Autobiographical Discourse Research Articles

Ethics and Dialogue in Autobiography: The Cases of Vitomil Zupan and Lojze Kovačič

Vitomil Zupan (1914–1987), a former partisan and political prisoner, and Lojze Kovačič (1928–2004) who was exiled as a German speaking child with his family from Switzerland to Yugoslavia, rank among the most outstanding autobiographers in modern Slovene literature. After a brief theoretical discussion on ethics and a dialogue on autobiographical discourse, the paper discusses the intersections and dialogical interplay between the real author, the writer, the narrator, the characters and the reader in their writings since the 1970s, taking into account the background of their personal experiences and the political, ideological and social conditions represented in their texts. As they pursued different concepts of self-representation, special emphasis is placed on ethical issues that derive from the autobiographical genre, respectively, from the specifics of the ethics of the told and the ethics of the telling as well as on the significance of ethical questions within the aesthetics of their writing. This article was submitted to the European Journal of Life Writing on April 16th, 2016, and published on July 17th, 2017.

Metafore sebstva u autobiografskom diskursu Vesne Parun

By using the concept of the Self as the human personality in its totality, as defined by Carl Gustav Jung and furthered by P. Ricoeur (the theory of narrative identity, the Self defined as an identity constructed by narrative configuration, the dialectics of the discovery of the other in one’s own Self and one’s own Self in the Other), this work will focus in the analysis of metaphors which express the Self of the auto-diegetic narrator as can be found in the autobiographical discourse of Vesna Parun. The corpus of this research is to be found in selected texts from her volume Noć za pakost. Moj život u 40 vreća (2001). From the first chapter of this volume [which consists of the following works of autobiography and essays: Poljubac života (1993), Do zalaska sunca hodajući za kamilicom (1958), Pod muškim kišobranom (1986)] the reader comes to realise that, for this author, the writing of autobiography is itself a problem of self-expression and that she had constantly deferred it, while, on the other hand, feeling a great compulsion from within to do so. This sense of paradox finds its reflection in some of the constitutive elements which can be found in her autobiographical discourse. In the relationship between literature and reality, which is something which the genre of autobiography questions in its own way, the author noticeably distances herself from the mere documentary transmission of factual information from her life. A reflection of this can be seen in the negation of a strict chronology of events and confessions, as she makes recourse to a technique which uses collage and appears fragmentary; furthermore, here prose here has a lyrical quality, negating "metaphor as a literary device" and transforming it into "literature as metaphor". The autobiographical prose of Vesna Parun is especially dense with metaphor, and it can be concluded that it expresses her Self. Attention is directed here to three metaphors in particular – the umbrella, which can be both "masculine" and "feminine", a map of the world, on the wall of every house in Vesna’s community, as well the sack, which is followed by the symbolic number 40, as many in which she could fill her life in. Besides the metaphors mentioned here, what will be proposed here is that in the autobiographical discourse of Vesna Parun literature itself is presented as metaphor of her Self, appearing to the reader as significantly (auto)meta-textual.

Rubber Ducks and Ships of Fools

The trope of boat figures centrally in Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman's travelling public artwork, Rubber duck (2007–2016); in the media images of migrant refugees arriving at European destinations by boat since 2015; and in British artist Paul McCarthy's Ship Adrift, Ship of Fools (2010). Functioning as a hybrid vessel containing conceptions of global and nomadic transitivity, the image of boat forms the coalescing crux of the discourse in this article. The boat is interpreted as figuratively representing vessel transporting the nomadic individual as an autobiographical subject positioned in liminal and polycultural circumstances. Following Russell West-Pavlov, it is argued that autobiographical discourse continues to manifest as one of the most potent forms of ideology and that subjective nomadic ideology is utopianistically coloured. In the course of the article, notions of polyculturalism; rhizomatic identity: the Foucauldian notion of a Ship of Fools; minor; minority; difference; and Otherness are explored as core aspects of the constructions around autobiographical trajectory in the nomadic context.

Pauses During Autobiographical Discourse Reflect Episodic Memory Processes in Early Alzheimer's Disease.

