Showing papers in "Life Writing in 2016"
TL;DR: In this article, the authors point out that, as much as we may like to evade or minimise them, illness and disability inescapably attend human embodiment; we are all vulnerable subjects.
Abstract: As much as we may like to evade or minimise them, illness and disability inescapably attend human embodiment; we are all vulnerable subjects. So it might seem natural and inevitable that the most u...
24 citations
14 citations
TL;DR: In autobiographical fiction, the repetition of specific ‘unprocessed’ tropes wherein contextual meaning remains unclear can be likened to the symptomatic "flashbacks" endured by victims of trauma.
Abstract: In autobiographical fiction, the repetition of specific ‘unprocessed’ tropes wherein contextual meaning remains unclear can be likened to the symptomatic ‘flashbacks’ endured by victims of trauma. Virginia Woolf's compulsive use of images of sea, mirrors, and unspoken shame, Jack Kerouac's brothers and angels, J. G. Ballard's empty swimming pools, Melville's tropes of Narcissus and madness and my own return to images of blood and wounding in my work, are part of each writer's attempt to construct a new post-trauma narrative identity. Writing fiction enabled these writers to shake off the fixed subject position dictated by their pasts and construct new and more multifaceted identity narratives as survivor-writers. As Maggie Schauer's work demonstrates, through narrativisation a new ‘sense of perceived identity may emerge: ‘who I am now’ and ‘who I was’ when trauma struck. These narratives comprise the past as a story written post-traumatically, and a new identity (as a survivor/writer) they have na...
11 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors focus on secret files compiled in the 1930s and 1940s around the activities of the prominent Nigerian newspaper editor and later first president of Nigeria, Nnamdi Azikiwe (1904-1996).
Abstract: Commentators on Europe’s colonial archives often highlight the lack of coherence to be found in official and national repositories. Even within a single file, the archives do not simply, or only, yield evidence about imperial intentions and colonial subjects in Europe’s diverse territories. Focusing on secret files compiled in the 1930s and 1940s around the activities of the prominent Nigerian newspaper editor and later first president of Nigeria, Nnamdi Azikiwe (1904–1996), this article argues that Colonial Office archives reveal the tensions between imperialism as a hegemonic ideology and the diverse practices of individuals, including colonial governors, civil servants in London, and their critics in the colonial public sphere. The article shows how Azikiwe’s biography was produced by spies and informants in Nigeria, and by civil servants at the Colonial Office, but that Azikiwe himself cleverly exploited the meticulous record-keeping procedures in Whitehall to insert his political autobiograph...
10 citations
TL;DR: The authors relocates the Indian Constitution in intertextual relationships with anti-colonial autobiographies and texts such as Gandhi's Hind Swaraj, showing the parallels between the way they dramatise self-rule and mix global, Indian and regional levels of identity.
Abstract: The Indian Constitution (IC) has been considered in terms of its intertextuality with preceding colonial documents such as the Government of India Act 1935. This essay relocates the IC in intertextual relationships with anti-colonial autobiographies and texts such as Gandhi's Hind Swaraj, showing the parallels between the way they dramatise self-rule and mix global, Indian and regional levels of identity. Both the IC and these texts are marked by processes of transnational and internal dialogue, and reflect transnational aspects of Indian print culture and the subject positions it gave rise to. Widening the discursive sites of the IC to include anti-colonial autobiographies raises questions about the IC as a species of autobiography itself, and it also gives us another perspective on the tensions within the IC, showing how the conflict between liberty and power is manifested in its linguistic cosmopolitanism and its approach to translation. Constitutions embody the aspirations of a nation's citize...
10 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, a retrospective diagnosis of a lifelong condition might also lead me to view my past self, my narrative self, in a different way, and reflect on what this could mean for my sense of self in the present.
Abstract: At 42, I received a diagnosis of Asperger syndrome (AS). In this essay, I reflect on what this could mean for my sense of self in the present, and how a retrospective diagnosis of a lifelong condition might also lead me to view my past self—my narrative self—in a different way. As a child, I experienced myself as indefinably ‘deficient’; as I grew to adulthood, I learned to repudiate and disguise those parts of myself which, in Ervin Goffman's terms, were ‘discreditable’. The effect of this was such that, when asked to ‘be myself’, I found I no longer knew what this meant. I did not recognise myself in clinical descriptions of AS, but my reading of autobiographical writing by women with AS would lead me to seek a diagnosis. As I tell this story, I consider the various perspectives available to help me structure and interpret it: the medical model, the social constructivist model and the perspective that emerges from such autobiographical writings. My reading, and experience post-diagnosis, leads m...
