Date of Award

2023

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Humanities

First Advisor

Wallace, Miriam

Area of Concentration

Literature

Abstract

Connection is the Golden Thread: Personal Narratives as Self-Transformation and Radical Change examines the life-writing genre as grounds for interpersonal connection, self-revelation, and radical social change, and asks how these qualities are amplified through the anthology format. I analyze the non-fiction personal essays of Gloria Anzaldua and Audre Lorde, among other feminists, to identify rhetorical devices often found in women’s personal narrative writing and critically examine their affective qualities. I first argue that women’s personal narrative writing challenges the Western conception of selfhood as “discrete” and “individual” through a recontextualization of the self as relational. By privileging stereotypically “feminine” relational modes - experiential epistemology as a valid way of knowing, embracing emotional response, and the use of personal language - these personal narratives effectively collapse distance between writer and reader, fostering spaces that establish vulnerability and cultivate genuine connection. I implement these rhetorical strategies in my own writing in order to demonstrate this collapsing of distance, drawing from my own raw, sensory experiences in my process of meaning-making. In my second section, I explore the anthology as a space in which multiple subjective realities can exist among each other, both embracing commonalities and recognizing differences in experience. I thus conclude the thesis with an edited anthology of my own comprised of writings from women of differing times, places, and identities. I structure the anthology using two radical powers inherent in personal narrative writing: its ability to validate subjective experience and its transformational potential for both reader and writer.

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