Border crossings : contemporary transnational literature across media and genre and Remind me again what happened : a novel
Abstract
[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.] Remind Me Again What Happened is a novel told through three characters' perspectives, one of whom suffers from memory loss. By exploring the individual memories that make up a collective history, my novel investigates the ways in which memory is narrated, archived, and validated. Remind Me Again What Happened is narrated in the first person by three characters - Claire, a journalist who has recently lost pieces of her memory after contracting Japanese Encephalitis while on assignment, Charlie, her estranged husband, an editor at a small town newspaper in Vermont, and their best friend, Rachel, who is harboring injuries from the time they all lived together. Claire's illness and subsequent memory loss trigger a variety of responses in every character, each of whom narrates their shared history in order to best justify his/her past behaviors and present resentments. Border Crossings: Contemporary Transnational Literature Across Media and Genre, I elucidates the formal strategies that contemporary transnational novelists employ in order to represent the flows of people, information, and policies across local and globalized spaces. Exploring the intersections of photography, journalism, archival documents, activism, and fiction, the dissertation argues that transnational literature not only redefines traditional theories of the novel, but also creates new modes for approaching historical narrative, theories of citizenship, and definitions of national and world literatures.
Degree
Ph. D.
Thesis Department
Rights
Access is limited to the campus of the University of Missouri--Columbia.