School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemBakhtinian Chronotopes in the Campus Novel; and a Short Story Collection: Gutsy Little Unit( 2022)This thesis contributes to Bakhtinian chronotope studies by identifying and examining the campus chronotope produced in campus novels. In the campus novel genre, campus environs are more than simply a setting in which to locate action: the university is a geographical and psychological site that occupies a central position within the text and acts as an influential character determinant. Given that campus spatiotemporalities underpin campus novels, Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the chronotope presents as an apposite analytical framework with which to study them. In the literary analysis component, I consider three distinct chronotopic forms – dominant, intervallic and motivic – to present chronotopic readings of three campus novels. Taking Zadie Smith’s On Beauty (2005) as an exemplar campus novel, I examine the narrative opportunities afforded by the spatiotemporal constraints of the novel’s dominant campus chronotope. This examination subsequently informs the argument that competing intervallic chronotopes of campus, crime fiction and Greek tragedy create a notable chronotopic hybridity in Donna Tartt’s The Secret History (1992). The campus chronotope also supports reframing and extending the diegetic value of Bakhtin’s staircase chronotopic motif and his established interpretation of stairways as sites of threshold and encounter. I contend that Vladimir Nabokov amplifies the stairway to the level of a stage in his campus novel Pnin (1957) by exploiting its associated spatiotemporal elements of performance, display and spectacle. In the creative component, I position the campus chronotope as a generative writing device to present a collection of interlinked short stories and flash fiction titled Gutsy Little Unit. Threaded through many of the stories is the campus chronotope in dominant, intervallic or motivic form. The collection is primarily focalised through the character of Nessie Loewe, though several characters in her orbit are protagonists in their own dedicated stories. Nabokov’s Pnin strongly influences the configuration of this short story collection; I take inspiration from its lightly comical tone and interlinked story structure of impressionistic sketches of Timofey Pnin’s life in and around a college.
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Item(Re)defining recovery: exploring poetry as a therapeutic tool in recovery from severe mood episodes and associated suicide attempts in bipolar disorder( 2020)The critical component of this thesis explores the value of poetry as a therapeutic tool in recovery from severe mood episodes and associated suicide attempts in individuals diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Through literary analysis of Shira Erlichman’s Odes to Lithium and Jeanann Verlee’s Said the Manic to the Muse, I suggest that poetry allows a therapeutic space for dynamic reclamation of subjective narrative experiences of bipolar disorder from the medical discourse. Poetic devices such as personification and juxtaposition support the decentralisation of narrative in the subjective dialectic, thus creating scope for the productive tolerance of polarities, fragmentation and disorder. In doing so, poetry can facilitate emotional healing whilst eschewing redemptive narrative arcs. This provides valuable alternate readings and renderings of ‘recovery’ as part of an ongoing management of chronic mental illness which prioritises the experiential perspective, and thereby posits poetic process as a dynamic therapeutic tool in bipolar and attempted suicide contexts. The creative component of this thesis is a collection of poetry exploring my own recovery.