Graduate Student, English
About
The following paragraphs no longer accurately represent my positioning; this section will be updated soon.
I am interested in post-memory, melancholy, and nostalgic frustration/longing for events that one did not actually experience first-hand. In particular, I am interested in how these manifest as powerful markers of identity for subjects (or generations) who are subject to these formative emotions and fixate on these unexperienced (but nonetheless powerful) memories.
My thesis will focus on Newfoundland literature written by a so-called "hinge" generation -- that is, those who became aware of themselves and the world after Newfoundland's Confederation with Canada, but whose work is animated by a sense that Newfoundland retains some ghostly or fragmentary claim to nationhood. I want to unpack the post-colonial and psychoanalytic implications of these doubled-selves, simultaneously situated in and constituted by both a lived past and an unlived past that is literally foreign.
