories through the construction of family narrative. The formal similarities between the two trends - (inter)textual dialogue, hybridity of prose style, vignette or essayistic structure - cast their underlying differences into greater relief. While the author-narrators of Väterliteratur seek to reach a definitive conclusion regarding the question of the father's complicity in Nazism, the authors of Generationenromane allow for greater nuance in categories such as victim and perpetrator. In both cases, however, the subjectivity of the individual protagonist shapes his or her engagement of the family past, as they seek to negotiate between personal family relationships and public discourses of collective memory in contemporary Germany

Understanding personality through preferences in popular mass media: An archetypal approach

In the Digital Age, it may be possible to assess personality in ways beyond those traditionally employed by psychologists. This work examines individual preferences in popular or mass culture media and what they say about people\u27s psychological processes. For example, knowing that someone likes romantic comedy movies and jazz music arguably paints a more useful picture of personality than saying that one is high in both extraversion and openness. In such cases, a media-based self-description provides a clear and tangible metric of individual interests. Here, we hypothesize that one reason such preferences may reflect personality is because media and the arts make frequent use of prototypical or archetypal themes and characters in the stories they relate to their audiences, and that people resonate---i.e., respond affectively---to these thematic elements in specific ways that reflect their personalities. Two studies were performed to test the general hypothesis that people\u27s tastes in popular and mass culture media largely inform their overall personalities and behaviors. In Study 1, two similar scales measuring resonance to archetypal media were compared and a five-factor model of archetypes in mass media was validated. In Study, 2, resonant media preferences were evaluated and compared with participants\u27 self-reported current concerns (including hobbies, group memberships, personal strivings, and possible selves) in order to identify possible archetypal life themes. Results supported the idea of archetypal life themes---that people\u27s mass media preferences are related to their everyday behaviors, goals, social interests, and self-concept. In the future, pop culture-based indicators of personality such as media preferences may be used more often as assessment tools; more pragmatically, they may serve to guide individuals\u27 overall personal development