Contemporary North American Motherhood Memoirs – PhD Project

von Rütte, Sabine (3 November 2021). Contemporary North American Motherhood Memoirs – PhD Project (Unpublished). In: Graduate School Gender Studies: Symposium. University of Bern. 03.11.2021.

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Contemporary North American Motherhood Memoirs – PhD Project”
Abstract: This doctoral thesis examines autobiographical narratives about motherhood – motherhood memoirs – by female writers from the North American context, such as, among others, Sheila Heti’s autofictional novel Motherhood (2018), Maggie Nelson’s genre-defying mix of autobiography and theory The Argonauts (2016), Rivka Galchen’s short essay collection/diary Little Labors (2016), and Julietta Singh’s longform epistolary essay The Breaks (2021). As a guiding principle leading me through my analyses, I am following Heather Hewett’s definition of motherhood memoir as a “life narrative written by those who are positioned in the social location of ‘mother’ and whose writing reflects their engagement with the work of mothering and parenting.” Following a close reading of my primary material, I argue that contemporary motherhood memoirs negotiate the relationship between the maternal and writerly selves by exploring the tensions between creativity, time, and a new sense of experience; they chronicle the diversity of maternal experience, and thereby challenge existing gender roles and heteronormative ideals of motherhood and family; and finally, they find formally innovative ways to narrate the maternal self.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Division/Institute:	06 Faculty of Humanities > Department of Linguistics and Literary Studies > Institute of English Languages and Literatures 06 Faculty of Humanities > Department of Linguistics and Literary Studies > Institute of English Languages and Literatures > American Studies
UniBE Contributor:	von Rütte, Sabine Jeanne
Subjects:	800 Literature, rhetoric & criticism 800 Literature, rhetoric & criticism > 820 English & Old English literatures
Language:	English
Submitter:	Federico Erba
Date Deposited:	07 Jan 2022 08:24
Last Modified:	14 Mar 2024 12:31
URI:	https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/163322