Autobiographical Dimension Research Articles

Fashioning the intimate: a cartography of autobiographical French documentary film

ABSTRACT In the 1980s, the French documentary field opened up to a number of autobiographical practices which redrew the frontiers of the cinematic landscape. L’Heure exquise (‘The exquisite hour’) (René Allio, 1980), Lettres d’amour en Somalie (‘Love letters in Somalia’) (Frédéric Mitterrand, 1982) and Mourir à trente ans (‘Dying at thirty’) (Romain Goupil, 1982) are the notable signs of this change. This shift was confirmed in the years that followed, as borne out by La Pudeur ou l’Impudeur/Modesty and Shame (Hervé Guibert, 1992), Rome désolée/Desolate Rome (Vincent Dieutre, 1995) and Je suis venue te dire (‘I came to tell you’) (Laetitia Masson, 1997), to name but a few. These films are investigations and confessions that tell stories of love or sickness, happiness or sorrow. Faced with grief and reparation, the act of creation is motivated by a quest and a recovery of the self. In the 2000s, initiatives diversified, based (sometimes politically) on the societal context of the period within which the filmmakers worked (family, genre, etc.). In this article, the author assembles a three-stage filmic cartography and defines issues at stake in this intimate autobiographical dimension forged over 40-odd years by French documentary films.

Présence auctoriale dans les films de Marguerite Duras

In “Time and Autobiography in L’Amant de Marguerite Duras”, Margaret Sankey was one of the first researchers to analyze the autobiographical in the novels of Marguerite Duras. Two years later, Aliette Armel published a book on Marguerite Duras and autobiography. More recently, researchers have focused on the autobiographical dimension of the cinema of Marguerite Duras and on the projection of the self in the paratextual and cinematographic work of the author. Pursuing this work, this study examines the elements that, in connection with the media exposure of the author, deal with the projection of oneself in the films, in particular through the analysis of the incursions of the person of the writer and of her inner circle. This article will also examine the filmic strategies that allow Duras to evoke more subtly fragments of her sensorial memory through the sound and visual aspects of the films.

Ingrained Habits: Growing Up Catholic in Mid-Twentieth-Century America by Mary Ellen O'Donnell (review)

Reviewed by: Ingrained Habits: Growing Up Catholic in Mid-Twentieth-Century America by Mary Ellen O'Donnell William L. Portier Ingrained Habits: Growing Up Catholic in Mid-Twentieth-Century America. By Mary Ellen O'Donnell. (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press. 2018. Pp. xviii, 164. $75.00. ISBN 9780813230375). As Mary Ellen O'Donnell explains in the preface, this book began at a memorial Mass for her mother. In the kneeling figures of her mother's generation, O'Donnell caught a glimpse of the passing world in which she learned to be a Catholic. Her three-year-old daughter might grow up to be a Catholic, but she would never know that world. Her daughter's Catholicism would not be embedded in a culture. O'Donnell sensed an emerging "chasm," based on fundamental generational differences "in the way Catholicism has been lived, shared, and internalized" (p. xiv). This book explores the "cultural Catholicism" (not a pejorative term for the author) of northeastern and midwestern descendants of European Catholic immigrants, mostly Irish and Italian, born between 1940 and 1965. Since O'Donnell is part of the cohort she is writing about and often finds her own experience mirrored in the narratives on which she draws, Ingrained Habits sometimes reads as a memoir. Rather than an intrusion, however, this autobiographical dimension adds to the book's overall impact. Ingrained Habits is a work of cultural studies, a literary ethnography—a salvage ethnography perhaps—that draws upon almost fifty authors, e.g., Mary McCarthy, Garry Wills, Alice McDermott, Robert Orsi, Claudia DeMonte, Donna Brazile, Anne Rice, Thomas Ferraro, and Anna Quindlen. Their literary productions, some fictional, some explicitly autobiographical, depict their Catholic culture as an "all encompassing, world determining experience" to which there appears to be no alternative (p. xviii). The author locates this work in a thick social network that includes parish and school, home, and neighborhood and community. After an opening chapter that introduces them historically and sociologically, these three sites structure the book's remaining three chapters. This world's tension arises from its rarely seamless blending of "celebration and community" with "rules and enforcement" (p. 5). O'Donnell's carefully circumscribed study of the "bridge generation" to which she and I belong, by definition, leaves out many voices. The divide this generation crossed, however, led not only from one experience of Catholicism to another, but also from ethnic enclaves to what sociologists of this generation might have called the dominant culture. Here there are alternatives, choices to make, and inevitable ambivalence. I would like to have heard more of the author's reflection on this ambivalence. [End Page 427] Nevertheless, O'Donnell's insightful, elegantly written account of a particular "cultural Catholicism" makes a valuable contribution, capturing the "feel" of European American Catholicism in this period. One of this book's main audiences would be cultural studies scholars in the field of Catholic Studies. A strong secondary audience would be educated Catholics who are members of the generational cohort the author is writing about. Ingrained Habits would also work in undergraduate courses on U.S. Catholicism, Catholic Studies, or American religion, giving a real-life, narrative feel to the kinds of formal sociological and historical works the author cites in Chapter 1. It is especially effective in opening a window on women's experience of what O'Donnell calls "Catholic culture." It is highly recommended. William L. Portier University of Dayton Mount St. Mary's University, Emmitsburg, Maryland William L. Portier University of Dayton Mount St. Mary's University, Emmitsburg, Maryland Copyright © 2023 The Catholic University of America Press

