Revisiting history through gothic evocations in Pat Barker’s regeneration trilogy /

Download

index.pdf

Date

2015

Author

Hoş, Gül Deniz

Metadata

Show full item record

Item Usage Stats

287
views

143
downloads

This thesis aims at analyzing how Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy evokes traditional and modern Gothic elements in terms of settings, shell shocked soldiers’ trauma-induced spectral illusions, overwhelming effect of past on present, and dissociative identity disorder. The trilogy reveals Gothic-like atmosphere of the First World War as well as its reflection on the characters’ frames of mind. By incorporating Gothic elements into her trilogy, Barker offers a multi-dimensional reading and also emphasizes fragility of human body and psyche, because holistic, stable and secure self is prone to scatter in case of excessive external and internal pressures. In the trilogy, physical wounds reveal deeper psychological fractures, from which the past perpetually leaks into the present. The recurrent and catastrophic intrusion of war reminiscences into today echoes a prevalent gothic theme of the past’s disruptive, shadowy, and overwhelming effect on the present. The specters haunting the soldiers represent an alternative cryptic language to restate their inexpressible devastations and apprehensions. Based on Sigmund Freud’s concept of “Uncanny”, how the character’s continual return of the repressed fears disrupt linearity of time, and how this might lead to dissociative identity is touched upon in v conjunction with the concept of Gothic double. The shattered psyche due to war trauma gradually becomes worse on the face of uncanny experiences and stifling effect of the past. The characters strive to deal with phenomenon of alienation from their surroundings, and most essentially from their own selves.

Subject Keywords

War neuroses, Soldiers, Psychiatrists, England

URI

http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12618461/index.pdf
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/24430

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis

Suggestions

OpenMETU
Core

Light and darkness images in relation to emotions in John Milton’s paradise lost / Doğan, Sadenur; Sönmez, Margaret Jeanne M.; Department of English Literature (2014) This thesis studies John Milton's Paradise Lost in terms of light and darkness images and connects this imagery to the emotional states of the characters. The recurrent images of light and darkness prove to reveal the emotional situations of the three main characters of the epic, Satan, Adam and Eve. Seventeenth century theories of emotions serve as background for this emotional analysis. The principles of the four influential philosophers of the era, Descartes, Malebranche, Hobbes and Spinoza about emotion...
TREATMENT OF FEMININE MADNESS AS AN APPARATUS TO TRAIN THE OTHER IN SYLVIA PLATH‘S THE BELL JAR AND JEAN RHYS‘S WIDE SARGASSO SEA Uçak, Merve; Birlik, Nurten; Department of English Literature (2022-12-23) This thesis aims to discuss Female Gothic fiction in terms of its treatment of feminine madness and how Female Gothic challenges the relationship between phallogocentric discourse and its use of madness as an apparatus to train the subject. I claim that Gothic in literature is a form where fantasy dominates reality in an attempt to speak the unspeakable, voice the unreason that is silenced in the eighteenth century, with an aim to blatantly attack the logocentric structures of modernity. Female Gothic, on t...
Realisms and working women in the novels of Gaskell and Brontë / Kahveci, Rana; Sönmez, Margaret Jeanne M.; Department of English Literature (2014) This thesis demonstrates the use of social realism in Mary Barton and Ruth by Elizabeth Gaskell and the use of psychological realism in Jane Eyre and Villette by Charlotte Brontë in the representation of working women in Victorian fiction. The study starts with a discussion of differing critical and philosophical definitions of the term “realism” in literature to point out the complexity of the term, that is based on its inherent apparent contradiction in referring to attempts to render “real” life through ...
A comparative analysis of sense of belonging as a part of identity of the colonizer and the colonized in the grass is singing and my place Göktan, Cansu; Doyran, Feyza; Department of English Language Teaching (2010) This thesis investigates how two loosely autobiographical works unveil the effects of colonization on their major characters in terms of their identities and senses of belonging. The Grass Is Singing by Doris Lessing, a second-generation member of the colonizer, and My Place by Sally Morgan, a third-generation hybrid Australian Aborigine, are selected because both novels essentially deal with colonial issues by depicting their major characters in a process of maturation within a colonial and post-colonial f...
Disfigural Dynamisms of the Pictographic Theater: Towards a Deleuzian Phenomenology of the Embodied Comics Experience Shores, Corry Michael (2022-12-01) Vivian Sobchack’s Merleau-Pontian phenomenology of embodied film experience is applicable, with certain modifications, to the embodied comics experience, especially when considering her analyses of Gestalt closure, bodily affectivity, and synaesthesia. We adopt these concepts yet with a different aim, namely, to account for shocking, disorienting, and decompositional embodied comics experiences of dramatically deformed bodies. For this task, we employ Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of shocking sensations and t...

Citation Formats

G. D. Hoş, “Revisiting history through gothic evocations in Pat Barker’s regeneration trilogy /,” M.S. - Master of Science, Middle East Technical University, 2015.