UC Santa Barbara Electronic Theses and Dissertations
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UC Santa Barbara UC Santa Barbara Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Memory on the Periphery of War: The Life Writing and Uncertainty of Peripheral Witnesses in British Literature of World Wars I and II Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9j35d1kn Author Chenoweth, Rebecca Christine Publication Date 2018 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Santa Barbara Memory on the Periphery of War: The Life Writing and Uncertainty of Peripheral Witnesses in British Literature of World Wars I and II A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in English by Rebecca Christine Chenoweth Committee in charge: Professor Russell Samolsky, Chair Professor Aranye Fradenburg Joy Professor Glyn Salton-Cox Professor Dominique Jullien December 2018 The dissertation of Rebecca Christine Chenoweth is approved. _____________________________________________ L.O. Aranye Fradenburg Joy _____________________________________________ Glyn Salton-Cox _____________________________________________ Dominique Jullien _____________________________________________ Russell Samolsky, Committee Chair December 2018 Dedication Thank you to the members of my committee—Russell, Aranye, Glyn, and Dominique—for helping this project to take shape, for your guidance in research and writing, and for your support in every aspect of academic life not contained in these pages. Thanks also to Julie, Kay, and everyone involved in the Literature and the Mind Initiative for being a model of interdisciplinary thought; and to Bishnu, whose advising in the doctoral colloquium and beyond has made me a better scholar and teacher. Thank you to the English department staff who helped me to navigate the department and university—Mary Rae, Meg, and all the coordinators and advisors in the SASC—whose knowledge and support allowed me to balance research and teaching, and be better at both. Thank you to the Christopher Isherwood Foundation and the Huntington Library, as well as the University of Texas at Austin Office of Graduate Studies and the Harry Ransom Center, for supporting the archival research in this project, and for welcoming readers, students, and scholars to discover new things about the writers we love. And for their support of my research and writing, thank you also to the UCSB Academic Senate, the Department of English, and the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center Finally, thank you to the colleagues, friends, and family who helped me to believe in this project and myself—Kristy, Jonathan, MJ, Liz, Nicole, Dalia, Kyle, my parents, and everyone else who has read this project or listened to half-formed thoughts. iii Vita of Rebecca Christine Chenoweth December 2018 EDUCATION Bachelor of Arts in English, University of California, Santa Barbara, June 2010 (high honors) Master of Arts in English, University of California, Santa Barbara, June 2013 Doctor of Philosophy in English, University of California, Santa Barbara, December 2018 PROFESSIONAL EMPLOYMENT 2012-2016: Teaching Associate and Assistant, Department of English, UC Santa Barbara 2014-2016: Research Assistant, Literature and the Mind Initiative, UC Santa Barbara 2015-2017: Co-Lead Teaching Assistant, Department of English, UC Santa Barbara 2014-2018: Teaching Associate and Assistant, Writing Program, UC Santa Barbara AWARDS AND FELLOWSHIPS Graduate Affiliates Program Scholar, Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, UC Santa Barbara Christopher Isherwood Foundation Fellow, Huntington Library Graduate Division Dissertation Fellow, Academic Senate, UC Santa Barbara Donald Pearce Dissertation Fellowship, Department of English, UC Santa Barbara Harry Ransom Center Research Fellowship in the Humanities, University of Texas FIELDS OF STUDY Major Fields: Twentieth Century British Literature, Memory Studies Twentieth Century Anglophone Literature Literature and the Mind iv Abstract Memory on the Periphery of War: Life Writing and Uncertainty in British Literature of World War I and II By Rebecca Christine Chenoweth This project addresses a corpus of narratives across twentieth century British literature that illustrate the troubling effects of World Wars I and II on the memories and self- understanding of “peripheral witnesses:” people who live through events of potential mass trauma, but feel that they occupy a complex position of marginalization and privilege that simultaneously connects them to the event and distances them from it. The speakers examined in this project—primarily drawn from works by Virginia Woolf, Christopher Isherwood, Kazuo Ishiguro—respond to this position by drawing on narrative features of life writing genres from the autobiography