Female Pleasure and Car Accidents: Signifying Alice Munro’s Middle Stories

ABSTRACT Alice Munro is a chronicler of women’s lives in her contextual time and space, although her subtle and incisive psychological insight and understanding of womanhood render certain aspects of her characters’ nature universal. Her short fiction describes and gives voice to a range of female identities and realities, often outlining sexual pleasure and desire with a sincerity and ingenuousness atypical for her time. This paper explores four Munro stories – “Memorial” (1974), “Accident” (1982), “Nettles” (2001), and “Trespasses” (2004) – included in her middle collections, which combine the female experience of an adulterous sexual act with a child’s traffic-related death, focusing on the voice and sexual role of the protagonists to establish coherent links with the seemingly disengaged fatal accidents. My reading and interpretation of the stories attempt to signify the connection between the two themes in the author’s corpus which, I argue, stems from her personal biography. The literary analysis is built on previous literature on the author and short story theory, and ultimately aims to understand, support, and extend the often-claimed autobiographical dimension of Munro’s literature.

A Depiction of War in Nigerian Poetry

This study depicts the quensequences of the war in the poetry of Nigerien authors namely Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe and Gabriel Okara. From the application of the sociocritical and autobiographical approaches, it appears from the texts that commitment is part of a moral and political awareness that identifies the poet in relation to a community of reprobates, no doubt, but a community fighting for a new morality. These texts are circumscribed in a context of deprivation of freedom by loneliness in prison, the slow and long disintegration that the man undergoes plunged into the abyss of prison isolation, the tortures suffered, the soiled walls, the fetid odors exhaled by the prison, the triumph of truth over the undermining of a system of repression. Prison disorients, disarticulates and fragments the personality of the prisoner who seeks to survive physical and mental attacks. It goes without saying that these texts have an autobiographical dimension. Keywords: Consequence; Death; Mental annihilation; Deprivation of freedom.

Fluid Entanglements: Narratives of Waterfronts in the City

This introduction to the thematic issue connects the contributors’ arguments to the broader context of existing literature and to current epistemological predicaments. The notion of waterfront has endured for over 100 years within planning documents and policy discourses, shaping urban strategies and citizens’ preferences across the world. This thematic issue examines the current state of narratives and discourses on waterfronts. Waterfronts are investigated to consider the conceptual work evoked to frame urban problems and build narratives that shape planning and policy action. It is asserted that narratives about waterfronts differ: while some define goals for city development relying on specific strands of expert knowledge to justify often questionable decisions, others capture the experiences and representations of waterfronts, including their subjective and autobiographical dimensions.

Commentary: Moment as method

This report corroborates Jerry Lee's argument that “approaching methodology from an orientation guided by the logics of translanguaging will enable us to revisit a range of methodological questions that might arise in a study of translanguaging”. My use of anecdotes recuperates the personal, autobiographical dimension in research; in foregrounding the subjective and the singular, it offers a corrective to the compulsive obsession toward objectivity and representability in the language sciences. As Jerry Lee has correctly pointed out, parameters like sample size are not necessarily congruent with “the realities of translanguaging as an individualized, and therefore oftentimes idiosyncratic, phenomenon”. In this regard, moment analysis through anecdotal stories and autobiographical perspectives, such as I have demonstrated above, could be an experimental answer to Lee's call for “increased openness” to alternative ways of approaching language in practice.

