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Reframing Confession: Parodying Childhood Trauma in Sylvia Plath and Louise Bourgeois

Silver, Natasha; (2020) Reframing Confession: Parodying Childhood Trauma in Sylvia Plath and Louise Bourgeois. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This thesis examines how childhood trauma is aesthetically mediated in the works and ego documents of Sylvia Plath and Louise Bourgeois, departing from a biographical approach in order to reconceive confession as an aesthetic genre. In particular, I explore the extent to which parody — as an intertextual, self-reflexive and playful mode — provides a means of framing an experience that resists symbolisation. Equally, I consider how the parodic mode might enable the artists to situate themselves in the male canon. Giving a cultural history of confession, Chapter 1 identifies a convergence between confessional practices and narratives of victimhood in contemporary western discourse. However, the art forms analysed in this thesis (namely, journal, poem and sculpture) actively manipulate confessional strategies, inviting critical reflection on audience enjoyment of the aestheticisation of suffering. Chapter 2 discusses how trauma can distort linear time and memory, drawing some key distinctions between traumatic temporalities that are frequently elided in trauma theory. By contrast, I propose that parody may enable the traumatised subject to establish reflective distance from overwhelmingly painful affect by localising the experience in time. Arguing that Plath’s journals produce (rather than reveal) a traumatised subject, Chapter 3 explores how they both inhabit and exceed the figure of melancholic poet, ironising the conception of trauma as a wellspring of genius. Chapter 4 situates Plath’s so-called ‘Holocaust poems’ in the context of debates about the possibility of poetry after Auschwitz, showing how they parody cultural assimilation of the Holocaust and engage critically with the potential allure of victimhood narratives. Reading Bourgeois’ archival documents as a multivalent and figurative art form, Chapter 5 analyses how the Freudian Oedipal complex (as it is applied to the little girl) is constructed and critiqued via identification with literary daughters in the French canon. Chapter 6 observes how Bourgeois’s ‘cell’ installations deploy Gothic narrative techniques, foregrounding the fundamental epistemic uncertainty at the heart of Freud’s theory of the ‘primal scene’ and mocking the viewer’s desire to uncover a secret trauma

Type: Thesis (Doctoral)
Qualification: Ph.D
Title: Reframing Confession: Parodying Childhood Trauma in Sylvia Plath and Louise Bourgeois
Event: UCL (University College London)
Language: English
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10108019
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