PhD Graduates

My PhD thesis examines the way writers use fiction as a rhetorical vehicle to thematise and to theorise the project of autobiography — a transformation of life into narrative that involves a negotiation between aesthetics and ethics. It analyses four fictional autobiographies: Paul Auster’s Moon Palace (1989), Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending (2011), Lydia Davis’s The End of the Story (1995), and Philip Roth’s The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography (1988). Each text presents an autodiegetic narrator narrating crucial moments in her/his life; they are ordered progressively according to the way each engages with the issue of narrative artifice on the narratorial and/or authorial level. I explore what makes the character narrator’s life story work, that is, the way s/he negotiates the possible tension between form and ethics, the resolution of which is what I call narrative integrity. The double meaning of the word “integrity”, as a formal and an ethical quality, encapsulates the dual demands of formal coherence and ethical commitment inherent in the challenges of autobiography. The thesis discusses four forms of narrative integrity — contingency, consistency, coherence, and counterpoint — and suggests ways in which they are interpreted differently on the representational and the rhetorical level of the text. Adopting a rhetorical approach to fiction, I address the way the particular representation of autobiography in each text is used rhetorically, not autobiographically, by the author to theorise certain aspects of self-representation in general. I argue that integrity as a critical concept helps elucidate the complications involved in life writing by foregrounding the issue of form, which is necessary, if also potentially problematic, for the articulation of personal truths. This project situates itself within the broad field of ethical criticism in literary studies and explores the relationships between fiction, narrative ethics, and life writing.

I grew up in Taiwan and have a BA in English and a BSc in Banking from National Chengchi University. I completed a MA in Modern and Contemporary Literature and Culture at the University of York in 2010. After a few years pursuing other interests, I returned to York in 2014 to undertake PhD study and passed my viva with no corrections in October 2018. My PhD is funded by a study abroad scholarship awarded by Taiwan’s Ministry of Education.