Autobiographical Discourse Research Articles

Life Writing at the Terminus: Glacier Memoirs and Planetary Relationality

This essay examines the American glaciologist M Jackson’s While Glaciers Slept: Being Human in a Time of Climate Change and The Secret Lives of Glaciers; the British glaciologist Jemma Wadham’s Ice Rivers: A Story of Glaciers, Wilderness, and Humanity; and the Icelandic writer Andri Snær Magnason’s On Time and Water, all of which employ autobiographical discourse to convey the enormity of the climate crisis as it is manifested in the rapidly accelerating loss of Earth’s glacial ice. I discuss these writers’ accounts of their turn to life writing to augment the limited persuasive force scientific data, their scaling of the temporality of glacier recession to the time spans of their own lives, their attribution of sentience to glaciers through an engagement with non-Anglo-European worldviews, and their expressions of grief at the impending death of Earth’s glaciers. I suggest that these texts demonstrate how the distinctive truth claims, temporal modalities, subject-positioning strategies, and affective appeals of life narrative provide a particularly supple hermeneutic schema in which an understanding of the moral ramifications of humans’ mutually dependent relationships with more-than-human nature - what Amy J. Elias and Christian Moraru have described as ‘a planetary ethics of relationality’ - might be fostered.

Aukštaičių vaizdeliai, or On the Search for the Autobiography of Juozas Tumas-Vaižgantas

Juozas Tumas-Vaižgantas has the reputation of an autobiographical author who overshadows his texts. At the same time, he is an author without autobiography, whose epistolary works form the basis of his egodocumentary research. Keeping in mind the characteristic of this reception, I examine Vaižgantas’s autobiographical texts: compile a corpus of his autobiographical texts, and conduct a research of Tumas’ autobiographical narrative, with a focus on the speaker’s relationship to the autobiographical discourse. I began the search for author’s autobiography with the first text that has the status of an autobiographical narrative, Aukštaičių vaizdeliai (Scenes of Aukštaičiai). The research has revealed certain features of Tumas’ treatment of autobiographical texts that have not been studied in detail. The article presents the history of the formation, attempted publication and disassembling of Aukštaičių vaizdeliai. It describes Tumas’ attitude towards his autobiographical texts and raises the question of the boundaries between literary and autobiographical texts, revealing the author’s changing and individual relationship to autobiographical narrative. The research also points to a secondary effect of the research—the highly problematic identity of Aukštaičių vaizdeliai.

Специфика конструирования этнической идентичности в межкультурном дискурсе (к вопросу о лингвокультурной адаптации средневекового автора «Хожения за три моря Афанасия Никитина»)

The article is devoted to the consideration of a previously unexplored aspect: the monument of medieval culture “Walking across the Three Seas of Afanasy Nikitin” will be considered in the focus of text-creation strategies of autobiographical discourse, the events of which represent the ethnic identity of the author. This article describes the text-generating strategies of the ethnic identity of a medieval author who lived in the East for several years and partially mastered the language of a “foreign” culture for him from the standpoint of the anthropological approach in linguistics, methods of semiotics and discourse analysis. The study includes such research parameters, as well as characteristics of the phenomenon of ethnic identity, as the linguistic picture of the world, the author’s discursive strategies, his self-consciousness in the context of acculturation (secondary socialization) and inculturation (symbolization of “foreign” culture). The study confirmed the model of ethno-cultural hybridization of cultures, dating back to the concept of M. Bakhtin. Based on the analysis of the specifics of the linguistic portrait in the autobiographical narrative of merchant Afanasy Nikitin and the description of cultural associations, archetypal images and meanings in the linguistic picture of the medieval author of the XV century. The theoretical significance of this study lies in the proposal of the concept of linguistic and cultural adaptation, which makes it possible to identify the conditions for successful socialization of the individual and productive as a strategy for the study of the phenomenon of identity.

