Date of Award

2014

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Humanities

First Advisor

Van Tuyl, Jocelyn

Keywords

Marsden, John, Myers, Walter Dean, Young Adults, Imprisonment

Area of Concentration

Literature

Abstract

This thesis examines the use of literary techniques to resist confession in two realistic young adult novels of imprisonment written in the autobiographical mode. The imprisoned, teenaged protagonists in John Marsden’s Letters from the Inside (1991) and Walter Dean Myers’s Monster (1999) introduce fragmentation, doubling, and multiplicity into their autobiographical texts. Using Michel Foucault's description of disciplinary confession as well as his mapping of potential avenues for subverting this practice, this thesis shows how these tactics can be used to resist disciplinary power. In both novels, linear autobiographical narratives, which Foucault rightly situates within confessional discourse, are positioned as a tool that can be used to justify the imprisonment of a suspected pathological criminal. In Letters from the Inside, the imprisoned protagonist uses fragmentation and doubling to grapple with her ambivalent relationship to her culpability for her alleged crime. In Monster, the imprisoned protagonist uses multiplicity and fragmentation to produce an ambiguous confession that neither totally affirms nor denies his culpability. Moreover, the degree to which each protagonist strives to trouble the practices of disciplinary confession is directly correlated to their own sense of culpability for the crimes of which they have been accused. Both novels delineate potential avenues through which confession, including modes like autobiography and memoir, can be used to investigate and critique disciplinary power.

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