Autobiographical Fragment Research Articles

Carnival, Hysteria, and Writing: Collected Essays and Autobiography

Before his death from leukemia at the age of 36, Allon White had become known as one of the most important literary and cultural critics of his generation. Carnival, Hysteria, and Writing represents a summation of the work which, as Stuart Hall explains in an extended introduction, transformed cultural studies in the 1980s. Allon White's central concerns - with writing, carnival, the body, hysteria, and memory - recur with differing inflections in the pieces collected here. Wide-ranging in scope, the essays move with fluency from an analysis of the work of Julia Kristeva to a discussion of language and location in Dicken's Bleak House, and from a Thomas Pynchon short story to the 'seriousness' of academic language. Other pieces deal with Gilles Deleuze and Francis Bacon, and with Mikhail Bakhtin, a major influence on Allon White's thinking. Included too is the poignant autobiographical fragment, 'Too Close to the Bone'. An Afterword by Jacqueline Rose deals with the links between theory and autobiography and between the academic and personal writings in the book. A memorial to Allon White's life and work, Carnival, Hysteria, and Writing will be essential reading for all working within literary and cultural studies.

Susan Glaspell's Fiction: Fidelity as American Romance

Susan Glaspell's play Trifles (1916) or short story she based on it, Jury of Her Peers (1917), may be found today in almost every anthology introducing college students literature, yet it seems strange that woman who wrote nine novels and over fifty short stories, in addition fourteen plays, is still mainly known, when known at all, for short dramatic work. Feminist critics such as Christine Dymkowski and Linda Ben-Zvi, among others, are in process of resurrecting Glaspell's reputation and establishing that she is one of two most accomplished playwrights of twentieth-century America (Dymkowski 91). But although this is invaluable, attention continues be focused almost solely on Glaspell's drama, exclusion of her novels. Veronica Makowsky's recent study provides first scholarly feminist analysis of Glaspell's entire oeuvre, from her early stories her late novels, but even Makowsky appears agree with standard view, which is in my opinion not sufficiently substantiated, that Glaspell's plays are her greatest work (24). Glaspell's first novel, Glory of Conquered, was published in 1909; her second, The Visioning, in 1911; and her third, Fidelity, in 1915. In 1913 she married George Cram Cook, an idealistic, bohemian fellow lowan. They moved New York and summered in Provincetown, Massachusetts. They were both instrumental in creating Provincetown Players and in establishing group in Greenwich Village. Despite fact that she spent most of 1920s plays for Provincetown theater and did not return novel form until 1928 with Brook Evans, Glaspell considered herself writer of and, as she recalled in later autobiographical fragment, began plays because my husband forced me to (Noe 33). Later, after she and Cook had left New York for two-year sojourn in Greece, she confided in letter her mother that the theater always made it hard for me write and now I will have better chance for my own writing (Noe 49). Although her play Alison's House won Pulitzer Prize in 1931, and she served briefly as Midwest director for Federal Theatre Project in Chicago during 1934, she basically settled in Provincetown after Cook's death in Greece in 1924 and returned fiction, producing five more novels: Fugitive's Return (1929), Ambrose Holt and Family (1931), The Morning Is Near Us (1939), Norma Ashe (1942), and Judd Rankin's Daughter (1945). Not only did Glaspell regard herself primarily as fiction writer, but she was critically accepted as an American novelist of integrity and importance until mid 1930s. Many of her novels were reviewed, increasingly favorably, in New York Times. Fidelity was praised by New York Times reviewer for its convincing realism, but it was seen be romantic tale; the story of caught in mesh of law; therefore reviewer did not understand second half of novel, where love is entirely abandoned, and found it flawed for that reason (Anon.). Although Percy Hutchison, Times reviewer of Fugitive's Return, found novel uneven, he praised Glaspell as so much of an individual [that] knows in advance that novel from her pen will not be an ordinary book. John Chamberlain praised Brook Evans in 1928 Times review as a masterpiece on small scale, masterpiece because Glaspell has distilled essence from most important and character-revealing moments, and small scale because she has limited her canvas deliberately . . . focus[ing] on purely human values that remain eternal, irrespective of time or place. In 1931 he aptly described Ambrose Holt and Family as tragi-comedy of and noted Glaspell's delicately pervasive humor, which acts as perpetual astringent cutting through sentimentality. In both reviews he discussed Glaspell's idealism in her life and her work, and praised her courage and commitment as writer. …