There is a large body of research on discourse production in Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Some studies have focused on pause production, revealing that patients make extensive use of pauses during speech. This has been attributed to lexical retrieval difficulties, but pausing may also reflect other forms of cognitive impairment as it increases with cognitive load. The aim of the present study was to analyze autobiographical discourse impairment in AD from a broad perspective, looking at pausing behavior (frequency, duration, and location). Our first objective was to characterize discourse changes in mild cognitive impairment (MCI) due to AD. Our second objective was to determine the cognitive and neuroanatomical correlates of these changes. Fifteen patients with MCI due to AD and 15 matched cognitively normal controls underwent an ecological episodic memory task, a full neuropsychological assessment, and a 3D T1-weighted MRI scans. Autobiographical discourse collected from the ecological episodic memory task was recorded, transcribed, and analyzed, focusing on pausing. Intergroup comparisons showed that although patients did not produce more pauses than controls overall, they did make more between-utterance pauses. The number of these specific pauses was positively correlated with patients’ episodic memory performance. Furthermore, neuroimaging analysis showed that, in the patient group, their use was negatively correlated with frontopolar area (BA 10) grey matter density. This region may therefore play an important role in the planning of autobiographical discourse production. These findings demonstrate that pauses in early AD may reflect a compensatory mechanism for improving mental time travel and memory retrieval.

The Most Memorable Circumstances: Instructions for the Collection of Personal Data from Church Members, circa 1752

ABSTRACT Moravian archival facilities around the world house over 40,000 memoirs, known in the German language as Lebensläufe, from members of the Moravian Church. This article is a translation of a memorandum, found at the Moravian Archives in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, about the collection of biographical information from members of the Moravian Church. This source, an undated request from Matthaeus Hehl, provides instructions for how to collect such information. Because Hehl calls upon Moravians to provide detailed information about their lives, he may have in effect contributed to the development of autobiographical discourse within the church. This manuscript is a significant discovery, as it builds upon our current understanding of autobiographical writing within the Moravian Church.

Beyond the Subject: Anglo-American Slave Narratives in the Netherlands, 1789-2013

In recent years life writing scholars have increasingly linked the autobiographical genre to human rights causes, such as abolitionism. This article aims to historicize and contextualize the presupposed connection between human rights and the human subject of autobiographical discourse by focusing on the cultural mobility of Anglo-American slave narratives. Tracing their presence in the Netherlands since the late eighteenth century, it is demonstrated that slave narratives were considered of no value to Dutch abolitionism and Dutch debates on slavery and its legacy until very recently. Publishers and readers did, however make sense of slave narratives as sensational, gothic literature. Furthermore, the narratives were appropriated by Dutch fundamentalist Protestants advocating the nation’s emancipation from its state of spriritual “slavery”. Only when secularization converged with post-colonial migration patterns new interpretations stressing Black experience, agency, and subjectivity came to the fore in the Netherlands. Inspired by African-American rhetoric, Afro-Dutch migrants appropriated slave narratives in order to break the public silence on the Dutch history of slavery. This article was submitted to the European Journal of Life Writing in June 2014 and published in April 2015.

Postmodernism And Subjectivity Reconstructed In Edward Said's Out Of Place: A Memoir

Abstract This paper studies the connection between the textual politics of ethnic autobiography and postmodern aesthetics as demonstrated in Edward Said's Out of Place: A Memoir (1999). It explores the complexities of the relationship between the dominating western discourses of identity and constructing subjectivity. This paper shows that Said is rewriting the diasporic model of subjectivity as a position of difference, by doing so he challenges both the traditional prevailing notion of a coherent universal transcendental subject, and the essentialist concepts of the other. It also examines the way in which Out of Place as a postmodern autobiography provides insights into the contemporary dilemmas about the limits of an autobiographical discourse attempting to speak in the name of truth and yet of difference.