Языковая личность автора в метатекстовой перспективе автобиографического дискурса

The aim of the research is to determine the communicative and pragmatic specifics of implementation of a linguistic personality’s linguocreative competence in autobiographical discourse through metatextual inclusions. The scientific novelty of the research lies in considering B. L. Pasternak’s autobiographical discourse as a semiotic-pragmatic phenomenon, which makes it possible to qualify the author’s linguistic personality as not only elitist, but also discursive, focused on a constant dialogue with the reader. This dialogue is capable of turning into polyphony on the basis of the author’s comparison of his current self with his past self, as well as due to the broad inclusion of the author’s evaluation of various cultural facts in the semantic space of autobiographical texts. As a result, it has been found that metatext in B. L. Pasternak’s autobiographical discourse is characterised by a set of functions, among which the text-forming and structure-forming functions, as well as the aesthetic fiction are of prime importance. The author employs various linguistic ways of metatext realisation – such are lexemes and lexical combinations with the meaning of speech, thought, creativity, subjunctive mood forms, parenthetical words and constructions, while metatext itself in B. L. Pasternak’s prose is mainly innective.

Family relationships as a source of narrative identity of people with advanced dementia

BackgroundThe growing body of research on narrative identity, while helpful, rarely focuses on people with dementia. In this paper, we explore how individuals living with advanced dementia construct their narrative identities in relation to their family experiences, which play a crucial role in shaping identity as shown by recent studies.MethodsWe conducted a qualitative study using data from 15 semi-structured interviews with people aged 66 to 94 who have advanced dementia. The data were analyzed using a textual-oriented discourse analysis.ResultsWe identified two discourses—autobiographical and economic—that organize their narrative identities. Through the autobiographical discourse, participants emphasized their sense of belonging within a social group and their role as custodians of family identity. Within the economic discourse, they negotiated their social utility and value, particularly in response to demeaning discourses targeting individuals who do not accumulate wealth. In the structural analysis, we identified two narrative types—looped or unfolding—that depend on their affective experiences related to their family. We especially explored how the repetition of narrative threads by individuals with dementia might indicate a traumatic background rather than just memory disruptions.ConclusionsThis study provides insights into the narrative identities of individuals with advanced dementia, shedding light on the intersection of family experiences and identity formation in this population.

AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL TEXT: THE SHIFTING OF THE LINGUISTIC FORM (CASE STUDY OF ITS TYPOLOGY AND STYLISTIC FEATURES)

The article provides an analysis of modern theoretical and methodological studies focused on the study of autobiographical texts within their typological and stylistic characteristics. It has been specified that the theoretical understanding of autobiographical texts closely correlates with the concepts of anthropocentrism and the autobiographical discourse.
 The purpose of our paper is to outline the main vectors of theoretical studies of the autobiography and the biography as texts of the autobiographical discourse. It is believed that the processed data have a fruitful basis for further research of the literary biography. It is noted that the linguistic form of the autobiography has undergone changes due to the skillful description of a person’s life as an amazing story via which one can outline his/her image.
 The attention has been focused on various scientific approaches to the study of an autobiographical text in modern linguistics. Different classification criteria as well as linguistic and stylistic properties of the autobiography and the biography have been established, such as: retrospectivity, chronology, identity of the author, narrator and protagonist, memory, openness, ratio of the past and the present, a pronounced personal element, ratio of subjective and objective principles.
 The article claims that the text of the artistic biography differs from the text of the literary biography. The latter is characterized by a gradual and slow depiction of data from the real life of a specific figure, an arbitrary way of presenting the material, a combination of elements of two styles (artistic and official), awareness of the picture of the past life of the object of the literary biography. Among the stylistic peculiarities of such texts the article distinguished emotional and expressive vocabulary, complex sentences, the author’s digressions that reflect his personal positions and "destroy" the ambiguity, one-planning and simplification of the biographical text.

СЕМАНТИКА ЕДЫ В ТРАНСКУЛЬТУРНОЙ ЛИТЕРАТУРЕ (НА МАТЕРИАЛЕ НЕМЕЦКОЯЗЫЧНОЙ ПРОЗЫ ВЫХОДЦЕВ ИЗ СССР)

