Jan Ziolkowski, Remarks at Interment

The Qualitative Report, 2015

Late September, 2014, my grandmother died. A second mother to me, her absence is a physical thing, palpable, an ever-present missing. Serendipitously, On (Writing) Families: Autoethographies of Presence and Absence, Love and Loss, edited by Jonathan Wyatt and Tony E. Adams (2014), ended up in my mailbox. I read the title and thought I'd find some connection to help me through my own grief. I was correct. I enjoy reading personal narrative of family, and On (Writing) Families does not disappoint. The chapters are honest (sometimes painfully so) and avoid the schmaltzy turn these sort of narratives can sometimes take. Indeed, this diverse, multi-layered set of writing hangs together beautifully, exploring the connections, entanglements, and spaces between these assemblages we call family. The reader will not find tidy, happy endings. Nothing is pat or contrived here. As the editors note in the introduction: "The chapters show ... what parents, children, and families can mean,...

This is an autoethnographic account of a family's struggle to respond to a series of tragic losses and to fend off the encroaching shadow that descended on them in their grief. The story unfolds as a study of the redemptive power of story to penetrate the shadows of collective grief and speaks to the possibility of healing from tragedy through the fusion of dream and story into a new nexus of possibility.

University of Oklahoma, 2010

This work is dedicated to the woman who taught me by her example that it was possible. Thank you, Dr. Stevens, aka, Mom. I am and will always be genuinely grateful for the direction of my dissertation work by Tim Murphy. He was thorough, rigorous, forthright, always responding to my drafts and questions with lightening speed. Whatever is good here is based on his guidance, and whatever is not is mine alone. I know that I would not have been able to finish this work without him. I also appreciate the patience and assistance I received from my committee members, Henry McDonald, Francesca Sawaya, Rita Keresztesi, and Julia Ehrhardt. I have benefitted greatly from their experience, knowledge and encouragement. Henry deserves special recognition and heartfelt thanks for sticking with me through two degrees. I would also like to thank Dr. Yianna Liatsos for introducing me to-the archive.‖ I most sincerely thank (and apologize to) Nancy Brooks for the tedious hours she spent copy-editing my draft. My friends Nathalie Jaëck and Pascale Sardin also copy-edited for me and talked me through some of the concomitant stress! Orit Rabkin, my dear friend, I thank for her level-headed advice, kind encouragement, practical support, and, above all, for making me laugh. Jerôme Puckica was kind enough to share his knowledge of linguistics with me in a few discussions and emails. Thanks also to Jeanetta Calhoun Mish and Courtney Hopf for their words of encouragement and technical help. I have nothing but admiration for my children, Scarlett, Wyatt and Alyénor, who have endured and surmounted enormous change/challenges over the years it has taken me to finish my degree. Their strength, humor, intelligence and love inspire me. I am in awe of them. My parents, David and Wanda Stevens, deserve recognition for v making my studies possible both practically and theoretically. To list what they've done to help me would be longer than this manuscript. Christian and Michèle Larré, my parents-in-law, have patiently endured my work, supporting me and my family in so many ways. Thanks to them for all the food and bricolage. To my husband, Lionel Larré, to whom I owe a debt I will never repay. My story is next to his.

Writing the Family, 2012

That evening for the first time in his life, as he pressed through the swing door and descended the three broad steps to the pavement, old Mr. Neave felt he was too old for the spring. Spring-warm, eager, restless-was there, waiting for him in the golden light, ready in front of everybody to run up, to blow in his white beard, to drag sweetly on his arm. And he couldn't meet her, no; he couldn't square up once more and stride off, jaunty as a young man. He was tired and, although the late sun was still shining, curiously cold, with a numbed feeling all over. Quite suddenly he hadn't the energy, he hadn't the heart to stand this gaiety and bright movement any longer; it confused him. He wanted to stand still, to wave it away with his stick, to say, "Be off with you!" Suddenly it was a terrible effort to greet as usual-tipping his wide-awake with his stick-all the people whom he knew, the friends, acquaintances, shopkeepers, postmen, drivers. But the gay glance that went with the gesture, the kindly twinkle that seemed to say, "I'm a match and more for any of you"-that old Mr. Neave could not manage at all. He stumped along, lifting his knees high as if he were walking through air that had somehow grown heavy and solid like water. And the homeward-looking crowd hurried by, the trams clanked, the light carts clattered, the big swinging cabs bowled along with that reckless, defiant indifference that one knows only in dreams...