To Russia with “Spain”: Spanish Exiles in the USSR and the Longue Durée of Soviet History

To Russia with “Spain”Spanish Exiles in the USSR and the Longue Durée of Soviet History Glennys Young (bio) Verónica Sierra Blas, Palabras huérfanas: Los niños y la guerra civil (Orphan Words: Children in Exile and the Civil War). 434pp. Madrid: Taurus, 2009. ISBN-13 978-8430606764. €20.00. Susana Castillo, Mis años en la escuela soviética: El discurso autobiográfico de los niños españoles en la URSS (My Years in the Soviet School: The Autobiographical Discourse of Spanish Children in the USSR). 265pp. Madrid: Los Libros de Catarata, 2009. ISBN-13 978-8483194645. €18.00. Gina Herrmann, Written in Red: The Communist Memoir in Spain 272pp. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010. ISBN-13 978-0252034695. $45.00. Miguel Marco Igual, Los médicos republicanos españoles en la Unión Soviética (Spanish Republican Doctors in the Soviet Union). 511pp. Barcelona: Flor de Viento Ediciones, 2010. ISBN-13 978-8460808268. €29.50. Luiza Iordache, Republicanos españoles en el Gulag (1939–1956) (Spanish Republicans in the Gulag [1939–56]). 142pp. Barcelona: Institut de Ciències Polítiques i Socials, 2008. ISBN-13 978-8460808268. €15.00. Immaculada Colomina Limonero, Dos patrias, tres mil destinos: Vida y exilio de los niños de la guerra de España refugiados en la Unión Soviética (Two Countries, Three Thousand Destinations: The Life and Exile of the [End Page 395] Children of Spanish War Refugees in the Soviet Union). 280pp. Madrid: Fundación Francisco Largo Caballero y Ediciones Cinca, 2010. ISBN-13 978-8496889606. €25.00. To review statistics on Spanish exiles in the USSR is to assume their minimal impact on Soviet socialism. As a result of the Spanish Civil War, only 4,221 Spaniards came to the USSR before World War II began.1 Nearly 3,000 were children evacuated during the Iberian conflict in five expeditions over stormy and dangerous seas. The remaining exiles, almost all catapulted to the USSR by Francisco Franco’s victory, included political refugees, among them leaders of the Communist Party of Spain (PCE) such as José Díaz and Dolores Ibárruri, as well as doctors and medical personnel who had cared for Spanish Communists and Republican officers. A subgroup became exiles because they were stranded in the USSR: such was the predicament of the 157 Spanish pilots who had studied at Soviet aviation schools in Kirovabad and Khar′kov, and the 69 sailors from the nine Republican ships in Soviet ports at the end of the Iberian conflict.2 From this small number there were, of course, subtractions. About 200 Spaniards died fighting for the USSR during World War II. Hundreds of other noncombatants perished from disease and other factors. Spaniards died in the Gulag, among them a few evacuated as children, and approximately 100 of the Republican pilots and sailors. Others went “home”: during Khrushchev’s “thaw,” nearly 1,900 Spaniards returned to Spain—in some cases, to migrate back to the USSR after a few years. June 1961 marked the arrival in Cuba of a significant contingent of approximately 200 Soviets of Spanish origin, who served as Castro’s advisers. They, and [End Page 396] subsequent installments of Soviet Spaniards who came to Havana in the 1960s, stayed for a few years and, in some cases, even for decades.3 Yet it is important, as suggested by a close reading of the works under review, to question the reasoned conjecture that the small and dwindling number of Spanish exiles made them marginal to Soviet socialism. Numbers do not tell the whole story, even concerning demographic statistics on the Spanish Civil War diaspora in the USSR. They eclipse the fact that Spanish Civil War exiles and Spaniards in the USSR were not the same thing. The broader category of “Spaniards”—those who regarded themselves as part of the disparate Spanish community in the USSR, even if they were not born in Spain and mostly spoke Russian—encompassed not only the exiles but also the children, grandchildren, and sometimes extended family members of the exiles themselves.4 That the most expansive definition of “Spaniards”—including the Civil War exiles—would likely not yield...