The article considers the semantics of food and drinks in German-language prose, created by immigrants from the USSR and having signs of transcultural literature, implying the hybridization of cultural (including linguistic and literary) experience. The subject of the analysis are three autobiographical texts written in the 21st century: “My White Nights” (2004) by Lena Gorelik, “The Totalitarian Kitchen. The Cookbook of Socialism” (2006) by Olga Kaminer and Wladimir Kaminer, and “Maybe Esther” (2014) by Katja Petrowskaja. In all three texts, a significant place is given to the names of dishes, foods and drinks, descriptions of the preparation, serving and use of food and drink. They also contain recipes (Gorelik’s text and especially the Kaminers’ book) or mention them (Petrowskaya’s text). Memories of food and drink are integral to childhood memories and are part of the autobiographical discourse. The task of the study is to analyze the functions of the culinary code of these texts. The methodology of intercultural research and interdisciplinary food studies, and various aspects of nutrition researches, were used. Food is presented by all authors as the primary bodily experience that is significant for socialization in a particular culture and plays an important role in acculturation. The function of the culinary codes of the studied texts is shown in structuring the key categories of culture: “one’s own”, “other” and “foreign”, as well as in the process of cultural hybridization. Particular attention is paid to the untranslatability of gastronomic realities: vocabulary denoting dishes and traditions of their use. The mechanisms of metaphorization and metonymization in the field of food and drinks, and the role of these processes in the generation of ethnic and national stereotypes, as well as in their destruction are considered.

Transmedialne podróże ze smakiem. Historia i specyfika kulinarnego trawelebrytyzmu jako produktu kultury medialnej

The article focuses on various transmedia projects developed by culinary travelebrities. The aim of the research is to show that the form of transmedia storytelling, based on the flow of content between different platforms (book travelogues, videos, TV programs), is treated by traveling chefs as a tool for building a recognizable and coherent personal brand. The study covers the media activity of three culinary travelebrities: Jamie Oliver, Anthony Bourdain and Robert Makłowicz, whose projects combine journalistic, culinary and travel content with autobiographical discourse. Due to the adoption of such a communication strategy, they effectively influence the attention of the contemporary media audience, but also they build a recognizable and coherent media identity. The research outlined in the article demonstrates that culinary travelebrity focuses primarily on discovering the exotic side of the world. Celebrity chefs are presented in the original scenery where they prepare a kind of media performance simulating authenticity.

Про сповідь, написану серцем

The author analyzes the poetic and prose works of Natalia Zamulko-Dubushe (1948–2020). The Ukrainian emigrant writer, who has lived and worked in France since 1989, is the author of the Ukrainian-language poetry collection Storks of the Native Land (2004), prose books Alien Nation (2012), Rain Border (2018), and others. The aim of the article is to analyze the confessional beginning of Natalia Zamulko-Dubushe’s works. In order to comprehend the weight of the author’s personal experience in the poetic and prose narration, Valentyna Sobol compares the defining motives of the poetic and prose works of the writer. As a result of a comparative reading, the researcher draws a conclusion about the dominance of the autobiographical discourse of the entire creative work of the writer. It is shown how the motives of her poems resonate differently in prose each time. In fact, memory is the driving force in all emigration works. Returning mentally to her Ukrainian roots, the writer at the same time exposed herself as a person of the world.

To Kill the False Woman: Annie Ernaux Autobiographical Writing in Happening

Annie Ernaux’s L’événement (Happening) stands as a powerful piece of autobiographical discourse and incites discussion in both trauma literature and as an extension of Hélène Cixous’s The laugh of the Medusa. Ernaux’s text revolves around her clandestine abortion, as she writes of her trauma through the event. I will attempt to demonstrate that while the mere act of writing constitutes a form of overcoming traumatic events, Ernaux’s writing goes above and beyond these conventions. To do so, I will analyze how Ernaux’s autobiographical writing combines several discursive, narrative, and literary techniques to firstly meditate and reflect on the past and present, and secondly to reconcile and overcome the past and presents perspectives, or the “unspeakable” incited by rigid social and legal norms. I will further demonstrate how by writing her own body, that is by meditating on the numerous limitations placed on the female body and mind, her literary contribution is two-fold: Ernaux both pays homage to her own personal female experience and represents the collective female experience in a larger, historical context. The result is a re-framing of a feminine narrative into a human question through a validation of Ernaux’s experience.