9 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the characteristics or distinctive features of life writing in colonial and post-colonized spaces are investigated. But the focus is on the importance of American literature for early articulations of the problems and dilemmas of postcolonial life writing, and the need for bibliographical research into the place of publication of works written in or concerned with colonial spaces.
Abstract: This essay offers an investigation into the characteristics or distinctive features of life writing in colonial and postcolonial spaces. Among the examples of life writing here considered are George Lamming’s In The Castle of My Skin and C. L. R. James’s Beyond a Boundary, and, less often treated in this context, works by Benjamin Franklin and James Joyce; stress is placed on the importance of American literature for early articulations of the problems and dilemmas of postcolonial life writing. Further emphasis is laid on place, and on the need for bibliographical research into the place of publication of works written in or concerned with colonial spaces.
8 citations
TL;DR: For centuries, the imperial expansion of Europe affected not only global power structures, but also individual subject positions of colonisers and colonised alike as mentioned in this paper. But with the changed world order of d...
Abstract: For centuries, the imperial expansion of Europe affected not only global power structures, but also individual subject positions of colonisers and colonised alike. With the changed world order of d...
8 citations
TL;DR: The focus of as discussed by the authors is the letters and unpublished journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, concentrating on the period of her first serious illness, situated next to Virginia Woolf's attempts at pathography.
Abstract: The focus here is the letters and unpublished journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, concentrating on the period of her first serious illness, situated next to Virginia Woolf's attempts at pathography. Under consideration is a selection of Woolf's diaries; her essay ‘On Being Ill’; her biographical-critical essay on Dorothy Wordsworth published in the second Common Reader in 1932; and her ‘biography’ of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Flush, published in 1933. In selecting certain women to write about during the late 1920s/early 1930s, Woolf is extending her project of rethinking and retheorising life writing, particularly in the context of her interest in the subjectivity of illness. At stake is the question of how the lines of a writing life are shaped by illness; how writing renders a transgressive space beyond the ‘normal’ rhythms of life in which to work through a subject's altered relation to her mind and body; and the ways writing can be restorative for a subject grappling with how she has been othered within...
7 citations
TL;DR: This paper developed a few key principles for discussing graphic narratives as a mode of life writing, especially graphic memoirs relating to illness, disability, and care work, as well as issues of difference more broadly (including gender and sexuality).
Abstract: This text is fashioned from an email exchange between the authors during the spring, summer, and fall of 2015. Our aim with this informal, collaborative process was to develop a few of the key principles for discussing graphic narratives as a mode of life writing, especially graphic memoirs relating to illness, disability, and care work, as well as issues of difference more broadly (including gender and sexuality). Thinking through the genres and media of graphic life writing, we discuss narrative, text authentication, institutional positioning, world-making, narrating difference, and the role of the visual, while giving particular attention to the importance of objects and temporality to the comics form.Rather than a resolved or comprehensive series of guidelines, we offer instead an experiment in epistolary criticism, through which we formulate several points of contact between graphic narrative and life writing scholarship—instances and considerations where the central concerns for scholars in ...
7 citations
TL;DR: This article examined how individuals use their autobiographical memories of education to position themselves within the new discursive and aesthetic frameworks of their postcolonial societies, and found that both Clarke and Ward employ different positioning strategies in terms of their former selves, suggesting either their complete immersion in an imperial world view or their budding criticism of the curriculum.
Abstract: The end of the British Empire saw profound changes to collective narratives of identity in former colonies—changes which did not leave individuals untouched. This essay examines how individuals use their autobiographical memories of education to position themselves within the new discursive and aesthetic frameworks of their postcolonial societies. Australian historian Russel Ward and Canada-based Barbadian novelist Austin Clarke both wrote their autobiographies in the 1980s and their texts reflect the after empire context in strikingly similar ways. As they recall their education, they link a curriculum focused on Britain to alienation from their local surroundings and associate their adoption of English speech patterns with snobbery. Clarke and Ward employ different positioning strategies in terms of their former selves, suggesting either their complete immersion in an imperial world view or their budding criticism of the curriculum. However, both authors signal to their postcolonial audiences th...
TL;DR: In this article, the socio-political tendency to devalue a disabled life when it is associated with trauma, pain, and loss is identified as a main obstacle to connecting the two fields.
