Alienated Memories: Reconstructing the Self in Autobiographical Writings of Diasporic Iranian Women

本文将分析伊朗女作家的散居回忆录，强调生活写作在治疗创伤记忆中的作用。我研究的双语女性隶属于两种截然不同的文化（美国和伊朗）。这些作家用波斯语和英语还原了创伤记忆，在这样做的过程中，他们协商了由流散状态形成的相互冲突的双文化主体性。用另一种语言讲述移民的创伤性记忆可以治疗性地重塑它们。另一方面，作为移民创伤后果之一的语言丧失和非领土化可能导致进一步的流离失所。此外，由于伊朗文化与美国文化对女性身份的定义之间的话语冲突，这些作家作为移民和女性双重流离失所。为了理解他们的人生故事，解决他们的冲突，这些作家通过讲述双语自传式记忆来（重新）建构他们的身份。我希望在我选择的文本中调查自我塑造和流散创伤记忆叙述的后果。我将探讨如何通过记忆和叙述一般的记忆（汉克[1998]称之为“脚本疗法”），特别是通过用一种不同于它们被铭刻的语言来做这件事，主体在治疗上如何将自己与创伤性语言依赖记忆的真实性拉开距离。

This thesis will analyse diasporic memoirs by Iranian women writers, emphasizing the role of life-writing in healing traumatic memories. The bilingual women I study affiliate to two distinct cultures (the US and Iran). These writers restore traumatic memories in Persian and English, in so doing negotiating conflicted bicultural subjectivities shaped by their diasporic condition. Narrating intrusive traumatic memories of immigration in a different language can therapeutically reshape them. On the other hand, language loss and deterritorialization, which are among the traumatic consequences of immigration, may result in further displacement. Additionally, these writers are doubly displaced both as immigrants and women due to the discursive conflict between Iranian and adopted American cultural definitions of female identity. In order to make sense of their life stories and to resolve their conflicts, these writers (re)construct their identities by narrating bilingual autobiographical memories. I wish to investigate the consequences of self-fashioning and narration of diasporic traumatic memories in my selected texts. I will explore how by remembering and narrating memories in general (termed 'scriptotherapy' by Hanke [1998]), and by doing so in a language other than the one in which they were inscribed, in particular, the subject therapeutically distances herself from the authenticity of traumatic language-dependent memories.