Jane Gray’s Framing of Asa Gray through Autobiography, Biography, and Correspondence

Jane Loring Gray, wife of celebrated and renowned Harvard botanist Asa Gray, helped to build up the work and the posthumous reputation of her husband as a leading scientist, an advocate of Charles Darwin, and a popular proponent of science in the nineteenth-century United States. Jane left Asa the scientist for others and wanted to create a portrait of Asa the person. This article discusses the Grays’ partnership in science, places that relationship in context, and stresses the contribution Jane made to Asa’s legacy, including the way she framed her husband’s work and reputation after his death. The emphasis is on the literary, historical, cultural, biographical, and autobiographical dimensions of the Grays’ work, on the implications that work has for botany and science, and on the challenges that Jane Gray had owing to her gender, to family and social roles, and in the face of delicate health.

La Guerre et l’Histoire : la création poétique de Louis Aragon dans Les Yeux d’Elsa

This article aims to study the relationship between poetry, war and history in the collection Les Yeux d’Elsa by Louis Aragon. The poetry of Aragon or even his art of composing verses shows a real ≪poetics of history and war≫ where the autobiographical dimension of the life of the poet-soldier during the Second World War becomes entangled with deciphering the carnage and misfortunes of a devastating war. So the poetry turns out to be a quest for traces of the past and collective memory against the amnesia of a suffering whose effects and repercussions are visible until today. One observes the themes of resistance and literary engagement with human affairs. Without setting himself up as a historian or as a documentary poet, Aragon recalls historical episodes in leading a reflection on the importance of literature and investment of the cultural repertoire of peoples in poetry to face the pitfalls of oblivion.

Miriam Fuchs, Life Writing, and Life

Miriam Fuchs, Life Writing, and Life Craig Howes (bio) Others contributors to this collection will movingly and accurately capture what Miriam was like as a coeditor, coauthor, crew member, and dear friend. Except for the paddling, I knew her in all of these roles, but I will begin this Biography tribute with some words about her as a researcher and scholar. Her biography on the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa English Department website listed her principal interests as modernism and modern American literature, twentieth century women’s literature, autobiography theory and criticism, and “all modes of life writing.” Her academic journey explains how her interests became her recognized expertise. She received her BA in 1970 from SUNY Buffalo, a major center for the study of modern and contemporary literature. The title of her 1979 NYU doctoral dissertation was “‘Persistent Pattern and Significant Form’: The Conceptual and Formal Impact of The Waste Land on Selected Anti-Realistic American Novels,” and she would go on to publish essays on T. S. Eliot, William Gaddis, Nathanael West, and Hart Crane. What she soon became best known for, however, was her work on women and modernism. She published extensively on Djuna Barnes and H.D. She edited and included her own work in Marguerite Young, Our Darling: Tributes and Essays. And in 1989 she coedited with Ellen G. Friedman the collection Breaking the Sequence: Women’s Experimental Fiction. Their introduction has been called “practically a monograph” in itself, and the volume played an important role in “the continuing feminist project of the recovery and foregrounding of women writers.” This landmark collection was reprinted in 2014 by Princeton University Press as part of its Legacy Library series. In the mid-1980s, Miriam’s interest in modernism brought her to Hawaiʻi for a seminar conducted by the noted William Butler Yeats and Hart Crane scholar John Unterecker. Shortly afterwards, she resigned her associate professorship at Elizabeth Seton College and settled permanently here. For Miriam, moving to a world center for modernism studies like Honolulu after years of toiling in the literary and cultural backwater of New York City was an easy decision to make—after all, Jack Unterecker and Leon Edel had already done the same thing. But I suspect that someone named Alan Holzman probably had something to do with it as well. She [End Page 135] spent her first years as a visiting assistant professor in English at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa—she always remembered who was collegial, and who was . . . otherwise. She came on the tenure track in 1989, in 1993 she was tenured and promoted early, and she became a full professor in 2003. As a lifewriting scholar, Miriam’s status is indisputable. Part of the University of Wisconsin Press’s renowned Studies in Autobiography series, her 2004 book, The Text Is Myself: Women’s Life Writing and Catastrophe, fulfilled Susanna Egan’s prophetic assessment: “Miriam Fuchs is breaking new ground. Her remarkable exploration of catastrophe writing will be important in autobiography studies and fascinating to all who care about self-representation as a mode of survival.” This book brought Miriam’s many interests together—modernism, women’s literature, autobiographical fiction, art, and Hawaiʻi and the Pacific—in her outstanding opening chapter on the diaries of Queen Liliʻuokalani, but also in the book’s dedication: “To the women paddlers—Lanikai, Kumulau, Bora Bora.” I’ll let other contributors to this tribute address the autobiographical dimensions of a book entitled The Text Is Myself, mentioning only its major theme: “however much the past may be shaped into a discernable storyline, it is the uncertain present that preoccupies these writers.” And of course, Miriam had a long and profoundly influential impact upon Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly and the Center for Biographical Research. Cynthia G. Franklin offers some personal and detailed remarks on their collaborations as coeditors and friends; let me set the stage with an origin story, and a few personal notes. When I took over as editor of Biography in 1994, I asked Miriam to replace me as one of the literary editors; a year later, she was listed as “literary editor in chief...