“War Beading up into a Red Dot”: Autobiographical Discourse in Andrzej Żuławski’s “The Third Part of the Night”

The author is mainly interested in the chosen aspect of autobiographic dispute, namely a film autobiographism understood as a defined communication attitude of the film author and the audience reaction generated by it. In this paper Maszewska-Łupiniak discusses autobiographism included in the fictional film narration of The Third Part of the Night by Andrzej Żuławski. His film, presenting a part of a family history, matches the autobiographic dispute. As a text about Holocaust, it creates a universal message – the duality in the film structure makes us think about the relations between a creator and his work, between the ethical conditions of that relation. All that is reflected in the style and poetics of the film, which, in turn, makes the receiver of the story adopt a distant attitude. [originally published in Polish in Kwartalnik Filmowy 2011, no. 73, pp. 163-174]

Lost in Third Space? Narrating German-Jewish identity in Maxim Biller’s autobiography Der gebrauchte Jude (2009)

After the Holocaust Jewish life in Germany was invisible: many survivors left Germany, and most of those who did stay or returned from exile preferred to keep a low profile. Most Germans were keen to move on; their awareness of Jewish life was reduced to memorial contexts, and, being the majority, they dominated public discourse of commemoration. From the 1980s on, young German-Jewish writers of the second generation started to reflect in their work on what it meant to be Jewish in Germany. They have thus contributed to making Jews more visible again in Germany. This process has been helped by the immigration of Jews mainly from the former Soviet Union following the fall of the Iron Curtain. This article examines how in his most recent text, Der gebrauchte Jude, the controversial second generation writer Maxim Biller reflects about the parameters of this visibility through his autobiographical discourse.

AS TRÊS IDENTIDADES DO DISCURSO AUTOBIOGRÁFICO: REFLEXÕES SOBRE A OBRA DE PEDRO NAVA

Os diários, as cartas, os memoriais acadêmicos, os romances autobiográficos são gêneros que realizam o discurso autobiográfico, cuja marca central é, além da temática da “minha vida” – o “eu” é o centro do discurso –, a produção do efeito de identidade entre o enunciador e o narrador; o narrador e o protagonista; o protagonista e o enunciador. Ao examinar os livros que compõem as Memórias de Pedro Nava, notamos que, a partir da segunda metade de Galo-das-trevas (quinto volume), esse triplo efeito de identidade não se realiza por completo. Por meio de uma análise centrada na sintaxe e na semântica discursiva, procuramos desvendar os mecanismos labirínticos que rompem essa coerção dos gêneros autobiográficos e seus efeitos de sentido.

Advertising and Autobiographical Discourse

In her article "Advertising and Autobiographical Discourse" María Ángeles Rodríguez Fontela sketches a poetics of advertising in autobiographic discourse working from a selection of narrative and autobiographical spots. Emphasized in her narratological study is the contraction of retrospective temporality, the domination of the proleptic construction of the "I," the ellipsis in the outcome, the iterative and archetypical character of the narrated episodes, the confidential tone of the narrative voice, and the mythical projection of the narrated story. Rodríguez Fontela analyzes in selected television advertisements the ironic, comic, and parodic effects which show the hybridization of genres and the rhetorical function of the different models of identification between spectator and actor.

Remapping Autobiographical Space: Jean-Philippe Toussaint's Self-Effacing Self-Portraits

This essay considers how Jean-Philippe Toussaint's Autoportrait à (l’étranger) and Mes Bureaux: Luoghi dove scrivo represent a counter-discourse to the exhibitionism and voyeurism that underpin the contemporary phenomenon of extimité, constitute a meditation on the limits of self-representation, and shed light on what Paul Gifford has called the “highlighted question mark” (226) of the subject returned from structuralist and deconstructionist exile. Self-effacing in their minimalist stance and their recourse to fiction, Toussaint's self-portraits draw attention to the transparency fallacy of autobiographical discourse as well as underscore the elusiveness of the self. As much as self-portraits these texts are literary manifestoes that assert literature's illuminating powers, not only its capacity to show the metaphysical in the mundane but also its ability to reveal a self through absence as much as presence.

Autobiographical Discourse in the Theaters of Politics

During the course of the 2008 presidential election in the United States, candidates, voters, journalists, pundits, and campaign operatives engaged directly and indirectly in an extended national debate about auto/biographical storytelling, its generic forms, its grounds of authenticity, its routes of circulation, and its afterlives in various media. In the wake of that election, scholars have been probing the conjunctions of personal discourse and political discourse, autobiographical acts, and the "theater" of politics. This introduction situates contributions to this special issue of Biography in the context of three broad themes: the personalization of politics over the last five decades, with its mobilization of the personal story to suture political persona and national fable; the social action of genre in constituting political publics, in such diverse genres as television reality shows, blogs, and national biography; and the archives of the fragment animating strategic biographism and scholarly methodology.

