JSalter PhD Final Thesis Submission.pdf - University of Guelph

they are presented, and query their implications for intergenerational and cross-cultural
relations in Canada.
Chapter 1 outlines my theoretical framing and methodologies for this project. My
investigation of storytelling as a discursive mode of intergenerational transmission draws
together narratology with critical discussions about cultural storytelling practices and
narrative theories on ageing and perspective, postcolonial studies on gender and
discrimination, diaspora scholarship on generational perspectives, and studies on
representations of ageing in literature. Narratology provides a critical language through
which to address specific storytelling strategies. However, this objective structuralist
approach fails to consider satisfactorily context and tradition, and thus cultural studies on
non-Western storytelling practices inform my investigation of what and how stories
communicate. Additionally, my dissertation explores how memory in old age is a
contributing factor in narrativization patterns. Therefore, I supplement my analysis of
these old women’s storytelling engagements with theories on narratives of ageing, so as
to communicate better how memory, the past, and retrospective life reflections impact the
structure of personal narratives and the construction of narrative identities. Importantly
however, focalization contributes to a reader’s understanding, and the narrator’s age
invariably constructs different age perspectives on how the past influences the present.
The novels I focus on provide different age perspectives on the ways that personal and
collective traumas impact the individual and the family. In the subsequent chapters, I will
demonstrate how trauma theories guide my analysis of specific intergenerational
storytelling engagements that reveal modalities of silence, psychic hauntings, and
complex acts of forgetting as common manifestations of psychogenic responses to
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