Abstract: This article responds to several calls to consider the ways disability studies and trauma studies might work synergistically with each other. Using a reading of Kenny Fries's 1997 memoir Body, Remember, I identify the socio-political tendency to devalue a disabled life when it is associated with trauma, pain, and loss as a main obstacle to connecting the two fields, and argue for the importance of studying stories in which disability, trauma, pain, and loss are present in order to locate models that counteract such a bias. The genre of life writing gives authors significant control over the construction of their images and is therefore a particularly potent venue for integrating the alternate constructions of trauma survivorship and disability into a single identity. Fries's memoir insists upon the interrelationship of the seemingly fraught alignments of disability and trauma so that they co-exist, even intertwine, as composites of his narrative and identity. In asserting their interconnectedness,...
TL;DR: In this paper, Strayed describes how a deep depression prompts her to hike the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) alone and inexperienced, and her feminist narrative records how hiking the PCT helps her to regain her emotional footing and redefine her identity.
Abstract: Studying ecocritical life writing shows how travel into the wilderness can be therapeutic to the self during periods of malaise and alienation. Jon Krakauer's biography, Into the Wild (1996), explores the life, death and psyche of Christopher McCandless who seems to deliberately lose himself in the Alaskan bush, succumbing to a death by starvation that is strangely triumphant. Krakauer as biographer romanticises McCandless's experience in a manner that imagines and projects his life and death in an idealistic light. In her memoir, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail (2012), Cheryl Strayed describes how a deep depression prompts her to hike the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT). Alone and inexperienced, Strayed struggles to survive, and her feminist narrative records how hiking the PCT helps her to regain her emotional footing and redefine her identity. Emotionally estranged from others and at critical junctures in their respective lives, the two explorers seek meaning on the path less trav...
TL;DR: In this paper, a reading of white Zimbabwean narratives that takes cognisance of how the Rhodesian past and the Zimbabwean present inhabit shared time and place is proposed, and the authors argue that the colonial past exists alongside the post-colonial present despite persistent calls by the new post-colonisation governments for former colonisers to forget.
Abstract: This article proposes a reading of white Zimbabwean narratives that takes cognisance of how the Rhodesian past and the Zimbabwean present inhabit shared time and place. This reading suggests that white Zimbabwean narratives are characterised by simultaneity. In these texts it can be seen that the (Rhodesian) past and the (Zimbabwean) present appear incommensurate but nevertheless coeval. Using Ian Smith’s The Great Betrayal: The Memoirs of Ian Douglas Smith (hereafter referred to as The Great Betrayal), I argue
that in Zimbabwe, like in other former colonies, the colonial past exists alongside the post-colonial present despite persistent calls by the new post-colonial governments for former colonisers to forget. In Smith’s The Great Betrayal, the past inhabits the present in three forms: as an endurance of the founding principles of
British Empire; as an indictment of the Zimbabwean present; and as a strategic emplacement of white Rhodesians within a new Zimbabwe.
TL;DR: The authors examines natural disasters as a meaningful rupture in the often taken-for-granted surface ‘texts' inscribing everyday experience, and explores how such practices, particularly in highly uncertain circumstances, create opportunities for resilience by probing life's qualitative depths and values.
Abstract: Through a phenomenological, hermeneutic lens, this autoethnography examines natural disaster as a meaningful rupture in the often taken-for-granted surface ‘texts’ inscribing everyday experience. Such ruptures elicit a call to the human conscience to acknowledge and render through writing life's embedded riches—to encounter, embody and express meanings of gratitude. Summoning gratitude through narrating first-person accounts of a derecho storm, I demonstrate how reflexive, hermeneutic practices shape the ontology of a grateful disposition. I then explore how such practices, particularly in highly uncertain circumstances, create opportunities for resilience by probing life's qualitative depths and values.
TL;DR: Comics and their descendants, and their visual narratives, used to be considered the children of a lesser literary god as discussed by the authors, and they have been studied extensively in the field of comics, cartoons, and graphic novels.
Abstract: Comics, and their descendants the visual narratives, used to be considered the children of a lesser literary god. Twenty-five years of scholarship on the subject of comics, cartoons and graphic tex...
TL;DR: The authors explored life writing in a diasporic context, focusing on M. G. Vassanji's travel-self narrative A Place Within: Rediscovering India (2008).
Abstract: Currently life writing criticism shows a growing interest in relationality. In the context of lives written after empire, relational dimensions are often fragmented, misremembered and semi-imaginary. This essay explores life writing in a diasporic context, focusing on M. G. Vassanji's travel-self narrative A Place Within: Rediscovering India (2008). Relational dimensions do not solely encompass human subjects. Selves and subjectivities are formed and transformed by objects and environments. I argue for extending the category of relational life writing beyond the human sphere to include two significant non-human others: books and places and analyse their role in the fraught project of constituting a life in writing.
