Disgusting woundedness : anorexia and the transgenerational transmission of trauma

Abstract

This thesis examines the transgenerational aspects of trauma, focusing on both the phenomenon of anorexia and the discourse about it in the humanities. It seeks to determine the role of trauma in the disturbing a/effects, or affective and effective elements, that have been associated with first-hand accounts of anorexic experience, and to track the way that these same a/effects complicate those theories that reduce anorexia to culturalist frameworks. The dissertation Disgusting Woundedness: Anorexia and the transgenerational transmission of trauma argues that even when trauma is invoked in prominent discussions about anorexia in the humanities, the discourse fails to take proper account of it and also fails to notice, as it were, its own failure to do so, since an abjective, or compulsively dismissive, substitution of the traumatic material in the text is bound up with a teleological or goal-driven pursuit of the substituted object. This pattern of abjective substitution is also identifiable in the internal dynamics of anorexia, whose modes, furthermore, can be likened to key narrative features of the Gothic. Hence, against perspectives which maintain that the more disturbing textual features of a first-hand account of anorexic experience, such as its Gothic detail and narrative digression, threaten a vulnerable reader with anorexic "contagion", this dissertation argues that these features are conduits, rather, of traumatic material that is yet to be brought to therapeutically representative language, and hence yet to be addressed. Therefore, any transmission of anorexia would require, in the first instance, a shared mode of response to the radical difficulty of putting words to trauma. Research findings from attachment theory are then used to form the proposition that the very same reflective, mentalising approach being advocated for eating disorders in the clinical context might be useful in moderating the abjective processes in our reading and writing of anorexia. A reflective approach has the capacity to do more than merely forestall our tendencies to abject traumatic material in a text which, otherwise, might prompt a potentially infinite series of teleological abjections. It also provides a means for this traumatic material to be articulated in the text and, as a result, for its distortive a/effects to be eased. The second part of this thesis "" the novel, The Wall of Still Lives "" complements the investigation by testing the extent to which a reflective use of digressive strategies has the capacity to access relevant traumatic material in a fictional account of anorexic experience, even when the anxious teleology of a narrative voice works to exclude it. Here, the relationship between teleological narrative processes and reflective disruptions to these processes is played out in full in a fictive realm.

Date of Award	2017
Original language	English