Appropriating culture to recuperate history/prisoner

The following thesis consists of three parts: a research paper comparing two other texts, In Country by Bobbie Ann Mason and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera, that incorporate the same or similar strategies as those adopted in the creative component of the thesis, a synopsis of two related texts preceding the creative component, and finally, the creative component itself, Prisoner. The essay, requiring research into critiques of the Mason and Kundera texts, found a number of parallels between them and my own creative practices relating to Prisoner. All three texts can be seen to appropriate icons of popular culture, and high culture on the part of Kundera, as part of their strategy to tell a story. Additionally, all three can be seen to develop similar, and occasionally oppositional, philosophical discourse on the recuperation of history, at both a personal and political level. The inclusion of a synopsis of two creative texts written prior to Prisoner, was deemed necessary as they set the stage for the third and final text in completing an extended narrative. The creative text itself completes the story begun in the previous texts, The Visitation and The Interview, and resolves the ambiguities inherent in the previous texts. Additionally, it incorporates a strategy, much like Mason and Kundera, of appropriating a popular cultural icon in Prisoner – the television series of the early eighties, as part of its discourse into the recycling and re-interpretation of history conducted by the story’s characters.