Dream(e)scapes': a Poetic Experiment in Writing a Self

Critical Quarterly, 2019

Are dreams a kind of poetry? This question is raised, although never definitively answered, by The Interpretation of Dreams. At times, Freud treats dreams not as symptoms to be unravelled, but as evocative, indeterminate, nocturnal compositions. Where dreams are handled as aesthetic objects rather than clinical problems, a different kind of analysis ensues, at odds with the book’s more dominant hermeneutic style. The resulting poetics of dreams suggests an alternate route from dream interpretation to literary criticism: an associative, rather than symptomatic, Freudian reading.

European Journal of Women's Studies, 2009

ABSTRACT The aim of this article is to demonstrate a methodology that ‘writes across’ the separation (border?) between theory and practice. It refers to the French feminist writers of the 1970s and 1980s often categorized under the heading of ‘écriture féminine’, who were concerned with how language operates and with the relationship between language and the formation of the self. The article consists of a short preface introducing a piece of autobiographical writing 'driving home'. The piece brings into collision incidents, objects and time frames in an attempt to dissolve the borders between fact and fiction, personal and impersonal, private and public, poetic writing and analysis. In the act of writing 'driving home' the author also attempts to generate knowledge. 'driving home' searches within the anecdotal and autobiographical for methodological indicators. The how and why of the author’s writing practice run across, over and around each other, acting asshort and inconclusive pathways within the investigative structure of the whole.

Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, 2021

ABSTRACT: This essay interrogates and expands conventional views of the archive by considering how subjects who write themselves engage in processes of archival thinking and practices of curation in autobiographical discourse. It tracks features of alternative archives of the self in life writing through six microstudies that engage different concerns in autobiographical texts by women over the last century. The issues explored are affective archives of feelings and impressions; archives for rewriting the past; the imaginary archives of possible selves; digital archives of embodiment and desire; archives in global circulation; and archival remediation. The conclusion poses questions for those developing theoretical frameworks and methodologies to interpret the archival imaginary in the lives women inscribe and the afterlives they acquire. This article looks to expand methodologies in the field of archival studies that do not sufficiently attended to the status of the evidentiary in autobiographical materials and the archival imaginary mobilized in some autobiographical acts and practices and their afterlives.

Although the death of the Author, the problematization of referentiality and several other tenets of post-structuralist theory have questioned the feasibility of ‘Rousseauist’ autobiographical writing, we find autobiographical fragments in a number of texts by those very authors that challenge its feasibility. Autobiography existed long before Rousseau and will exist long after the Author’s death; but post-structuralist theory has certainly provoked a series of mutations in the notions of subject and language that structure any attempt at writing the self. While autobiographical writing in the tradition of Rousseau tends to focus on the development of the author’s soul, the postmodern autobiographical texts of Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy and Hélène Cixous foreground the authorial body. By privileging this body, Derrida, Nancy and Cixous subvert the notion of a disembodied cogito to upset the conventions that sustain the philosophical discipline. Moreover, the bodies produced in these texts are often bodies in crisis: circumcised bodies (Derrida), blind or myopic bodies (Derrida and Cixous), cancerous bodies and bodies with transplants (Nancy). In my contribution, I will relate the corporeal crises of the authors in question to the ways in which their texts both thematize and perform an epistemological challenge to the modern Western subject. Whereas the body in phenomenology served to ground knowledge claims, these sick and incapacitated bodies come to undermine epistemological stability. Playfully dislocating the boundary between philosophy and literature, Derrida, Nancy and Cixous employ autobiography in an attempt to undermine philosophical claims to universality in a mode of writing that inextricably entangles fragments of self writing with theoretical concerns, making a separation between the rhetorical, biographical and conceptual dimensions of their work all but impossible.

