1st Edition
Exploring Plural Identity Through Creative-Critical Autoethnography
Exploring Plural Identity Through Creative-Critical Autoethnography offers a unique perspective on the intersection of creative and critical writing and mental health autoethnography, specifically of dissociative disorders. The media have long sensationalised Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), which formerly had the misnomer Multiple Personalities. One of the most misunderstood forms of neurodiversity, this book is about what is involved in learning to live well with the defiant survival mechanisms the brain creates in response to trauma. Readers are invited to encounter a different form of subjectivity from the traditionally perceived dominant mono-mind through various evocative and analytical writing ventures. This book looks at memoir, autobiography, autoethnography and forms of life writing to expose hidden dimensions of the plural subject; critique society’s shaping of the millions of people with this way of being; and to explore the fundamentals of narrative in general and within the memoir genre. This book is for academics within health humanities, as well as literary critics interested in identity and narrative. The book may also appeal to psychologists and sociologists.
Introduction: Dissociative Identity Disorder
Chapter One: Auto(?)-Biography
Chapter Two: Autoethnography as a Form of Writing Therapy?
Chapter Three: Seeking Help: Poaching Words
Chapter Four: Being Diagnosed: Exploring Etymologies
Chapter Five: Shaping from all Sides
Chapter Six: Experiential Data Curation: Creative and Critical Journalling
Chapter Seven: Theoretical Emotions: Analogical Thinking
Chapter Eight: Calming Safety Storms: Evocative Metaphorical Processing
Chapter Nine: Accepting Polyphonic Narrators: Prewriting
Chapter Ten: Mapping Internal Landscapes: Relational Taxonomies
Conclusion: We/Us Acceptance: Ready to Begin
Biography
Elayne Smith is Honorary Associate Professor in Literature at the University of East Anglia, UK.
