Profile of: Eliza Ives

Award Received: SSHRC Canada Graduate Scholarship - Doctoral

Awarded for the project: Insomnia: A Fugue State

Department: English

Supervisors: Dr. John Ball and Dr. Stephen Schryer

Insomnia is a common yet poorly understood disorder. My doctoral project, a narrative composed both of fiction and fact, relates a year-long episode of chronic insomnia, for which there was no explanation. Novelistic scenes spur essayistic passages of analysis and reflection, connecting the narrator’s personal experience to broader, more fundamental concerns — most notably, the mind-body problem. My narrative depicts various interpretations of insomnia and corresponding therapeutics, examining how these relate to philosophical thinking on mind (or soul) and body, from Plato and Aristotle to modern and contemporary theorists.

Because my narrative has a narrator whose relationship to the author is ambiguous, it could be classed as “autofiction,” a genre in which the proportion of fictional to nonfictional content is uncertain. This term has become common in English-language literary criticism in the past few decades, but works that evince a similar ambiguity are nothing new and have been categorized variously, including as novel, poem, memoir, and essay. My critical introduction considers a range of such works, from antiquity to the present day, but focussing on contemporary authors, such as J.M. Coetzee, Rachel Cusk, Claudia Rankine, W.G. Sebald, and Ben Lerner. I consider how such works trouble the fiction/nonfiction distinction, what their ambiguity and hybridity achieve, and how such compositional practices expand our understanding of fiction and its purposes.

Insomnia not only lengthens the nights but interrupts ordinary, pragmatic thinking. It can occasion a wider or enlarged perspective in which one experiences a detachment from daytime concerns and, instead, feels an increased interest in difficult, abstract questions. Similarly, the hybridity of “autofictional” works prompts a certain disorientation and estrangement. Both the critical introduction and narrative explore how such fictions can be used to interrogate the illusions and hypocrisies of the actual. Employing their strategy of ambiguity, I consider how the day encourages us to create and participate in comforting fabrications, and to forget or ignore the disturbing realties that become apparent and pressing during a sleepless night.