Before I Say Goodbye

Alice Munro published in 2012 her last collection of short stories, Dear Life, which includes “Finale”, a quartet of stories introduced by the author in semiautobiographical terms. The relevance of the themes addressed is, as may be inferred, significant in relation to her life and previous work. In fact, they echo her first two collections of short stories —Dance of the Happy Shades (1968) and Lives of Girls and Women (1971)— not only in motifs and events, but also in style. This paper analyses and compares this last section —Munro’s conclusive contribution to the literary world— with her early work to establish joint features and similarities in order to support and extend the often-claimed autobiographical dimension of Munro’s fiction from this unexplored perspective. In addition, this process of analogy has recognised the author’s literary and emotional closure in relation to her mother, a hitherto elusive endeavour in her work.

Les tourments autobiographiques du peintre Gérard Garouste

Gérard Garouste was born in 1946. He is considered one of the greatest French painters today. He is also a sculptor and scenographer. He painted over 600 paintings. He exhibited in the biggest galleries, the biggest museums in the world. From the publication of his autobiography L’Intranquille, Gérard Garouste publicly reveals the weight of his family history and his psychiatric problems, in particular his delusional attacks and his behavioral disorders for which he was treated in a psychiatric hospital. His painting is figurative, fantastic, enigmatic has an autobiographical dimension that he claims.

Bodies and self-disclosure in American female confessional poetry

Far from being a mere thematic device, the body plays a crucial role in poetry, especially for modern women poets. The inward turn to an intimate autobiographical dimension, which is commonly seen as characteristic of female writing, usually complies with the requests of feminist theorists, urging writers to reconquer their identity through the assertion of their bodies. However, inscribing the body in verse is often problematic, since it frequently emerges from a complicated interaction between positive self-redefinition, life writing, and the confession of trauma. This is especially true for authors writing under the influence of the American confessional trend, whose biographies were often scarred by mental illness and self-destructive inclinations. This paper assesses the role of the body in the representation of the self in a selection of texts by American women poets—namely Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Elizabeth Bishop, Adrienne Rich, and Louise Glück—where the body and its disclosure act as vehicles for a heterogeneous redefinition of the female identity.

La escritura de Mario Levrero como una cartografía autobiográfica y literaria, rioplatense y trasatlántica

En este artículo, se realiza un análisis de la escritura autobiográfica de Mario Levrero (1940-2004) a partir de la categoría de espacialidad y la perspectiva teórica de Karl Schlögel. Consideramos que Apuntes bonaerenses, Diario de una canalla, El discurso vacío, La novela luminosa y Burdeos, 1972 constituyen una cartografía autobiográfica y literaria rioplatense y trasatlántica dentro de la obra levreriana en la medida en que las ciudades uruguayas de Montevideo y Colonia del Sacramento, la argentina Buenos Aires y, del otro lado del Atlántico, París y Burdeos se convierten en los ejes sobre los que giran unas narraciones centradas en la primera persona del singular. La incorporación de este correlato geográfico nos permitirá autenticar la dimensión autobiográfica en estos textos al observar procesos microhistóricos (individuales, subjetivos, endógenos) y macrohistóricos (colectivos, objetivos, exógenos) dentro de este corpus narrativo, y, además, esto permitirá repensar la relación existente entre este arco narrativo y la ficción del autor uruguayo.

“A Good Man for Structure”

Abstract In the Pat Hobby stories, F. Scott Fitzgerald crafts a comic rendition of what the public came to take him for: a washed-up drunk. Scholars have not recognized the autobiographical dimensions in both the character and the stories, or, more significantly, Fitzgerald’s own feelings of guilt and self-recrimination in framing a richly comic, if bitter, portrayal of the movie industry. This article details how Fitzgerald drew from his own experiences and other writings to cover the same emotional terrain as his 1936 “Crack-Up” series of confessional essays, first published in Esquire, replacing their self-pity and bombastic language with the redemption of humor.

Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name as an Autoethnography

Audre Lorde’s Zami (1982) is an autobiographical novel in which the author draws extensively on her life experiences as an African American lesbian writer. Due to the autobiographical dimensions within the work, scholars have previously critiqued Zami as a genre text, reading the book specifically as a female memoir, a lesbian novel, a queer coming- out Bildungsroman, a slave narrative or, broadly, a novel of black feminism. Beyond these conventional approaches, this essay instead focuses on some of the ways in which Lorde’s personal experiences and memories are comprehensively shifted into larger rubrics (cultural, political) in both realistic and abstract styles. Taking a poststructuralist approach to language and the world on one side, while identifying ancestral, cultural, and mythic strata on the other, Lorde violates any so-called conventional form of autobiography. Read in these critical contexts, Zami can be critiqued as a counter-narrative actively transgressing a suite of oppressions. This is no simple autobiography, and at the intersection of conflicting forces, there appears her relationship with her mother, a connection which serves as a symbolic nexus wherein the personal and the collective are combined. When read through an autoethnographic lens, ostensibly contradictory impulses are reconciled: Zami stages and codifies narratives of both oppression and liberation.

Negotiations of a Woman’s Self: Liminal Experiences and Dialogic Reconsiderations in Anna Banti’s Un grido lacerante

This article focuses on the authorial figure in Anna Banti’s last work, Un grido lacerante. An introspective portrait of an aging author whose life and career have been shaped by remorse over a lost vocation, the novel has traditionally been interpreted as an expression of the autobiographical and historical dimension of Banti’s work. Moving away from notions of self-confessional narratives in favor of an analysis of textual strategies, this study investigates the role of the protagonist within a self-research that opens up to shared experiences and problems of existential, interpersonal and socio-cultural importance. This universalist focus engages in particular Bakhtin’s concepts of dialogic construction and narrative space-time. While the “chronotope” of the threshold encloses the liminality of the protagonist between contradictory identities and inclinations, the idea of a “dialogic self” accentuates the function of this unresolved intermediate position in promoting a subject that is negotiated in relation to internal and external constraints. By formulating an unconventional idea of self and a narrative that develops in a fragmentary and contradictory way to overcome the limits of its own fiction, the novel confronts the constraints women face in pursuing their inclinations and aspirations and addresses issues of a more humanistic nature concerning the right to construct and define one’s own identity independently of conceptions and norms of gender behaviour.

Upward mobility, betrayal, and the Black Papers on education

Upward mobility, betrayal, and the Black Papers on education

The Autobiographical Dimension of Brainy Books

This article purports to explore the autobiographical dimension of a recent publishing phenomenon, brainy books. It’s my contention that these books display a constant dialectic tension between their source (academic research) and their target (non-academic readers), and one way of reconciling both sides consists in resorting to rhetorical strategies in order to make their research more accessible. One of these strategies is openly autobiographical. Through two case studies—Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011) and Paul Dolan’s Happiness by Design (2014)—I study the various functions of this autobiographical dimension: perlocutionary, contextualizing, illustrative and finally autobiographical beyond functionality. It’s my overall aim to demonstrate that the authors’ choice to include personal anecdotes or even confessions in books primarily meant to spread knowledge to a larger audience makes brainy books a fascinating subject for life writing studies.

“Little man you’ve had a busy day”: Music in the onstage and offstage lives of “Master Harold”

Frequently referred to by its characters, and often approximated or imagined by them, music plays an important — if largely unacknowledged — role in Athol Fugard’s “Master Harold” … and the Boys. This play is widely considered one of Fugard’s most obviously autobiographical works, the setting and characters based on the places and people that defined his Port Elizabeth youth. This article explores a further congruence between the playwright’s (auto)biography and this play, namely the role of music in each. As we learn from his autobiographical texts, Cousins: A Memoir (1997) and Notebooks: 1960–1977 (1983), listening to and trying to make music have constituted important activities in Fugard’s lived experience, most notably during his childhood and youth. Consequently, music holds a particular currency for Fugard. This article argues that Fugard entertains a perception of music as a privileged form of creative expression rooted in his own unfulfilled desire to make music. It also argues that these attitudes are reflected in the symbolic power afforded to music in “Master Harold” … and the Boys, informing a tension in the play between the presence of music and, conversely, the absence thereof. Through exploring music in the onstage and offstage lives of Master Harold, this article offers a reading that reconciles the autobiographical dimensions of the play with its political significance. Doing so has particular consequences for reading the absence of Hally — Fugard’s fictional avatar — from the play’s final, tantalizing, image of a non-racial South Africa.