Provocative Absences: The Affective Process of Recovery in Hyper-Contemporary Literature

This dissertation brings together three hyper-contemporary texts that share an interest in recovering the lives of women writers who have been forgotten, misunderstood, or left out of history altogether. Jenn Shapland’s My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost in the Throat, and Shola von Reinhold’s LOTE are representative of an emerging genre in contemporary literature that has its roots in the feminist literary recovery projects of the 1970s. Those early rescue efforts on behalf of women writers saw gaps in the record as provocations, and their response was to not only find figures who could fill those gaps, but to make them recognizable by well-established, institutionalized markers of literary value. Hyper-contemporary recovery avoids the distortive effects of appealing to “objective” value in the hope of achieving widespread recognition in two ways: 1) placing emphasis on material encounters, and 2) careful attention to process. In house museums and in archives, the authors and characters of these primary texts find opportunities for embodied rituals prompted by material encounters that offer proximity to their beloved subjects. This, unexpectedly, avoids the problem of treating those subjects like objects themselves—only useful insofar as they fill in certain gaps. Likewise, by centering the subjectivity of the researcher and describing the intricacies of their labor, each text brings recovery to a more human scale; emphasizing moments of recognition between researcher and subject that bring the latter into focus.
This project departs from the usual form of the dissertation in order to replicate the self-reflective, process-driven form of hyper-contemporary recovery. Interchapters consider the connections between the form of the humanities graduate essay and the logic of the gap model, the importance of a writer’s room to their self-image and output, and reflect, in real time, on the desire for hyper-contemporary recovery to either fix or move on from the “problems” that seemed to limit earlier versions. Ultimately, this dissertation finds that hyper-contemporary recovery projects are just as committed as the second wave feminists to filling in historical gaps, but prefer to do so on a more intimate scale, using their own lives as material.