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 Contemporary North American Motherhood Memoirs – PhD Project (Unpublished).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

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