Broken-off pieces: a memoir & Where nobody can follow: an overview of the self as process and product

Abstract

Creative Component
The creative component of this thesis consists of a transmutation of events from the raw material of my life experience into a work of creative non-fiction – Broken-Off Pieces: A Memoir. The act of writing - drafting, careful, considered revision and redrafting – continues to be exploratory research that emerges from, and complements, the creative and critical processes. Auto-ethnography may be expressed as an approach to research and writing that seeks to describe and systematically analyse personal experience to understand cultural experience. This approach challenges canonical ways of doing research and representing others and treats research as a political, socially-just and socially conscious act. A researcher uses tenets of autobiography and ethnography to do and write autoethnography. Thus, as a method, autoethnography is both process and product. I am exploring the physical and psychological damage that illness can inflict, asking questions on the ability to survive trauma; to find meaning in writing about these experiences. I am interested in how personal memory fuses with historical record. There is potential in what is obtainable by working with narrative, results that can be difficult to achieve with questionnaires and quantitative scales alone.

Critical Component
In Where Nobody Can Follow: An overview of the self as process and product, I demonstrate how my creative work engages with, and contributes to, broader conceptual or theoretical issues in trauma theory and narrative medicine. I am examining my own critical decisions in writing the memoir, the defining characteristics of self-narrative and the nature of therapeutic writing. Taking control, confronting illness and trauma in the form of creating a narrative of the self, allows for ownership of illness and provides understanding which is empowering. Throughout the critical essay, I discuss and evaluate the work of leading experts on trauma theory and narrative medicine like Cathy Caruth, Judith Herman and Rita Charon, in relation to my own experiences of living with chronic illness and the consequences of trauma. And I look at how memoir has been used by other writers with different experiences of trauma.

Thesis is embargoed until 31 December 2028.

Date of Award	Dec 2023
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Queen's University Belfast
Sponsors	AHRC Northern Bridge Doctoral Training Partnership
Supervisor	Glenn Patterson (Supervisor), Stefanie Lehner (Supervisor) & Jane Lugea (Supervisor)