Love in the time of Victoria: sexuality, class and gender in nineteenth-century London

'Vice and wretchedness exist in their most appalling and hideous forms, stalking about with bold front, unblushingly, as though vice were virtue.' For the middle-class moralists and reformers of Victorian London, poverty was synonymous with depravity: their descriptions of the urban working classes portray a swarming, undifferentiated mass, impoverished and immoral. In the absence of written accounts by the poor themselves, these nineteenth-century prejudices still cloud our understanding of popular attitudes to sensuality and courtship, marriage and pregnancy. Love in the Time of Victoria overturns these prejudices by presenting and analyzing an extraordinary range of hitherto unpublished first-hand documents: love letters and testimonies from working-class women who faced pregnancy alone, and from their suitors, relatives and employers. These unique and moving writings provide the fullest and most accurate picture to date of love and sex among the poor in Victorian London. Francoise Barret-Ducrocq has painstakingly uncovered autobiographical fragments which show women and men who are neither depraved nor unusually virtuous. They meet in the course of their work, in the streets or through family and friends; they seek romance in parks and pubs, servants' attics or rented rooms. The women's own records of their relationships resonate with all the singularities of desire, passion and regret, and they reveal a wide range of responses to separation or abandonment. For, despite their limited options, these women continued to exercise real choice. Their words vividly bring to life the material and emotional conflicts of the poor in nineteenth-century London. This remarkable book restores dignity and individuality to its subjects, but never idealizes them. The stories here contain cynicism and tenderness, cruelty and generosity. As the author says, this is history amazingly like real life.

La transposition filmique de la tragédie chez Pasolini, (Œdipe-Roi, Médée)

In his films (Œdipus-Rex, 1967 ; Medea, 1970), Pasolini manifests a hankering after a form of the sacred that includes the tragic dimension, tragedy representing, according to the film maker, the outbreak of the sacred into man's daily life. While Œdipe-rex signals, through the figures of the « African » Sphinx and Tiresias (as interpreted by Julian Beck, the director of the Living Theatre) the emergence of tragedy and the sacred, Medea takes us back to the confrontation of the archaic religious world of the Colchean high-priestess and magician with Jason's rational world. Through the « modern » prologue and epilogue of Œdipus-rex Pasolini, by means of contemporary autobiographical fragments, gives us a meditation on (and an exemplary transposition of) the further developments and personal implications of Sophocles' tragedy. In Medea's prologue and at the beginning of the Corinthian sequence (after the quest for the Golden Fleece), Pasolini presents the twofold aspect of Chiron the Centaur : a figure at once mythical and human, who draws the lessons of the confrontation between the « primitive » societies and the retrograde conversion of Medea the high- priestess and magician on one hand and Jason's pragmatic world on the other. With the human sacrifice in Cholcos which refers us to reconstructed archaic agrarian rites, Pasolini presents a new interpretation in contradistinction with the Euripidian schemata. The interpretation is closely akin to a « poetic cinema » and bears on Absyrte's murder and the infanticide perpetrated by Medea in Corinth, both taking place within a sacred time-space framework. Through rituals centered round such objects as Medea's garb and women's choruses, Pasolini, in this film even more than in Œdipus-rex, presents a baroque filmic opera which is a tentative eulogy of barbarity and the sacred.