TL;DR: In this paper, the first phase of a project in which life writing is used as a form of person-centred care for people who have, or appear to have, dementia is described.
Abstract: This essay describes the first phase of a project in which life writing is used as a form of person-centred care for people who have, or appear to have, dementia. Section one of the essay considers the relationship between the academic field of life writing and the uses of life narrative in dementia care. Examples of published dementia life writing are cited; topics discussed include conventional cultural understandings of dementia; the distinction between illness and disease; dementia as a form of biographical interruption; depression and dementia; and the evolving part that narrative therapy of various kinds may play in an individual's dementia journey. Section two compares aspects of political critique in academic life writing studies and in theories of dementia care. With particular reference to the work of Kitwood we argue for a model of person-centred dementia care which includes critique of dehumanising aspects of the ‘medical model’, of insufficiently relational understandings of selfhood,...
TL;DR: The role of life writing in contemporary remembrance of the moment of decolonisation in Singapore has been explored in this article, where the authors consider the role of biography in contemporary remembering of the decolonization in Singapore.
Abstract: This paper considers the role of biography in contemporary remembrance of the moment of decolonisation in Singapore. To challenge a hegemonic developmental narrative told through the biography of Singapore's first Prime Minister, Lee Kuan Yew, many popular and academic historians have focused on the lives of political figures previously written out of history. Most notable among these is the opposition leader Lim Chin Siong, who was detained in 1963 in Operation Coldstore, one of several waves of detentions by the security forces during Singapore's transition from internal self government in 1959, through membership of the Malaysian Federation in 1963, to independent nationhood in 1965. Such acts of storytelling, however, while having an important status as testimony, often simply invert the dominant narrative, trapping their protagonists in a new series of historical binarisms. In contrast, life writing in media less closely wedded to narrative, such as poetry and photography, has perhaps a more ...
TL;DR: Moore-Gilbert was part of the project that generated this special issue of Life Writing on "After Empire" and this Afterword draws together his criticism on postcol....
Abstract: It is no surprise that Bart Moore-Gilbert was part of the project that has generated this special issue of Life Writing on ‘After Empire’, and this Afterword draws together his criticism on postcol...
TL;DR: The title of Jeffrey Berman's 2012 study as mentioned in this paper reflects an interest that emerges logically out of the New York scholar's long career of writing about difficult subject matter, including writing about dea...
Abstract: The title of Jeffrey Berman's 2012 study reflects an interest that emerges logically out of the New York scholar's long career of writing about difficult subject matter, including writing about dea...
TL;DR: The authors argue that all of Clark's writing (including his histories) can be seen as inherently autobiographical, arguing that the history of Australia can be viewed as a collection of reflections on personal experiences.
Abstract: In the late twentieth century, Australian historian Manning Clark (1915–1991) was the nation’s leading historian and public intellectual. Clark published a six-volume history of Australia (1962–1987) and was one of a vanguard of intellectuals striving to articulate a new Australian nationalism in the wake of the British Empire’s decline. His best-known volumes of autobiography were published in quick succession. Puzzles of Childhood (1989), which tells the story of his parents’ lives and the ‘nightmares and terrors’ of his childhood, and Quest for Grace (1990), which begins from his days as a student at Melbourne and Oxford universities in the 1930s and ends just as the first volume of A History of Australia is published in 1962. In addition to these two volumes, Clark’s autobiographical writings extended to reflections on historical writing, essays, speeches and interviews. This paper argues that all of Clark’s writing (including his histories) can be seen as inherently autobiographical. As Clark...
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors explore the implications of the premise of J. M. Coetzee's novel Summertime that the author JohnCoetzee is dead, and argue that Kannemeyer's biographical account cannot be read as a text scripted in the spirit of the novel.
Abstract: This paper begins by exploring via Roland Barthes's eponymous book about himself the implications of the premise of J. M. Coetzee's novel Summertime that the author John Coetzee is dead. I show how Summertime’s fragmented structure and echoes from Coetzee's earlier novels undermine the idea of a coherent authorial subject, and how emigration and acts of translation in the novel are central to how Coetzee's personality, life, and work are interpreted. The paper goes on to examine the influence of Nabokov's work on Coetzee's later fictions, with an emphasis on the interplay between Nabokov's actual and fictionalised struggles with his biographers. The paper concludes by arguing that J. C. Kannemeyer's biography of Coetzee, notwithstanding its claims to objective detachment, cannot but be read as a text scripted in the spirit of Coetzee's novel.
