Telling encounters: Disrupted memory and fragmented narration in the works of William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf

The dissertation analyzes formal and thematic treatments of disrupted memory processes in novels by William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf, using Sigmund Freud's model of psychic trauma to suggest that the purpose of linguistic production in these texts is not narration but telling, its aim not abreaction but transmission, its method not the thematics of representation but the poetics of ruptured mnemosis. Chapter one examines representations of shock and memory in several of Faulkner's early novels, using Soldiers' Pay and Flags in the Dust to show a general development of the themes of shock and mnemosis as Faulkner's career matured, concurrent with an increasing sophistication in techniques of fragmentation, dislocation, and repetition to represent these themes and the mental states associated with them. Chapter two examines Absalom, Absalom! as an exemplary text for the high modernist revision of narrative and of the literary representation of memory, seeing it as an allegory of reading whose structure constitutes a critique of narrative as a form in which the very possibility of reading is brought into question. Chapter three turns to the work of Virginia Woolf, who similarly questions the ability of conventional narrative to perform the task of fiction, which for her is to (re)create experience rather than simply to describe it. The chapter compares "Modern Fiction" and "A Sketch of the Past" to explore the relationship between the "atom-showers" of conscious perception and the "shock-receiving capacity" Woolf puts at the heart of her identity as a writer, and it examines Woolf's techniques for representing memory and transmission in "An Unwritten Novel" and Mrs. Dalloway. Chapter four investigates ways in which The Waves conveys a formal and thematic frustration with the fundamental capacity of the narrative and lyric modes to perform the primary tasks of fiction and offers a new literary mode, akin to the dramatic, to accomplish these tasks, a "little language" for transcending the limitations of sequential narrative. The conclusion relates the poetics of ruptured mnemosis to the dynamics of hypertext fiction.