“that was the last time I seen them, and no more”: voices through time in Australian Aborigina autobiography

In the 1920s, Aboriginal Australians in northern Queensland were removed from the bush by force and deposited on missions, where they grew up, were educated, and often lived the rest of their lives. Their autobiographical memories—from conversation—about life in the bush and the events that sundered people from their families are framed in languages provided by subsequent mission life and are discursively shaped by the facts both of the moment and of subsequent biography. This article examines the complex voices in one such autobiographical fragment, drawn from one man's attempt to reconstruct a past for himself.

Modernizing Lives: Experiments in English Biography, 1918-1939

Eight distinguished English writersLytton Strachey, Geoffrey Scott, David Cecil, Percy Lubbock, A. J. A. Symons, Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, and Harold Nicolsonall wrote biographies of great influence. Hoberman suggests that it is time to re-examine these people and their contribution to biography.The biographers featured in this study were vastly different writers writing about people as diverse as Queen Elizabeth and Roger Fry, but they shared a common concern: the reshaping of traditional biography into a more flexible, more artful form, able to accommodate modern ideas of self, of time, and of narration. These lives, written between the wars, no longer have the serious, joyless, depressing similarity that Virginia Woolf complained about in Victorian biographies.Between the wars a number of discoveries, general currents, personalities, and theories made traditional biography seem inadequate. No longer was the compilation of letters and autobiographical fragments enough. Childhood became important, as did the unconscious, unwilled element in character. Social forces became paramount.

The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy, Volume 6: 1920-1925 , and: The Unknown Thomas Hardy: Lesser-Known Aspects of Hardy's Life and Career (review)

Reviewed by: The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy, Volume 6: 1920-1925, and: The Unknown Thomas Hardy: Lesser-Known Aspects of Hardy's Life and Career John Halperin Thomas Hardy . The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy, Volume 6: 1920-1925. Eds. Richard Little Purdy and Michael Millgate. New York: Oxford UP, 1987. 379 pp. $52.00. Harold Orel . The Unknown Thomas Hardy: Lesser-Known Aspects of Hardy's Life and Career. New York: St. Martin's, 1987. 194 pp. $32.50. "The whole time of the next generation will be occupied in reading the old letters of this," Hardy wrote, with some bitterness, to Harley Granville Barker in 1923. Letters from Hardy to Granville Barker had got into the hands of an unscrupulous collector and were being offered for public sale. That Hardy should find himself in such a situation was a result of his long life (he was now eighty-three) and of the high standing his reputation had reached in the thirty years since he stopped writing fiction. These dangerous incursions into his private life, growing more bold as time went on, stimulated anew Hardy's passion for biographical anonymity and immunity—which passion coexisted, of course, despite his constant protestations to the contrary, with his actively seeking to attain and finally being able to enjoy a cultural pinnacle: he was now the Grand Old Man of English letters, famous the world over. As Somerset Maugham once remarked, anyone can become respectable if he lives long enough. During the years covered by the present volume—the penultimate one of this series—Hardy was preoccupied chiefly with two volumes of poems and two plays, one new and one old. Late Lyrics and Earlier (1922) and Human Shows, Far Phantasies, Songs, and Trifles (1925) were, respectively, his sixth and seventh volumes of poetry. The Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall was published in 1923 and performed several times in various parts of the country. The dramatic version of Tess of the d'Urbervilles that Hardy had composed in the Nineties was now unearthed and became briefly a hit of the 1925 season in London, running for several months first in suburban Barnes and later at the Garrick Theatre in the West End. Hardy was bemused and excited by his sudden and unexpected entrance, at age eighty-five, into the playwriting profession, remarking (to Granville Barker) at the same time that in his opinion "to attempt to put a novel on the stage is hopeless, and altogether a mistake in art." Still, he did it, and enthusiastically too, for there was a good deal of money to be made out of the venture, and by money the once-poor Hardy was always dazzled. During these years (ages seventy-nine to eighty-five) Hardy spent a good deal of time fending off would-be biographers and other seekers of information while attempting to control what was written about him by tossing at them, simultaneously, autobiographical fragments, mostly trumped up, and blinding cinders. Refusing to tell the truth about himself was a settled habit. And, as always, he pretended not to care whether his work got sold and into print, at the same time pursuing publishers, editors, and agents shrewdly and relentlessly to be sure that it did. He managed to make his own signature worth a great deal by withholding it as often as he could. He received honors; he grew rich. Foreign translations of his works, into languages as distant as Polish, Russian, Czech, Norwegian, and Danish, now appeared. He was offered, and accepted (always [End Page 672] in absentia), a quiverful of honorary degrees. The film rights to his novels were optioned, and optioned again. And he was now beginning to scour the rich American market, the copyright act of 1891 requiring U.S. royalties to be paid on all volumes published since that year. Americans, Hardy quotes someone (perhaps mythical) as saying, "are like children, and . . . read whatever is put before them without much judgment of their own." The first printing of Late Lyrics went through three impressions; the entire first printing of Human Shows (five thousand copies) was sold out in just a few days. The British...

