Date of Award

6-2014

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Organizational Unit

College of Arts Humanities and Social Sciences, English and Literary Arts

First Advisor

Selah Saterstrom

Keywords

Creative writing, Nonfiction

Abstract

This dissertation, Uncountry, explores the gap between “remembered” official history and the more unreliable spaces of private memory and silent unofficial history. It aims to expand creative pathways into historical space, particularly histories of migration and displacement, and sets out to create both a map of belonging as well as walking the reader towards the nomadic spaces of dreams, memories and myths. I am specifically interested in the potential of cross-pollinating multiple sources of memory. How does the memory of my family’s migration (or its anecdotal narratives) intersect with my personal memory of visiting the Ukraine and the public documents that have recorded immigrants’ arrival in Ellis Island? What narratives emerge from collective remembrance and witness, and how does the engagement of diverse memory banks disrupt cohesive truth telling? The work resists closure and embraces the accumulation of multiple characters, histories, and experiences centering on archaic motifs as passed down through early written texts, such as the Hebrew Bible. Midrash is a further structural approach to move narratives beyond their own time-space limitations, their absences and silences, providing a manifold commentary on an original source text. Similarly to Susan Handelman’s comparison of Jabès’ work as an example of midrashic literature (60), characterized by the juxtaposition and varying of interpretations, Uncountry also employs a wide scope of narrative time and space, invested less in chronos, and rather embracing the Greek kairos.

Publication Statement

Copyright is held by the author. This work may only be accessed by members of the University of Denver community. The work is provided by permission of the author for individual research purposes only and may not be further copied or distributed. User is responsible for all copyright compliance.

Rights Holder

Yanara Friedland

Provenance

Received from author

File Format

application/pdf

Language

en

File Size

257 pgs

Discipline

Creative writing

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