Year

2019

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Department

School of the Arts, English and Media

Abstract

This thesis seeks to engage, both critically and creatively, with the place of history, experience and memory in what Marija Cetinic calls a ‘catastrophic era’, where the violent stimuli of the modern techno-aesthetic results in a poverty of experience. It asks the question—increasingly fraught, increasingly urgent: How do we experience, witness and remember within the sensory deluge, shock and surfeit of modernity?

The critical component of this thesis extends the work of Walter Benjamin (with a particular focus on The Arcades Project and Baudelaire, which have been positioned as Benjamin’s ‘prehistory of modernity’) and Susan Buck-Morss’ interdisciplinary writing on aesthetics, anaesthetics and narcotic modernity, updating both scholars’ approaches for the new modernity, in which a ‘virulence of memory’ shocks the collective consciousness into historical and contemporary amnesia. Against the current ‘memory crisis’ of modernity, I argue that experience, memory and empathy—a cultural ‘awakening’—are possible, and look to literature, specifically allegory, as an alternative means of witnessing contemporary and historical trauma, both punctual and structural. In doing so, I introduce two original concepts. First, the thesis argues that allegory offers simultaneous (somatic) connection to and (territorial and temporal) distance from the sites of trauma, allowing a reader to engage—as ‘intimate-distant witness’— without activating the protective shock reflexes that inhibit experience and memory. Secondly, I argue that the intimate-distant landscape of allegory encourages ‘empathic synaesthesia’, wherein the pain of others’ trauma can be felt, indirectly but somatically, as referred pain or referred sensation.

My theoretical framework is then used to analyse two contemporary allegorical novels: Téa Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife, which represents the punctual trauma of the Balkan war(s), and Charlotte Wood’s The Natural Way of Things, which speaks to the structural trauma of gender and the punctual trauma of the Hay Girls Institute. The thesis also includes a textual analysis of my novel, The Memory Addicts, which forms the second (creative) component of this thesis, and shares the same central concerns as the critical exploration. The novel, set in a world overrun and overwhelmed by memory, asks impossible questions about how we bear witness and how we live with the past without betraying the present. Within its allegorical thread (the Island of Lorne), the text also represents the trauma of transinstitutionalisation within boarding houses, wondering what it means to have too much and what it costs to have too little, to lie awake worrying that even that—even you—can be taken away.

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Unless otherwise indicated, the views expressed in this thesis are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the University of Wollongong.