The Concept of «Sport Doctor» in the Autobiographical Discourse

The subject of study in the article is the concept of «sports doctor» in autobiographical discourse considered on the material of the book «Seeing with Your Hands – My Life and my Medicine» (in original: «Mein Leben und mein Medizin. Mit den Händen sehen») written by German sports Doctor Hans-Wilhelm Müller-Wolfarth. The purpose of the study is to analyze this concept in the linguistic and cultural aspect. The findings make up a number of functionally significant features of the «sports doctor» concept. This concept has the following features: 1) it is kaleidoscopic, it includes such aspects as «responsibility», «selflessness», «dedication», etc.; 2) it integrates a wide range of medical terms; 3) it is filled with various lexical and semantic groups, for example, «Organism», «Trauma», «Medicines». The research carried out in this article presents the results that can be used in 
 research and teaching activities related to training at a medical university. This article deals with a discursive and conceptual analysis and a contextological method, a method of classification and description.

Alternative, Imaginary, and Affective Archives of the Self in Women's Life Writing

This essay interrogates and expands conventional views of the archive by considering how subjects who write themselves engage in processes of archival thinking and practices of curation in autobiographical discourse. It tracks features of alternative archives of the self in life writing through six microstudies that engage different concerns in autobiographical texts by women in recent centuries. The issues explored are affective archives of feelings and impressions; archives for rewriting the past; the imaginary archives of possible selves; digital archives of embodiment and desire; archives in global circulation; and archival remediation. The conclusion poses questions for those developing theoretical frameworks and methodologies to interpret the archival imaginary in the lives women inscribe and the afterlives they acquire. This article looks to expand methodologies in the field of archival studies that do not sufficiently attended to the status of the evidentiary in autobiographical materials and the archival imaginary mobilized in some autobiographical acts and practices and their afterlives.

How the “formula” of success has changed: Slovenian bestsellers of the 2010s. “Čefurji raus!” by G. Vojnović and “Belo se pere na devetdeset” by B. Žakelj

In the article, in the context of the studing the problems of Slovenian book market and the sociology of “consumption” of book publications are presented two novels of the 2010s: “Čefurji raus!” (2008) by G. Vojnović and “Belo se pere na devetdeset” (2018) by B. Žakelj. Both have become sales leaders and received the status of national bestsellers. Their curriculum vitae are similar: both were the debut works of authors who were not professional writers, both received the Kresnik national literary prize for the best novel of the year and both caused a heated discussion on social networks. The commercial success of both books was not only related to effective marketing, advertising, place in the rating, taste stereotypes of literary critics and other extra-literary factors, but also to certain artistic references: this is the existential nature of the problematic, autobiographical discourse, the type of narration (“Ich”-form), the specificity of the chronotope. In the focus of Vojnović’s novel is the fate of national minorities in the post-Yugoslav space, told on behalf of a teenager. After the final collapse of Yugoslavia, the inhabitants of the poorest republics and regions of the former Tito empire began to seek refuge in Slovenia, by the mid-2000s there was in the republic an acute problem of interethnic contradictions associated with the younger generation of immigrants. Žakelj’s confession novel focuses on the tragic and dramatic twists and turns of her own life story and the author’s reflection on her experiences. A comparative analysis of the works gives an idea of how the system of values of ordinary Slovenian readers was transformed, how their interest in the resonant problems of modern life in the country was replaced by the need for empathy, the desire to find a psychological refuge in the book.

(Авто)биографический дискурс в эпистолярии А.С. Хомякова

The article discusses autobiographical and biographical discourse in the epistolary of A.S. Khomyakov. It turns out that both, and especially the former, are underrepresented. Khomyakov steadily replaces autobiographical elements typical of the epistolary genre and thereby expected by the reader with biographical elements, almost always in the form of obituary. As a rule, those are obituaries to public figures who had left a mark in history, influenced contemporaries, and possibly descendants — what mostly interests Khomyakov as the author. Paying primary attention to personal qualities, the scope and degree of self-realization of these qualities, he almost never covers external, factual side of their lives. Thus, the epistolary includes, on the one hand, paradoxical elements of the obituary and the biographical genre without a typical biographic narrative, while on the other hand, a highly individualized version of the obituary, a genre that, at a time, seemed to have hopelessly exhausted itself and become clichéd.

