Thinking back and thinking forward – through her own split. En metateoretisk studie om självbiografisk metod och trauma hos Shoshana Felman och Maxine Hong Kingston

Abstract

Is it possible to speak or write about yourself, if you are considered, or experience yourself, as not able or allowed to do so? Can a person gain subjectivity and agency in limited situations? In this study I outline a new term called perverted agency to examine moments and figures within the text and the autobiographical gesture where limited spaces are transformed by a renegotiation of a hierarchy of values. According to literature critic Shoshana Felman in What Does a Woman Want? (1993), women cannot write autobiographies due to trauma and its impact upon memory. The aim of this study is to examine autobiographical methods and figurations of trauma. By first casting light upon cracks within some of Felman’s reasoning, I chisel what she, despite her dystopic view on women’s autobiographical writing, regards as strategies. Turning to the well praised autobiography The Woman Warrior (1976) by Maxine Hong Kingston where trauma and the traumatic speech is an overall trope I apply some of Felman’s strategies as a part in examining what methods are used to write about ’what cannot be written about’. Eventually I apply Felman’s own criteria on her theoretical work to argue that she is in fact writing her own autobiography while formulating her own poetics. Through a perverted agency, by using and transforming trauma and a ’poetics of impossibility’ – figures and rhetorical gestures of hesitation, speculation, dissociation, splits, and a coexistence of different genre, discourses, and aesthetics – into a kind of poetics of possibilities, Felman and Kingston create their autobiographies.