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TL;DR: In 1996, the Cambridge University Press (CUP) published an illustrated outline history of the British Empire as discussed by the authors and the California-based Indian historian Vinay Lal didn't like it much.
Abstract: In 1996 Cambridge University Press (CUP) published an illustrated outline history of the British Empire. The California-based Indian historian Vinay Lal didn't like it much. Indeed, ‘didn't like mu...
TL;DR: The key concepts of Boom! (gotta love that audacious exclamation point!) are efficiently embedded in its explosive title as mentioned in this paper, which is the basis for our own Boom! book.
Abstract: The key concepts of Boom! (gotta love that audacious exclamation point!) are efficiently embedded in its explosive title. Rak, a professor of English at the University of Alberta, analyses the outp...
TL;DR: Vested reading as mentioned in this paper is a means of engaging with the literary text in a way that reads the self into the book one holds in one's hands while also attending to issues of literary form.
Abstract: This essay builds on the work of Wolfgang Iser, Janice Radway, E. H. Gombrich, and other theorists of reading to argue for a new approach to the reading encounter, which I call vested reading. Vested reading is a means of engaging with the literary text in a way that reads the self into the book one holds in one's hands while also attending to issues of literary form. I turn to Edith Wharton's novella Ethan Frome and its popular reception in order to flesh out my understanding of vested reading as a practice that realigns life-worlds, while reconstructing the world of the text in ways relevant to readers’ lives.
TL;DR: Inspired by Aileen Moreton-Robinson's Talkin' Up to the White Woman, in this reflection on the beginnings of foster care in Australia I talk back to a dead white woman, Catherine Helen Spence, and argue that she should no longer be honoured for her role in the nascent system because of the classism at the heart of it as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: Inspired by Aileen Moreton-Robinson's Talkin’ Up to the White Woman, in this reflection on the beginnings of foster care in Australia I talk back to a dead white woman, Catherine Helen Spence, and argue that she should no longer be honoured for her role in the nascent system because of the classism at the heart of it.
TL;DR: This article examined the role of satire as a form of biographical storytelling in the life of Nell Gwyn (1650-1687), one of the very early theatre actresses on the Restoration stage and mistress to King Charles II.
Abstract: Nell Gwyn (1650–1687), one of the very early theatre actresses on the Restoration stage and long-term mistress to King Charles II, has today become a popular cultural icon, revered for her wit and good-naturedness. The image of Gwyn that emerges from Restoration satires, by contrast, is considerably more critical of the king's actress-mistress. It is this image, arising from satiric references to and verse lives of Nell Gwyn, which forms the focus of this paper. Creating an image—a ‘likeness’—of the subject is often cited as one of the chief purposes of biography. From the perspective of biography studies, this paper will probe to what extent Restoration verse satire can be read as life-writing and where it can be situated in the context of other seventeenth century life-writing forms. It will examine which aspects of Gwyn's life and character the satires address and what these choices reveal about the purposes of satire as a form of biographical storytelling. Gwyn's case, it will be argued, demon...
TL;DR: Visiting Not Dad as discussed by the authors explores nonfiction as an experiment with experience, in particular an experiment in writing the father, my father: "Visiting not Dad" is a trying out (or essaying) of something indistinct, something belonging more to shadows, half-light, the in-betweens, which takes us away from the deductive logic and dogmatism of my father's creationist beliefs opting instead to celebrate empathy and pathos, with a willingness to explore human fallibility, and unsettledness.
Abstract: Alzheimer's disease or AD is characterised by neurofibrillary knots, or tangles, and beta-amyloid plaques in the brain. Nerve cells waste away and wither and eventually decay and die. AD is a state of atrophy, degeneration, and negation. It is about not thinking right, about not being able to think straight, and not being able to remember. In Heidegger's terms we could think of this as unthinking—or unthought: nots as well as knots. As a site of resistance this essay is highly speculative, an exploration of nonfiction as an experiment with experience, in particular an experiment in writing the father, my father: ‘Visiting Not Dad’. What I am presenting here is a trying out (or essaying) of something … something indistinct, something belonging more to shadows, half-light, the in-betweens, which takes us away from the deductive logic and dogmatism of my father's creationist beliefs opting instead to celebrate empathy and pathos, with a willingness to explore human fallibility, and unsettledness. Thr...