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    'Invincible summer' : a thesis presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Masters in Creative Writing at Massey University, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2019) Cush-Hunter, Jeanita
    Why is silence considered to be golden? This Master of Creative writing thesis questions why so many women suffer in silence and dares to break that silence. The thesis examines the genre of the personal essay in a contemporary context and explores its relevance and utility for the expression of the stories of women’s suffering. The thesis consists of two sections, creative and critical, and has an eighty percent creative component and a twenty percent critical component. Invincible Summer is divided into two parts. The first part is titled ‘Concerto’ and consists of 8 personal essays. This section explores content and subject matter that is specifically about and, relevant to, my personal experiences with suffering as a woman including Anorexia nervosa, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, Postpartum trauma and being the mother of a child with Autism. The second part is titled ‘Risoluto’ and it is structured around critical analysis of the communication of suffering experienced by other women writers including Ashleigh Young, Maggie O’Farrell, and Leslie Jamison. As a whole, but most directly in this essay, the thesis questions and investigates the criticisms leveled against the personal essay, particularly the accusations of solipsism, narrow scope, and sensationalism. The thesis employs a variety of approaches toward the personal essay in order to explore the diversity and flexibility of the genre as a form of autobiographical writing. These personal essays utilise different approaches to structure and are built around scenes from specific times in my life. The essays explore the use of patterns and connections through personal writing in a way that allows each essay to be effective as a stand-alone essay while also functioning as part of a whole through the interweaving of common themes and events. By taking this approach, I aimed to portray the essays as snapshots of unique moments in order to demonstrate how fragments of a life may be perceived as isolated incidents while still forming part of a whole cohesive picture. My purpose when creating this thesis was to demonstrate the versatility, power and accessibility of the personal essay for women who write about their suffering. In the creative component, I aimed to demonstrate the flexibility of the personal essay as a framework that is capable of supporting multiple stories from multiple stages in a writer’s life. In the critical component, I defend the personal essay’s place in a contemporary context and argue against specific criticisms in order to justify that self-disclosure is an acceptable and respectable form of communication.
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    Fiona Kidman, writer : a feminist critique of New Zealand society : a thesis presented in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English Literature at Massey University, Albany, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2012) Leclercq, Anna Elizabeth
    Two perspectives are pervasive in Fiona Kidman’s writing: the reconstruction of historical female voices, through fictional narrative; the recording of contemporary female voices, through autobiographical commentary and through fictional characterisations. This thesis engages with examples of Kidman’s work which show Kidman’s literary project to be the shaping of a New Zealand Pakeha cultural identity from a feminist perspective. In other words, Kidman constructs a patriarchal plot in order to demonstrate and expose the historical and contemporary inequalities of women’s position within New Zealand society. Their fictionalisations are influenced significantly by relationship intimacy, but their intention lies deeper. For those who wish to explore below the emotional surface of Kidman’s stories, there lies a social metanarrative, a journey of discovery for the reader. Each characterisation is part of an arranged message which Kidman challenges us to decipher. Kidman’s constructed narrative is manipulative and manipulated; put together in order to explore and explain the workings of the female psyche under stress; how the female psyche responds to the pressures of living within a patriarchal society; those ways in which the female psyche acts and reacts when seeking to buck the prevailing system, and how the system responds to this. Although not apparent when read piecemeal, Kidman’s body of work has an identifiable sense of unity, amounting to a social critique of an epoch.
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    'I'm not a woman writer, but--' : gender matters in New Zealand women's short fiction 1975-1995 : a thesis presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2006) Le Marquand, Jane Nicole
    From the late 1970s, New Zealand women short story writers increasingly worked their way into the literary mainstream. In the wake of the early, feminist-motivated years of the decade their gender, which had previously been the root of their marginalized position, began to work for them. However, rather than embracing womanhood, this growth in gender recognition led to many writers rejecting overt identification of their sex. To be a labeled a woman writer was considered patronising, a mark of inferiority. These women wanted to be known as writers only, some even expressing a hope for literature to reach a point of androgyny. Their work, however, did not convey an androgynous perspective. Just as the fact of their gender could not be avoided, so the influence their sex had on their creativity cannot be denied. Gender does matter and New Zealand women's short fiction published in the 1975-1995 period illustrates its significance. From the early trend for adopting fiction as a site for social commentary and political treatise against patriarchy's one-dimensional image of woman, these stories show a gradually increasing awareness of fictional possibilities, allowing for celebration of the multiplicity of female experience and capturing a process of redefinition rather than rejection of 'women's work'. Though in the later 1990s it may no longer have been politically 'necessary' to promote women's work on the grounds of gender, on a personal level the 'difference of view' of the woman writer remained both visible and vital. An increasing sense of woman-to-woman communication based on shared experience emerges: women are writing as women, about women, for women.
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    Trauma and recovery in Janet Frame's fiction : a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Graduate Studies (Department of English), the University of British Columbia
    (Massey University, 1997) Lawn, Jennifer
    Focusing on four novels by Janet Frame in dialogue with texts by Freud, Zizek, Lacan, and Silverman, my project theorizes trauma as the basis for both an ethical and an interpretive practice. Frame's fiction develops a cultural psychology, showing how the factors of narcissistic fantasy and the incapacity to mourn contribute to physical and epistemic aggression committed along divides of ethnicity, gender, and linguistic mode of expression. Employing trauma as a figure for an absolute limit to what can be remembered or known, I suggest that reconciliation with whatever is inaccessible, lacking, or dead within an individual or collective self fosters a non-violent relation with others. I begin by querying the place of "catharsis" within hermeneutic literary interpretation, focusing on the construction of Frame within the New Zealand literary industry. With Erlene's adamantine silence at its centre, Scented Gardens for the Blind (1964) rejects the hermeneutic endeavour, exemplified by Patrick Evans' critical work on Frame, to make a text "speak" its secrets. My readings of Intensive Care (1970) and The Adaptable Man (1965) address inter-generational repetitions of violence as the consequences of the failure to recognise and work through the devastations of war. The masculine fantasy of totality driving the Human Delineation project in Intensive Care has a linguistic corollary in Colin Monk's pursuit of the Platonic ideality of algebra, set against Milly's "degraded" punning writing. In The Adaptable Man, the arrival of electricity ushers in a new perceptual rgime that would obliterate any "shadow" of dialectical negativity or internal difference. The thesis ends with a swing toward conciliation and emotional growth. The homosexual relationship depicted in Daughter Buffalo (1972) offers a model of transference, defined as a transitional, productive form of repetition that opens Talbot to his ethnic and familial inheritance. Working from within a radical form of narcissism, the novel reformulates masculinity by embracing loss as "phallic divestiture" (Kaja Silverman)