A Question on Genre:
The Binary of the Creative/Theoretical Text in Elif Batuman’s The Possessed
Anna Nguyen
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Creative writing, notably different from creativity in research methods, has long been a contested form in academic writing. In the introduction of The Possessed, Elif Batuman begins her literary essay collection with an immediate reference to Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain. For Batuman, the working question of the very long and complex novel is quite simple: “How does someone who doesn't actually have tuberculosis end up spending seven years at a tuberculosis sanatorium?” (Batuman 3). She rewrites Mann’s working question to pose a similar one for herself, to justify regarding her decision to enter the Stanford comparative literature department as a person “with no real academic aspirations” and who ends “up spending seven years in suburban California studying the form of the Russian novel?” (3). Love is an abstract answer to the parallel questions posed by the reader and writer. But it is not enough of an answer to guide her more obscured question about the ideological underpinnings of institutions.
Within the first page and a half, Batuman sets up her story as a life within literature, particularly Russian literature, in an institutional framing. The dilemma for Batuman, who studied linguistics as an undergraduate, was how to continue with her love of literature in addition to fulfilling her dreams of writing a novel. The question of love, then, becomes a question of which programmatic vision best supports this love. Click here to continue reading. |
Saving Self and Others in Telling: Rhetoric, Stories, and Transformations
Rachel N. Spear
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Four sentences filled with emotion and implication. Four sentences that appear early in Patricia Weaver Francisco’s 1999 memoir appropriately titled Telling: A Memoir of Rape and Recovery: “I’ve told this story many times. I’ve never told it this way before. Telling requires a kind of courage that I normally lack. This book is an exertion, a promise I’m keeping, and it’s slow going” (18). Francisco’s narrative reconstruction of her rape and recovery is not like hashing out the exacts for a police report or like journaling the events for herself. Rather, her textual representation, creatively and cleverly, braids together four distinct narrative layers: the narrative of her presently writing her rape story; the narrative of her past rape and the years living in its aftermath; the narrative of her telling a bedtime story to her son; and the insertion of excerpts from that bedtime story—Hans Christian Anderson’s classic fairy tale The Snow Queen.” [1]
Francisco’s memoir has received little scholarly attention—a review here, a footnote there. Scholars briefly acknowledge the author’s style and memoir’s form, indicating that Francisco writes in “an almost halting, episodic style…[that] is deliberately self-conscious” (Gediman and Zaleski 60) and making note that “fairy tale…[is] a central device in telling her traumatic story” (Haase, “Children” 374). However, these quick references limit the significance of Francisco’s rhetorical moves, particularly how her memoir hinges on feminist rhetorics, multiple rhetorical positionings, and a layered narrative structure that transcends the individual-based pitfall of therapeutic rhetoric. Intersecting feminist rhetorical theory with trauma studies, autobiographical studies, and fairy tale scholarship, I illuminate how Francisco fuses her seemingly fragmented narratives together with a storytelling thread not only to implore social change but also to reconstruct her identity. Francisco writes herself as someone who has moved past the trauma, depicting her present self as mother, activist, and storyteller while textually interrupting her (everyday) telling of a bedtime story with the extensive, layered detailed telling of her rape and recovery. Such narrative interruptions rhetorically mirror the return of trauma and its symptoms, surfacing during normal occurrences. Thus, Francisco’s four distinct narratives, in a way, represent fragmented versions of the self, a seemingly fractured identify attempting to make sense out of the insensible and attempting to exist in the present while being interrupted with memories, with sensations, with stories of the past. Click here to continue reading. |