Prison Narratives: The Year in South Korea

Prison NarrativesThe Year in South Korea Heui-Yung Park (bio) One of the most significant roles that life narratives have played in South Korea has been giving voice to those who have suffered social injustice and want to be heard. Lifewriting texts often serve as trial sites outside the legal systems, where writers can tell their stories to the reader without judicial authority being present. In their prison narratives, Im Pang-gyu1 and Ch'oe Sŏ-wŏn2 both turn to autobiographical representation beyond the jurisdiction of the court to present their cases in public and to disclose the injustice that they believe they have suffered. This year's essay examines how Im's Pijŏnhyang changgisu Im Pang-gyu chasŏjŏn (2019) and Ch'oe's Na nŭn nugu in'ga: Ch'oe Sŏ-wŏn okchung hoeogi (2020) defend their writers, and try to convince others of their innocence. Im was a pro-North prisoner for more than thirty years who rejected conversion to democracy following his imprisonment during the Korean War (1950–1953). His autobiography describes how he became a ppalch'isan—a communist guerrilla—who fought against the Korean military and its allies during the war. Ch'oe, on the other hand, was accused of manipulating state affairs during the presidency of Park Geun-hye, the eighteenth president of South Korea. Telling her own story in the form of a memoir, she denies all such accusations. Im's and Ch'oe's prison narratives—in which each makes a case for themselves—show how recently published South Korean life writing has spoken for those who feel they have been mistreated, offering "a forum of judgment in which the subject may achieve a control over [their] story that [they] would not hold in court" (Gilmore 696). Outside the judicial system, Im's and Ch'oe's autobiographical representations enable them to speak for themselves, presenting their own stories that differ from what others assume they know. In so doing, their life narratives turn into alternative venues for telling the truth about themselves and seeking out justice. Examining these narratives, however, should also remind us of Paul John Eakin's proposal "to think of ethics as the deep subject of autobiographical discourse" ("Introduction" 6). Im's Pijŏnhyang changgisu works to correct the [End Page 91] stereotypical, negative views of unconverted communist prisoners—most of whom have suffered long-term imprisonment and state violence—and addresses the ethics of these laws. But Ch'oe's also raises questions about the amount of truth in the information provided to the public, and can therefore lead us to think about the ethical responsibilities of the autobiographer, and especially when demanding justice. Looking into these prison narratives sheds light on the empowering roles that life writing can offer these prisoners, and more generally, on the ethics of writing one's own life story. Unconverted Long-term Prisoners: National Heroes or Enemies? Pijŏnhyang changgisu (unconverted long-term prisoners in Korea) refers to those who have been imprisoned for an extensive period (the majority for more than thirty years) for maintaining their socialist ideology, or for participating in communist activities in South Korea since the 1945 liberation of the country. Im Pang-gyu was a communist imprisoned for twenty years (1952–1972) for his participation in a communist guerrilla unit. Five years after his release, he was reimprisoned without trial because he had refused to convert to democracy. While serving an additional twelve years (1977–1989), Im and other unconverted inmates were exposed to so-called conversion "maneuvering" imposed by the state in the form of physical abuse. Published years after Im's 1989 release, Pijŏnhyang changgisu Im Pang-gyu chasŏjŏn reveals the unfair treatment long-term prisoners like Im experienced, and also tries to change defamatory preconceptions about them by presenting their life stories. In South Korea, ppalch'isan and those with communist ideologies have aroused fear and hatred among people influenced by Cold War, anti-communist ideology. The still-famous story of nine-year-old Yi Sŭng-bok—reportedly killed in 1968 by armed North spies because he shouted "I...

