School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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Item(Re)tracing the line: familial representations in contemporary multicultural texts and immigrant fiction( 2014)This thesis is a genealogical exploration into a second-generation immigrant writer’s identity through critical and creative writing. It (re)traces the author’s own familial immigrant experience via select contemporary literature and multicultural works, analysing key theoretical ideas and critical scholarly texts by intellectuals, including Roland Barthes, Marianne Hirsch, Madelaine Hron and Gaston Bachelard. The thesis also explores and produces creative works on the themes of death and memory, place and trauma, journey and home. Chapter One, discusses death photography as the site of trauma and the “wound” (Barthes, Camera Lucida 26), and the resulting narratives produced as a response to the “punctum” (27) through the analysis of specific photographic works and texts by Chinese-Australian artist William Yang, French theorist Roland Barthes, and Australian photography curator, historian and writer, Helen Ennis. The chapter also introduces the writer’s own idea of “the personal punctum” building on the Barthesian notion of the power existing within death photographs and the “triggering” of memories through “photo elicitation” (Harper 2002) for their potential in the creation of fictional narrative. Chapter Two, through textual analysis of two contemporary Asian-Australian writers, Alice Pung’s memoir Her Father’s Daughter (2011) and Nam Le’s fictional short story “Love and Honour and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice” (2009), trauma and second-generation immigrant writing about place, explicitly the landscape and familial homeland as “traumascape” (Tumarkin 12), are examined . The section focusses on the inter-generational effects of trauma and “postmemories of place” (own term), and the conflict arising with the appropriation of survivors’ testimonies. Chapter Three, investigates the trauma and pain as a result of the “journey” (Hron 15) in the immigrant narrative genre. It explores the ideas of “topography” and “topoanalysis” with the mapping of the first-generation immigrant’s journey back to the homeland. The emigrant’s/immigrant’s journey and the realities of the old homeland and the new imagined home are discussed through Shaun Tan’s graphic novel The Arrival (2006), and Péter Forgács’ documentary Hunky Blues (2009), about the Hungarian mass migration to America. Framing the dissertation are selected creative works. The non-fiction interleaves are bridging devices, linking critical theory with creative practice, enabling meditation on the aforementioned critical themes provoked by my father’s death. The fiction includes chapters from Our Fathers, a contemporary-historical novel of a boy escaping post revolution Hungary, and his death in Brisbane fifty years on. The fiction ties both past and present through themes of family history, trauma, inter-generational transfer of memories and postmemories, place, and the idea of home.