I've long been attracted to writing on WWII, but it was not until I read Testimony that I began to question the role of the witness and understand its importance in the midst of horrific events.  The absence or presence of the witness shapes the narrative and directly impacts the historicity and memory of the event.  In an exploration of history, memory and cultural identity, I am interested in these intersections and how they affect the sense of self.  Is artmaking the search for truth or the solidification of erroneous narratives that we cannot let go? 

This particular project will move from the macrocosm of the representative Armenian cultural narrative of genocide using writings, letters and legal documentation of her great- grandfather to explore the personal/ethnic sense of self.  The tensions, incongruences and re-workings of personal and collective memory awaken the ghosts of the past to examine their presences within the self, and reveal how interpersonal, familial and cultural/ethnic relationships affect the integrity of those memories.

Literature exposes the seduction of finding meaning within the given form by specifically haunting from the outside.  Literary theory calls into question the priority and relationship between form and function, specifically because it forces literature to deal with the confines and failures of language itself.  Therefore language must take seriously its own textuality; it is not immune to the process of transmission, interpretation, translation and reinterpretation.  Literature becomes defined not just by its use (or misuse, or non-use) of language, but by the very transmission it demands.  Dr. Shoshana Felman, drawing on the work of Foucault, writes: “Madness becomes a symptom of a culture, but the symptom is incorporated in a silenced body (and silenced soul) whose suffering cannot say itself.”  She believes that literature is part of what restores the marginalized to the community by bearing witness to the madman’s testimony.  This project is a textual, material, and visual attempt to explore the connection between language and the body. 

I cannot satiate my hunger for a good collection of essays.  So many literary critics downplay the craft and importance of this form, and I could not disagree more.  

I have been very drawn to the question of "how is it that we heal other than just the passage of time?"  These are books that I have read, addressing death, personal narrative, cancer, broken relationships, etc.  Through their varying genres/styles and differing amounts of personal confession, all address how it is we deal with art as we are in the throes of grief.