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Dissertation Information for Dana Beth Millard McGraw

NAME:
- Dana Beth Millard McGraw

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- Women's Studies

SCHOOL:
- Emory University (USA) (2007)

ADVISORS:
- Angelika Bammer
- Rosemarie Garland-Thomson

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- Rosemarie Garland-Thomson
- Robyn Fivush

MPACT Status: Fully Complete

Title: \"The living of dying\": An epistolary grief memoir

Abstract: This study introduces, defines, and analyzes a literary genre that has not been previously singled out and named, epistolary grief memoir; this genre, a subset of the life-writing category of letters, is further divided into two sub-genres, epistolary thanatography (the story of a death, in letters) and epistolary threnography (the story of a grief, in letters), a term I coin. Employing autobiographical criticism, I analyze a representative text, a set of letters and emails I myself wrote during a twelve year period in which my domestic partner was diagnosed and treated for three episodes of cancer and for four years after her death. In a close reading of the text, using the tools of literary criticism, I analyze narrative form, metaphor and other figurative language, plot, and themes in the memoir.

Epistolary memoir, as distinct from traditional retrospective memoir, is written in real time, to a known audience, its composition episodic and serial, making it a form of testimony, often to traumatic events. In an extension of the definition of trauma, I recognize the experience of living with multiple recurrences of cancer and of facing a terminal illness as a form of attachment trauma; the consequent emotional reactions provoked in my partner and me represent a kind of post traumatic stress, the symptoms of which can be seen in the letters. I use psychoanalytic theory to analyze these symptoms in terms of loss and repetition.

The project is based in the feminist claim that the lives of ordinary women, lesbians, are a productive subject for academic study. In the field of death studies, it introduces letters as a primary text for the study of death and dying, and it provides a case study in how one couple defines a \"good death,\" in this case as coming to know \"the living of dying\" both intellectually and experientially. A contribution is made to disability studies in the dissertation\'s recognition of dying from a lingering wasting disease as a form of progressive disability, one which most people will face, and in its insistence on knowing and speaking this truth about human existence.

MPACT Scores for Dana Beth Millard McGraw

A = 0
C = 0
A+C = 0
T = 0
G = 0
W = 0
TD = 0
TA = 0
calculated 2008-02-24 17:49:54

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