William Carlos Williams

I'M a doctor all day and into the night; I write on the run, or when it's plenty dark, before going to bed. That autobiographical fragment was sent to an inquiring Harvard undergraduate who wanted to make a clearer distinction between a particular person's vocation and avocation than the student was disposed to allow. I happened to be the lucky recipient of the message. I was writing a major paper on the American poet (and novelist, and writer of short stories, and essayist, and playwright) William Carlos Williams and felt emboldened to ask a few questions of him. He was more than forthright; he answered in strong, wry, bemused language. And he offered a bonus: If I ever wanted to accompany him on his medical rounds, I would be welcome. I quickly accepted and soon enough found myself utterly captivated by this brilliant, energetic, many-sided man from Rutherford, NJ, who

Conrad Hal Waddington, 8 November 1905--26 September 1975.

Conrad Hal Waddington was born in Evesham on 8 November 1905. His parents, Hal and Mary Ellen (Warner) Waddington, were of long-established Quaker families and were first cousins, as were Mary Ellen’s parents. His surname traces to the Lancashire village of Waddington. He had one sister— Mrs Doris Christie. His father was a tea planter in South India and he spent his first 2 1/2-3 years on a tea estate in the Wynaad district of the Western Ghats and then nearly two years in Coimbatore, both being in the Madras Presidency (now Tamil Nadu). In a brief autobiographical fragment he describes one of his few memories of India: ‘One morning in the road outside our house I was scuffling my feet in the thick dust; as I remember it, it must have been at least six inches deep. I looked over my shoulder and there was a herd of young domesticated buffaloes coming fast towards me. I was terrified. I fled through the gate into the wide open garden, where the only cover was a rather straggly hedge in which I hid. It was made of some thick juicy plant, whose fleshy leaves were almost indistinguishable from the stem and when I broke one off and, without thinking, put it in my mouth as I watched with relief how the buffaloes went by without noticing me, the white acrid sap stung my tongue sharply, and I felt a renewal of terror that I was now poisoned and would surely die.’ He returned to England at the age of four (though his parents did not return permanently until 1928) to live with an aunt and uncle who had a son of his own age, on a farm in Sedgeberrow in the shadow of Bredon Hill. His uncle was farm manager for a bachelor gentleman farmer, always known as ‘Squire Bowly’, and the family lived with the squire in the farmhouse. His grandmother, who brought up his sister, lived in a house on the outskirts of Evesham where he went on school holidays.

Building History from Fire Insurance Records: An autobiographical fragment

With documentary sources, as with one's friends, it is never easy to recall exactly when mere acquaintance passed into familiarity. I am somewhat shaken to see from its footnotes that when I wrote my chapter for the Chapman symposium in 1969–70 that I made no use of fire insurance policies for the dating of house-building, relying mainly on conveyances, estate-plans, rate books, press advertisements and family papers; the same range of sources employed over a far wider geographical area in Christopher Chalklin's recent study. My love affair with insurance policies is therefore relatively recent, and that of an ageing researcher, not to be compared with the amatory techniques of others who were using them for industrial history well before 1971. I have been an old man in a hurry, a scanner rather than a scholar; and these practical notes from a scanner will be superseded if the S.S.R.C. project for an index to the main registers is ever realized.