Qualitative Inquiry, 2018

Wet sheet that gets cold. The smell of sweat. A disrupted, unpleasant night again where my dreaming had me; a felt vulnerability from which it was impossible to hide. Sometimes, at bedtime, I already know that it will be a tough night. At the same time, the night offers experiences that radically differ from my everyday life. I want to learn from the way in which these experiences unfold and what I am capable of doing at night; what can my dreaming body teach me that can be generative for my writing? Through a reading of Hélène Cixous’s work on the writing body and inquiring into my night dreaming, I elaborate on possibilities for writing that differ from my usual daylight writing. Written in the form of seven invitations, I note that these possibilities are not about finding ways to overcome vulnerability in writing, but rather writing through vulnerability as a gift from the dreaming-writing-body.

In this dissertation I develop a theoretical framework for the practice of dream reading as a form of literary engagement worthy of attention from educators. Dream reading is a form of research in which the researcher takes responsibility for selfreflection and potential transformation of self through the construction of knowledge based on "reading" literary fictive images as if they arose from night dreams. This study develops dream reading theory through an exploration of Carol Shields' novel, Unless, as if it were a dream. It examines women's silence and the disposition of fear of knowing from multiple perspectives. The study uses my personal dream journals together with a variety of theoretical works in feminist, consciousness and dream theories to inform interpretations of Norah, Reta, Lois, and Danielle. For as Donald says, "when stories and ideas are juxtaposed, so that their meanings collide, they can shift our focus to new semantic spaces [to] clarify the experienced world" (p. 294). This work is a limit case that investigates women's silence and fear of knowing as they emerge from my personal experience of resistance to the chaos and uncertainty of disintegrating and rebuilding through midlife into crone.

The European Journal of Life Writing, S. SV1–SV12, 2021

This editorial introduces the four articles of the section "The Self in Verse. Exploring Autobiographical Poetry" and connects their specific findings to a variety of more general aspects in the study of life-writing. It sketches out preliminary considerations concerning the definition of autobiographical poetry and the relevance of paratexts and autofictionality for the genre. Furthermore, it outlines some of the most common recurring themes in poems dealing with autobiographical issues, such as writing (through) the body and exploring life's crises, watersheds, and crossroads lyrically. We advocate for a more comprehensive study of autobiographical poetry as a form of life-writing that, in our view, has not yet been investigated systematically, neither by historical nor by theoretical approaches in literary and cultural studies.

TEXT

This Special Issue of TEXT explores the capacity of dreamscapes to function as powerful literary devices within an array of creative writing forms, while also informing and shaping creative arts practice more broadly. Its authors demonstrate diverse curiosities about creative practice as a kind of dreaming, where a practitioner's engagements might constitute a quasi dreamwork-on-the-page. In addition to this, creative thinking itself can pass via registers reminiscent of the dream and of its atmospheres and formation, broaching unconscious material, experiences, and paradigms. Suffice to say, an inherent connection between dreams, storytelling and the production of artwork more generally is tested and expanded upon in these articles. The unconscious processes that unfold during dreaming may harvest their contents and compositions from the conscious processes engaged and activated intentionally by established practitioners when working in literary, narrative and poetic forms, but also vice versa. The poietic strategies fundamental to crafting dream sequences for written forms entail far more than a simple duplication of any real dreams' narrative potential, associative chains, structures, or uncanny atmospheres: they require writers to translate dream-like elements into tangible sequences, rhythms, or scenes, to bring material substance to the oneiric.

2024

Paper presented at the International Conference “After-words/After-worlds. The Legacy of Jacques Derrida.” Faculty of Humanities, University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland, 5-7 November, 2024.

2021

ABSTRACT: This essay interrogates and expands conventional views of the archive by considering how subjects who write themselves engage in processes of archival thinking and practices of curation in autobiographical discourse. It tracks features of alternative archives of the self in life writing through six microstudies that engage different concerns in autobiographical texts by women over the last century. The issues explored are affective archives of feelings and impressions; archives for rewriting the past; the imaginary archives of possible selves; digital archives of embodiment and desire; archives in global circulation; and archival remediation. The conclusion poses questions for those developing theoretical frameworks and methodologies to interpret the archival imaginary in the lives women inscribe and the afterlives they acquire. This article looks to expand methodologies in the field of archival studies that do not sufficiently attended to the status of the evidentiary in autobiographical materials and the archival imaginary mobilized in some autobiographical acts and practices and their afterlives.