ISDAL & 'I was ashamed, but undaunted (my epithet?)': intersections of shame and elegy in Maggie Nelson's Jane: A Murder

Abstract

Among the myriad legacies of modernism is shame, manifesting as both an explicit, genre-derived anxiety, and as a generative affective force. Maggie Nelson’s Jane: A Murder (2005) is the product of these two distinct, but nonetheless linked, shame-based conflicts. Jane is a poetic exploration of the murder of Nelson’s aunt, which occurred before Nelson was born. On the one hand, Jane arrives as the poetic successor to complex, near-century long grappling with lyric poetics, influenced by the 20th century US academy’s flawed but vociferous anti-lyricism. However, the text is also emblematic of a more genre-specific upheaval, that of elegy. The result is a text made complex and contradictory by Nelson writing into these conflicts. Because of these distinct but symbiotic shames, Jane as a poetic and elegiac vessel proves incapable of holding, and the ideas breach the boundaries of the initial form. The result of this breaching is The Red Parts: Autobiography of a Trial (2007), a prose companion work, which retroactively reframes and supplements the ideas of its prequel. The critical component of this PhD will attempt to interrogate how shame manifests within Jane, and how it infiltrates and alters Nelson’s complex poetics of elegy. The creative component is a collection centred around the Isdal woman, an unidentified woman whose body was found in Isdalen, Norway, in 1970, and who has since become fodder for True Crime speculation. The collection attempts to interrogate the ethics of co-opting a woman’s death for the purposes of narrative intrigue, while also confronting its own complicity.

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	Gail McConnell (Supervisor) & Stephen Sexton (Supervisor)