The Ideas as Aitiai in the Phaedo

The third and final argument presumably is intended to 'give an account' that will make the soul's survival a matter of knowledge in the strict sense. After a long pause to indicate both the difficulty and the importance of what is to come, Socrates announces that the final argument demands a full explanation (oC-'Lo) of generation and destruction, and so introduces at 96 a the discussion of aitia. This discussion begins with the well-known 'autobiographical fragment.' We hear how Socrates began by looking for the kinds of explanations sought by those Presocratics who were interested primarily in physics and medicine. Failing to find satisfactory answers and bewildered by what he took to be logically puzzling features of accounts of this type, he abandoned this method of enquiry and was then attracted by the promise of teleological explanation offered by Anaxagoras' postulation of intelligence as the aitia of everything. Anaxagoras did not fulfil the promise in the further exposition of his system, but for Socrates' teleological explanation remained the most desirable kind. In default of this he had worked out a secondbest alternative, a 'second voyage'2 in which the ideas function as a*t* X

The Prose Writings of Jonathan Swift. Vol. V. Miscellaneous and Autobiographical Pieces, Fragments and Marginalia. Edited by Herbert Davis. Pp. xl+376. Oxford: Blackwell, 1962. 40s.net.

The Prose Writings of Jonathan Swift. Vol. V. Miscellaneous and Autobiographical Pieces, Fragments and Marginalia. Edited by Herbert Davis. Pp. xl+376. Oxford: Blackwell, 1962. 40s.net.

Turgenev's Literary Reminiscences and Autobiographical Fragments; Herman Melville. A Biography; Conrad the Novelist

Turgenev's Literary Reminiscences and Autobiographical Fragments; Herman Melville. A Biography; Conrad the Novelist Get access Turgenev's Literary Reminiscences and Autobiographical Fragments. Translated and introduced by David Magarshack. With an essay by Edmund Wilson. Faber. 25s.Herman Melville. A Biography. By Leon Howard. Cambridge (California U.P.). 17s. 6d.Conrad the Novelist. By Albert J. Guerard. Oxford (Harvard U.P.). 30s. Paul West Paul West Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar English: Journal of the English Association, Volume 12, Issue 71, Summer 1959, Pages 190–191, https://doi.org/10.1093/english/12.71.190 Published: 01 July 1959

Albert Einstein, 1879-1955

Albert Einstein was born on 14 March 1879, at Ulm in Wurttemberg, Germany, the son of Hermann Einstein and his wife, Pauline, née Koch. Hermann Einstein was in partnership with his brother, an engineer, in a small factory producing electrical supplies. From an autobiographical fragment* we learn that the Einstein parents were Jewish, but non-observant of their religion; at a very early age the boy’s religious nature became dissatisfied with the spiritual emptiness of his surroundings: seeking for something deeper, he attached himself ardently for a time to the faith of his fathers; but further reading led him to the opinion that fact cannot easily be separated from legend in the framework of Jewish history, and he ceased to accept Judaism as a transcendental religion, while retaining its humanitarian principles. In later life he was a keen Zionist and a Governor of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Meanwhile, his education was somewhat irregular, owing chiefly to changes in domicile brought about by unsatisfactory circumstances in his father’s business. Between the ages of 10 and 15 he attended the Luitpold Gymnasium at Munich. Later for a year he became a pupil of the cantonal school at Aarau in Switzerland, and at the age of 17 he entered the Technische Hochschule at Zurich, each successive move involving some discontinuity in the curriculum.

An Autobiographical Fragment by Dom Leander of St Martin

An Autobiographical Fragment by Dom Leander of St Martin