| dc.description.abstract | Self-harm is often understood, experienced, or culturally positioned as an object which is particularly difficult to represent or narrativise. These difficulties encompass both the widespread fear that depictions of self-harm lead to imitative behaviour, and the difficulty of finding appropriate narrative forms or language for an experience which is often complex and contradictory. This thesis explores this difficulty, and in so doing centres the experiences and perspectives of people who have self-harmed in analysing fictional depictions of the practice. This is accomplished both through the study’s advisory group, and through conducting in-depth qualitative interviews with people who have self-harmed. These interviews are then brought together with close readings of fictional texts, including novels, plays, films, and television. Thus the study is an innovative, interdisciplinary attempt to bring both Literary Studies and Social Science methods to bear on the question of narratives of self-harm.
Through this method the thesis suggests, first, that modes of subjectivity and identification through and in relation to fictional depictions of self-harm are bound up with knowledge and agency. I then argue that the meaning, affect, and significance of self-harm within fictional texts is intertwined with fraught questions of authenticity, with the negotiation of textual pleasure, and with the stereotypical figure of the self-harmer as a young, white, middle class woman. Finally, I explore endings and chronicity, noting that through compression and certainty the self-harming subject is presented with stark futures of recovery or death, leaving little space for self-harm’s own temporalities. Throughout, I note that the specific construction of self-harm in fictional narratives often (although not always) functions to locate the self-harming subject as beyond or not deserving of care. This occurs, in part, because self-harm is (or has been understood and constructed as) both signifying and signalling a failure of rational, contained, self-controlled neoliberal selfhood. | en_GB |