2017

This dissertation analyzes a collection of personal letters sent to German-speaking migrants from Russia in the American Midwest by their relatives in southern Russia. The letters can be divided into two groups: the first one includes the ones written in 1913-1914, soon after the couple's immigration to the United States, while the second one consists of the letters from the 1920s and the 1930s. The main purpose of this study is to analyze the letters from a rhetorical perspective, while the grounded theory and my personal and cultural knowledge about the ethnic Germans in Russia provided an additional help with analyzing the letters and filling in contextual "gaps." After coding the letters, I examine the ways their rhetoric was influenced by the rhetorical situation, and also the ways various dominant "themes" were communicated by the letter-writers. Also, because some of the letters were sent during a famine that affected the region and the community they came from, many letters included pleas for help from America. I am interested in how these requests for help were rhetorically represented and, therefore, focus on analyzing the theme of "crisis" in these texts. My analysis contributes to a deeper understanding of the letter-writing genre and cultural rhetorics by offering a detailed discussion about the letters as rhetorical texts, the people, who produced them, and the constraints that influenced the letter-writers. By using grounded theory to guide my coding process, I was able tailor this qualitative research method for the needs of my project. By using rhetorical theory as a vehicle, I analyze the stories told through the letters and explore how these historical artifacts go beyond simply fulfilling the function of maintaining personal communication between the writers and readers and provide a rare "unofficial" insight into a tumultuous period of Russian history in the early 20 th century. Furthermore, my iv dissertation informs the discussion about the value of archival research and the use of archival artifacts in studying rhetoric and composition. vi DEDICATION To my people vii

Preface CHAPTER ONE Family-Present and Past Discourses CHAPTER TWO On the way to the concept of the symbolic family-a family story and what it suggests The story How the story relates to family theories CHAPTER THREE The extended symbolic family system-An old world to discover The system The interplay between the social world and the family CHAPTER FOUR The characteristics of the extended symbolic family system Extension and flexibility Hybridity CHAPTER FIVE Two components of the system Time The narratives Families without family histories 116 CHAPTER SIX A family with family history-The Richter family References Appendix Main themes for the case studies Tables 211 26 A small village not far from Lake Balaton 27 Another small village some miles from Lake Balaton 28 A village in the Bakony, not far from the previously mentioned two places

Telos, 2022

How is it that we can reserve the cruelest hatred for those we love? When we do, can we find our way back to one another? And what does the appearance of that hatred tell us about the mark left by the twentieth century upon the culture of the United States? Seldom does a philosopher explore the cardinal categories of his thought within the intimate reaches of his family life; but this is the gift Paul Kahn offers us in Testimony. The book tells of his mother's extraordinary confession, late in life, of an affair thirty years prior. Kahn's father, consumed by injustices of poverty and war earlier in life and a "militant atheism" (12), is unable to forgive, and his violent rage shatters their remaining years together. The book is an attempt to make sense of their tragedy, and in doing so to better understand those forces-metaphysical and historicalthat shaped their lives. In this, it channels and extends Kahn's long-standing critique of secularism's limits. "[I]t is simply not possible to come to terms with my mother's confession or my father's response," Kahn writes, without exploring the social imaginary of faith that "claimed them" (17). The text chronicles the pain of particular "hearts opened and broken" (2) but adultery, like idolatry, can destroy a world only if the life of that world is structured by faith. That many of us moderns tend to think less consciously of faith does not mean we can escape its inheritance. Both parents were "most irreligious people", yet the landscape of betrayal and confession upon which they moved was one of "justice and identity, of sin and love" (17).

Ethnos, 2019

The intimate genre of family discourse has traditionally posed problems for linguists because of the difficulty in collecting the data and the intimate nature of the genre. For obvious reasons, people view family life as intensely private and so are unwilling to allow linguists to intrude upon it. This, to a certain extent, would explain the paucity of directly relevant material available. This paper is an attempt to address this lacuna, and perhaps more ambitiously, to provide openings for further study. The paper analyses the structure of the exchange in family discourse. A traditional model of the exchange is applied to the data but is seen as unsuitable for the analysis due to factors particular to family talk. However, later work in the area of the exchange brings into relief a clear exchange structure in this discourse which, on the surface, appears dense and chaotic.

2017

This literary analysis-of Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis, Tom Gilling's The Sooterkin, and Gabriel Garcia M arquez's "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings"-asserts that unconditional love is not possible without a supernatural impartation, because all humans have their limitations. To further this claim, I dissect the most sacred of interpersonal dynamics, society's subgroups-the family. The four guiding perimeters of affection are societal influence-its opinion of a person; money, financial prospect; communication aptitude, whether verbal and physical speech that is understood or enjoyed; and, lastly, aesthetics: are they nondescript or pleasant to the eye? These variables determine how long a person will stay in a family's domestic space or their proverbial rolodex. These three texts have numerous similarities, most apparent is their each having a weird character interrupt a family's domestic life: hyperbolic contingencies that highlight the causes of limited or temporal affection.