Weblogs as Autobiographical Discourse

Weblogs as Autobiographical Discourse

Mark S Micale, Hysterical men: the hidden history of male nervous illness, Cambridge, MA, and London, Harvard University Press, 2008, pp. xv, 366, illus., £19.95, €21.00, $29.95 (hardback 978-0-674-03166-1).

Mark S Micale, Hysterical men: the hidden history of male nervous illness, Cambridge, MA, and London, Harvard University Press, 2008, pp. xv, 366, illus., £19.95, €21.00, $29.95 (hardback 978-0-674-03166-1). - Volume 54 Issue 1

Decolonizing African Autobiography

Despite Western autobiographical theory's ongoing efforts to render it impossible, African autobiography—and autobiography in general— thrives. Examining the process of decolonization in African autobiography, this essay traces a discursive shift from tragedy to comedy in three African autobiographies by explaining how these texts negotiate the challenging terrains of history, language, genre, modernity, and colonialism. Camara Laye's haunting The Dark Child tragically narrates his discursive alienation from African society, while the other two—Dugmore Boetie's Familiarity Is the Kingdom of the Lost and Buchi Emecheta's Head above Water—comically challenge Western autobiographical discourse by denying the possibility of verifying autobiographical truth or by contesting the Western success narrative. Thus, in its analysis, this essay seeks to avoid a crippling essen- tialism by approaching Africans texts both as specific, localized narratives and as a part of an emerging global discourse of noncoercive knowledge. If one looks at the history of post-Enlightenment theory, the major problem has been the problem of autobiography: how subjective structures can, in fact, give objective truth. During these same centuries, the Native Informant . . . was unquestioningly treated as the objective evidence for the founding of so-called sciences like ethnography, ethno-linguistics, comparative religion, and so on. So that, once again, the theoretical problems only relate to the person who knows. The person who knows has all of the problems of selfhood. The person who is known, somehow seems not to have a problematic self. . . . Only the dominant self can be problematic; the self of the Other is authentic without a problem, naturally available to all kinds of complications. (Spivak 66)

The Rhetorical Meaning of a Personal Deixis in the Female Autobiographical Discourse (“The Field Work in Ukrainian Sex” O. Zabuzhko)

The article deals with an autobiography as a type of rhetorical discourse. Having analyzed “The Field Work in Ukrainian Sex” the researcher scrutinizes how personal deixis determines the positions in a discourse and how a transposition of personal pronouns becomes a rhetorical means which affects the dynamics of personal narrative and emotive expression. The dialogical figures in the novel (self communication and imaginary dialogue with readers) are compared with monologue in a theater. Thus, the “theatrical” dialogue is considered to be an important feature of a rhetorical utterance.

The Potential Role of Life-Writing Therapy in Facilitating ‘Recovery’ for Those with Mental Illness

This article addresses the experience of designing and conducting life-writing workshops for a group of clients with severe mental illness; the aim of this pilot study was to begin to determine whether such writing about the self can aid in individual ‘recovery’, as that term is understood by contemporary health professionals. A considerable amount has been written about the potential of creative writing in mental health therapy; the authors of this article provide a brief summary of that literature, then of the concept of ‘recovery’ in a psychology and arts therapy context. There follows a first-hand account by one of the authors of being an arts therapy workshop facilitator in the role of a creative practitioner. This occurred in consultation with, and monitored by, experienced mental health professionals.

Gypsy pentecostal ascetism and body management

Pentecostal religious beliefs and practices consist of a complex set of strategies of transformation and personal renewal. Among other aspects of their experiences in the Church of Philadelphia, the social construction of Gypsy reality turns on the reform of the body. The present paper lies on aspects such as the body as object and subject of biopolitical and religious practices; the relationships between religious experience and body management; new social and community interactions; and autobiographical discourse as the ideological vehicle of personal conversion and transformation. All these processes reveal how social practices remake and shape bodily behaviour and its meaning. Pentecostal charismatic practices channel and express the community and individual demands of Church of Philadelphia converts, and represent central issues in the Pentecostal management of body and spirit. Our aim in this paper is to analyze the bodily practices which provide for believers´ transformation, and which shape community rituals and the congregation's interactions.