to the travelogue. These speakers simultaneously strive to record detailed recollections of a war that has passed, and to interrogate their own memories for mistakes or gaps from the physical or temporal distance of the narrative present. This self-interrogative narrative mode—borne out of a self-questioning mental state that is prompted by culture-specific definitions of what it means to “see” war, and by unrealistic expectations that historically significant memories will be accurate, vivid, and comprehensive in scope—lays bare the imperfect, created nature of memory. By attending to v the gaps in their memories, and how the narrators aim to prevent or draw attention to these faults, this project exposes another fracture in memory that global war can reveal and exacerbate far beyond the battlefield. Memory on the Periphery of War contributes to the interdisciplinary field of memory studies, performing literary analysis in conversation with two methodologies: trauma studies from history and literary studies, and cognitive psychology. Examining texts by Virginia Woolf, Christopher Isherwood, and Kazuo Ishiguro that deploy and deconstruct conventions of life writing (with attention to contemporary approaches by Pat Barker and Ian McEwan, and unique approaches to life writing by parents of Isherwood and Ishiguro), this project recognizes a unique subgenre within war narratives and life writing. Taken together, these literary texts and theoretical frameworks invite us to recognize the role of creation, imagination, and self-questioning that are fundamental to memory’s processes, and to understand how particular experiences (like seeing war from the edge) can cast these traits of memory as faults. vi Table of Contents Introduction ……………………………………………………………………………........ 1 Chapter 1: Women Making and Mining Memory Across Genres in Virginia Woolf’s Novels and Life Writing ………………………………………………………………..…. 31 Chapter 2: Remembering as Re-Writing in Christopher Isherwood’s Novelized Autobiographies …………………………………………………………………. 107 Chapter 3: Repetition and Forgetting After War: The “Generation of Postmemory” Imagining War’s Edge in the Fictionalized Memoirs of Kazuo Ishiguro …..….….………... 166 Coda: Temporal Distance and Meta-Fictional Imagination Through Children in Barker and McEwan ……………………………………….………………………………… 216 Note on Appendices ………………………………………………………………...…….. 231 Appendix I: [“Very Annoying to Hear!”]: The War Widow’s Narrative Interventions in Bradshaw-Isherwood’s Commemorative “Diaries” of World War I …………... 232 Appendix II: “For the Others, It Was a Kind of Mercy:” Distance in Ishiguro’s “Flight from Nagasaki” and Family Documents on Japan …………………………………….. 245 Bibliography …………………………………………………………………………….. 256 vii Introduction From 2014 to 2018—when this project began to take shape and when it drew to a close—museums, libraries, and archives across the United States commemorated the centennial of World War I. The New York Public Library used one of their exhibitions to address “the manner in which public relations, propaganda, and mass media in its many forms were used to control public opinion about the war” (“Over Here”). The Harry Ransom Center, J. Paul Getty Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art also juxtaposed wartime propaganda with letters, poem drafts, and sketches from those who were in the trenches. Each exhibition contrasted these two narratives of the Great War: either explicitly, through statements about the exhibit as a whole, or implicitly, through the physical layout of works displayed. In the Ransom Center, recruitment posters were paired with gruesome photographs to bring the sanitized ideals of war up against previously censored images of violence. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a U.S. Army propaganda poster depicting Germans as gorillas stood alongside George Grosz’s satiric line drawing of German military doctors declaring walking skeletons fit for duty. These exhibits brought other perspectives of World War I into contrast as well: the war front and the home front through letters sent between them (including the perspectives of women and children), nations on opposing sides through visual arts, and even the mid-war and post-war years with works created as late as the 1920s that look back on the artist’s experience on the battlefield. But other than the tragic misnomer “the war to end all wars,” nothing is repeated so consistently across these exhibits as the contrast between government approved narratives and firsthand accounts of soldiers. This recurring framework suggests that, in the eyes of curators or patrons who visit these displays, the perspective of World War I soldiers was so muted and distorted in public 1 accounts that we were—and still are—in danger of missing or not