ОЧЕРК «ЧЕ-ЧЕ-О». СЕМАНТИЧЕСКИЕ РЕСУРСЫ АВАНТЕКСТА

The urgency of the research topic can be attributed to the acute need to study the literary heritage of A. Platonov and numerous problems related to the theory and practice of scientific interpretation of his works in the light of the latest publications, source discoveries and textual and biographical facts. Of particular importance for the teleology of the writer’s style and the ultra-textual “poetics of revisiting” characteristic of his writing (the term coined by N. M. Malygina) are the works created in transition epochs. The strategies of A. Platonov’s writing as an artist and publicist, realized in the late 1920s – early 1930s in an implicit and open polemic with aesthetic declarations and dogmatic propaganda aims, in modern science are interpreted in various ways, including analysis of the semantic resources inherent in the avantexts. The article deals with the specific features of actualization, selection, comprehension, and editing representation of creative and semantic resources of avantext on the example of the essay “Che-Che-O”, published by A. Platonov in collaboration with B. Pilnyak in a “reassembled” edition, which significantly differed from the original one. The novelty of the article is determined by the proposed approach to the object of research. The study reveals the axiological role of autobiographical discourse for the formation of the avantext and the significance of the “Voronezh text” for the implementation of the final plan. It also discovers the lines of creative attraction, due to which writers with different understanding of the nature of essay writing and possessing personally specific composition techniques could cooperate. The study identifies the most important components of the creative idea, examines the sources reinterpreted by A. Platonov, including the works of A. Bogdanov, investigates the variety and multi-vector nature of discursive practices, compares the semantically significant episodes presented in the original manuscript and in the published text, and analyzes the intertextual connections and their role in different editions of the work.

КОНЦЕПТ «СЕМЬЯ» В УСТНЫХ АВТОБИОГРАФИЧЕСКИХ РАССКАЗАХ ЖИТЕЛЕЙ СИБИРИ

The aim of the article is to analyze the implementation of the concept “family” in the speech genre of an autobiographical story. The research material is 200 oral autobiographical stories, which were recorded in the villages of Tomsk Oblast during dialectological expeditions from 1946 till 2021. The informants are residents of villages of Tomsk Oblast; they are representatives of different types of speech culture (native speakers of dialect and literary language). All stories are characterized by a relatively stable theme, means of language implementation, and structure, which allows qualifying them as a speech genre whose communicative purpose is to tell about life from the moment of birth to the moment of communication. The novelty of the article is connected with: (1) its appeal to the problem of interaction and mutual influence of the concept and the speech genre in oral everyday discourse, (2) the identification of cognitive features of the concept, (3) the definition of factors of transformation of ideas about the family in ordinary consciousness. The analysis of the concept makes it possible to obtain new data about the speech genre of the autobiographical story and its construction. The speech genre shows the dependence of the features of the content and implementation of the concept “family” on the sphere of functioning. This factor determines the theoretical significance of the results obtained. The analysis of the concept in the speech genre is carried out using the method of modeling and description of the conceptual, figurative, and value layers in the structure of the concept. As a result of contextual analysis, 16 cognitive features were identified; they are represented in the conceptual layer of the concept “family” and actualized in the speech of informants (family size, social status, compliance with moral norms, relations between family members, attitude to work, etc.). The conceptual layer is developed in detail in the oral everyday communication of Siberians. It is represented by a large number of lexical units. The figurative layer of the concept is characterized by single actualizations. At the same time, the variety of their expression is noted: metaphor, metonymy, comparisons are used. The world of the family can form the initial and resulting spheres of metaphorical models. In the initial sphere, the world of plants (roots, mushrooms), products (noodles) is mainly reflected; the semantics of unity and kinship is actualized in the initial sphere. The value layer of the concept “family” is well represented in the oral autobiographical discourse. It indicates that the family occupies one of the main places in the system of life values of peasants. The specifics of structuring this concept in the oral everyday discourse are determined mainly by the attitudes, norms of traditional culture (the family should be large, friendly, hardworking, young members of family honor the older ones, etc.). At the same time, changes in the system of family values determined by sociohistorical processes are noted. These changes are evaluated ambiguously by informants, and the family is still one of the main values of life for them. Regional (natural, social, historical, geographic) specificity is reflected in the actualization of the concept.

El archivo fantasma. Apuntes acerca de la maternidad como (im)posibilidad en la práctica artística de Tracey Emin

