HEIDI BOLLINGER DISSERTATION FINAL COPY.doc (Restricted Access)
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Rochester. Dept. of English, 2010.
This dissertation argues that testimonial literature resists and critiques policing institutions through its transgression of formal boundaries and synthesis of seemingly incommensurate genres. Contemporary theorists of genre exhibit anxiety about its institutional quality and policing function, echoing Jacques Derrida's “The Law of Genre.” Bruce Robbins has noted aptly: “when genre is discussed, the metaphor of the police is everywhere.” The characterization of genre as a restrictive social institution is significant and vexed in relation to the trauma narratives of marginalized groups and individuals who are themselves policed and contained by dominant social institutions. Through its symbiotic combination of genres, testimonial literature creates a “chorus” of witnesses: a multi-perspectival mode of bearing witness to traumatic historical events. Testimonial literature seeks to expand the historical record to acknowledge marginalized individuals and groups, while undermining the stability of historical representation.
Each chapter of this study examines a work of testimonial literature whose symbiotic combination of genres enables it to witness and critique policing institutions. Chapter 1 demonstrates how James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912) transgresses generic and racial boundaries to manipulate readerly expectations of African American literature’s testimonial function. Chapter 2 examines John A. Williams's novel Clifford's Blues (1999) as a generic fusion of the diary, Holocaust testimonial, slave narrative, and blues narrative. Through its combined form, the novel gives voice to a chorus of witnesses and transcends the logic of competing victimhood that haunts Holocaust literature. In Chapter 3, I argue that Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated (2002) tests the ability of fiction to function as an imaginative form of testimony, through a dialogic combination of epistle, magical realism, Jewish Memorial Book, and travelogue. The novel’s dialogic structure enables Foer to overturn the discourse of historical inevitability that pervades Holocaust literature. Chapter 4 treats Anna Deavere Smith's work of documentary theater Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (1994) as a discordant chorus of witnesses. Smith’s performance of conflicting testimonies counters the silencing of witnesses by the legal system and media during the Los Angeles riots. Each work in this study responds to a traumatic silence in the historical record with a combination of genres and plurality of witness voices.
University of Rochester - Dudley Doust Writing Associate Fellowship from the College Writing Program (2008 to 2010); Dean's Dissertation Fellowship (2009); Susan B. Anthony Institute Teaching Fellowship (2010)
