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Authenticity and Readability on the Brink: Grief and Anxiety in a Tandem Narrative

Files

Exegesis(960.17 KB)

Date

2016

Authors

Supervisor

George, James

Item type

Exegesis

Degree name

Master of Creative Writing

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

Auckland University of Technology

Abstract

White Sheets and Other Particulars is a novel of a woman recovering from the death of her son and a subsequent suicide attempt. It is written as a tandem narrative, with non-chronological flashbacks between a pre-traumatic past and a post-traumatic present. The exegesis was written in parallel and in dialogue with the novel and explores research themes that influenced the first developmental draft. The overarching theme of my work is the notion of “the brink” – the psychological boundary between sanity, normality and life, on one side, and illness, madness and death on the other. The core of the exegesis explores how to express this boundary, as an interior state of the main character, while maintaining both authenticity and readability, and also how structure – in particular, the movement between timelines – can illuminate her changing psychological condition.

Description

Keywords

Tandem narrative, Fictive memoir, The psychological brink in writing, Non-chronological flashback, Experimental structure in fiction, Psychoanalytic theory and fiction, Recovery, Grief, Suicide, Sanity and madness

Source

DOI

Publisher's version

Rights statement

Permanent link

https://hdl.handle.net/10292/10476

Collections

Masters Theses