Doctoral Degrees (English)

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Browsing Doctoral Degrees (English) by browse.metadata.advisor "Ellis, Jeanne, 1962-"

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    Madness and gender in contemporary diasporic life writing and fiction
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2024-03) De Villiers, Stephanie; Ellis, Jeanne, 1962-; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: In this dissertation, I consider the roles that gender, migration, and diaspora play in the portrayal of madness in two contemporary life writing texts and four novels. The selected texts map a variety of diasporic journeys that encompass the variables of migration and emigration: I’m Telling the Truth, But I’m Lying (2019) by Bassey Ikpi, The Icarus Girl (2005) by Helen Oyeyemi and Freshwater (2018) by Akwaeke Emezi all originate from Nigeria; Porochista Khakpour’s Sick: A Memoir (2018) from Iran; Sorry To Disrupt the Peace (2017) by Patrick Cottrell from South Korea; and Mira T. Lee’s Everything Here is Beautiful (2018) from China. The aim of this dissertation is therefore to examine how the triangular connection of madness, gender, and diaspora in these texts conveys the experiences of mental distress or madness caused by a sense of displacement or alienation that disrupts the lives of the protagonists. My specific interest is in their authors’ employment of metaphor and experiments with language and form to convey the interior worlds of the protagonists with a view to analysing the ways in which new definitions and vocabularies of madness emerge from the lived experience of diaspora portrayed. The key terms of the dissertation — ‘gender’, ‘madness’, and ‘diaspora’ — all raise important questions of definition and disciplinary specificity that emerge from substantive bodies of research and theory, which the dissertation engages within the context of literary criticism. The original contribution of this dissertation thus resides in the theoretical triangular connection of these terms in relation to a literary critical reading of examples of recent diasporic fiction and life writing which have in most cases not yet received extensive critical attention.