La irrupción del movimiento conceptual y del discurso autobiográfico en el terreno artístico desde finales de la década de los sesenta del siglo pasado, supuso un punto de escisión que redefinió la obra de arte en base a premisas como la información, la significación, el lenguaje y el archivo. Bajo dicho contexto esta intervención pretende analizar la maternidad como un tropo que históricamente ha articulado la realidad femenina a través de cierta facción del corpus artístico de Tracey Emin relacionada con la creación de un archivo fantasma en torno a sus embarazos, sus abortos y sus hijos no natos.Así, desde una perspectiva analítica, sociológica y de género se analizará la perversión del archivo, la memoria y la autobiografía a través de la revelación de una narrativa espectral, anclada entre la vida y la muerte que, paradójicamente, constituirá para la artista la única vía a través de la que poder tolerar su traumática realidad. The emergence of both the conceptual movement and the autobiographical discourse in the artistic sphere towards theend of the sixties of the last century, entailed a split point that redefined the art work as information, significance, language and archive. In this context, the aim of this paper is to analyse the maternity as a trope that, historically, has articulated feminine reality through one brach of Tracey Emin´s artwork related to the construction of a ghostly archive about her pregnancies, her abortions and her unborned children.Thus, from an analytical, sociological and gender critical approach, this paper ig going to analyze the perversión of the archive, memory and autobiography carried out by a ghostly narration, anchored between life and death that, paradoxically, for the artist will constitute the only way through which she can tolerate her traumatic reality.

"Iz ormara na police": O odrastanju i izlasku iz ormara u hrvatskoj queer književnosti

“OUT OF THE CLOSET, ONTO THE BOOKSHELF”: ON GROWING UP AND COMING OUT IN CROATIAN QUEER LITERATURE In the contemporary Croatian queer prose, growing up is represented as a process with uncertain outcomes. Contemporary writers do not describe gay and lesbian identities as already shaped, finalized, and unquestionably different from heterosexuality. Their poetics have many predecessors, Bildungsroman, the 19th-century genre that, despite conventional epilogues, depicts youth as a period of the adventure and overturn, being the oldest one. The second important influence are foreign coming out novels (texts that describe the articulation of gay and lesbian identities in the family and community) or narratives of affirmation, and the third Yugoslav young adult prose. The publication of the Croatian queer prose has increased dramatically since the first Gay Pride in Zagreb (2002) and the Queer Zagreb festival the following year. In the short story collection Poqureene priče [The queered stories] (2004) growing up is one of the prevailing topics with eventually popularized motifs such as coming out, moving away / traveling, cultural signifiers of gay identity, and crossings of sexual orientation with gender and class. Writing in the first person is also very popular. Vladimir Stojsavljević’s oeuvre is important because the author depicts growing up in three contexts, during Yugoslavia, in the war-time, and in post-transition, and texts by Nora Verde are a novelty because she writes about queer women as belonging to lesbian community. Young authors Mirta Maslać and Viktorija Božina reveal an interesting autobiographical discourse and share a tendency towards using diverse cultural references. This paper aims to show how the encounter of local gay and lesbian culture, foreign fiction, and already present genres has shaped the current texts about queer identity that manage to avoid writing about sexuality within simplistic, binary oppositions.

Objective and Subjective Evidence for Political Reality
 in Autobiographical Discourse

The article surveys peculiarities of a political language personality’s autobiographical discourse. Through the analysis of the autobiographical discourse, the specific features of the genre are revealed; its peculiarities in objectifying
 political reality are detected. The study material is a book of memoirs «Decision Points» by the 43d President of the USA George W. Bush, in which he describes landmark events in his personal and professional life and tries to explain what or who moved him forward in choosing complicated and provocative
 routes.
 In the analyses the author identifies genre-forming features of works, as well as the features in the objectification of political reality. The politician’s memoirs are distinguished not through accurate narration of factual evidence as much as through the aim to develop a certain view of the historical period in the
 reader and through the desire to cultivate a certain opinion in them. For this
 reason the reminiscent must strike an ideal balance in supplying objective and
 subjective evidence. A combination of unprejudiced narration and personal considerations,
 the author’s reflections on his reasons for decision-making, admission
 of guilt and not being right in some crucial moments add to the emotional
 disposition of the text and make it more convincing. Pragmatic actuality is
 achieved through rendering historical and famous facts, dates, and contemporary
 records.
 Within this article the onomastic space of G.W. Bush’s memoirs has ben
 analysed, which helps to reveal that most of the onyms (anthroponyms, zoonyms,
 chrematonyms, ethnonyms, socionyms, ergonyms, toponyms) and to testify to
 their credibility. The conclusion is made that the objective evidence is exposed
 to careful selection and is to accord with the pragmatic intention of the subject
 of reminiscence; the subjective evidence allows to fill the text with emotional
 substance and to plunge the reader in the thick of things.