ISDAL & 'I was ashamed, but undaunted (my epithet?)': intersections of shame and elegy in Maggie Nelson's Jane: A Murder

Because of these distinct but symbiotic shames, Jane as a poetic and elegiac vessel proves incapable of holding, and the ideas breach the boundaries of the initial form. The result of this breaching is <i>The Red Parts: Autobiography of a Trial</i> (2007), a prose companion work, which retroactively reframes and supplements the ideas of its prequel. The critical component of this PhD will attempt to interrogate how shame manifests within Jane, and how it infiltrates and alters Nelson’s complex poetics of elegy.

The creative component is a collection centred around the Isdal woman, an unidentified woman whose body was found in Isdalen, Norway, in 1970, and who has since become fodder for True Crime speculation. The collection attempts to interrogate the ethics of co-opting a woman’s death for the purposes of narrative intrigue, while also confronting its own complicity.<br><br><i>Thesis is embargoed until 31 December 2028</i>.<br><br><br>