عنوان

Testimony and poesis :

Number

TLets776046

Title Proper

Testimony and poesis :

General Material Designation

[Thesis]

First Statement of Responsibility

Stuart, Penelope J.

Title Proper by Another Author

challenging the symbolic supports of a culture of violence against women

Name of Publisher, Distributor, etc.

University of Glasgow

Date of Publication, Distribution, etc.

2007

Dissertation or thesis details and type of degree

Ph.D.

Body granting the degree

University of Glasgow

Text preceding or following the note

2007

Text of Note

This thesis begins with an acknowledgement of the reality of wide-ranging, cross-cultural violence against women because they are women, in the world today. In a quest to locate a strategy for prevention of such abuse in cultural change, it initially details directions and difficulties of research in this field. Seeking deep- seated cultural change beyond that which existing legal, political and educational interventions offer, it engages with the power of poetics and literature to disrupt social imaginaries: the shared understandings that underpin practice within societies. It explores factors that inhibit or enable the emergence of witness to trauma in examples of post-Holocaust and incest survivor testimony. In engagement with the writing of Paul Celan, it asks how poetics might speak the unspeakable when such trauma narratives fail. It draws on the thinking of Julia Kristeva and Emmanuel Levinas on language, subject formation and ethics to examine the complexities of this issue. Having located this move within a current strand of feminist theory, it goes on to employ the fiction of J.M. Coetzee as an example of literature which by its form disrupts and subverts existing discourses, such as those that currently frame gender identity.

Stuart, Penelope J.

University of Glasgow

Electronic name

p

[Thesis]

276903

a

Y