Autobiographical Fragment Research Articles

Фрагменты мемуарного и автобиографического характера в деловых документах XIX в. на примере отчетов сибирских генерал-губернаторов

The article reflects on boundary line of ego-documents and their inherent features. The author reviews the existing notions and offers her own approach. One traditional approach identifies memoir and/or autobiographical fragments in other types of documents. Another expands the corpus of ego-documents by including sources containing memoir and/or autobiographical fragments. Adherers of the latter approach postulate that professional autobiographies, official letters, formal requests, etc. convey personal traits, providing information about their authors and their feelings and emotional state. This article proposes a compromise solution: to include such texts in the corpus of ego-documents, placing them to its periphery, if size and significance of memoir and/or autobiographical fragments is substantial; in other instances, to indicate the presence of such fragments, noting their significance for characterization of the author’s personality. The article develops a definition, according to which memoir and/or autobiographical fragment is a thematically or plot-completed textual fragment reflecting personality or memory of certain person(s), incorporated in a text that is not memoir in its origin and purpose, created at the initiative of an author and containing direct personal statements. In order to identify such fragments, the article analyzes reports of the Siberian governor-generals of the 19th century; discovers circumstances and factors, under which memoir and/or autobiographical fragments most often appear in these official documents. These are: (1) first impressions of the region; (2) highlighting issues of personal interest; (3) sharing impressions that gave rise to strong emotions. The article concludes by arguing that memoir fragments often appear in the reports of governor-generals who could be characterized as enterprising, empathic people of high intellectual level, who enjoyed the emperor's trust, but (relatively) rarely had the opportunity for personal audience. These fragments are closely related to the reports’ agenda; they reflect the personality and individuality of the authors. At the same time, fragments do not change the nature of the document, thus preventing their attribution to ego-documents. Identification of such fragments and their methodical study can expand our understanding of significance and diversity of historical sources of this type, complement and enrich information about their authors. The very idea of identifying memoir and/or autobiographical fragments in documents of different types, including official government documents, seems promising and has potential for further research.

Mapping transnational lives: patterns of dislocation and reorientation in contemporary carto-graphic memoirs

ABSTRACT This article considers three recent graphic memoirs that focus on Italian transnational migration and its legacies: Elizabeth A. Povinelli’s The Inheritance, Joshua Santospirito’s Swallows (Part I), and Pia Valentini’s Ferriera. We adopt the term carto-graphic memoirs (Mitchell 2007; Norment 2012), to describe graphic novels that aim to literally and metaphorically map transnational lives, identities, and memories, through complex artistic processes of autobiographical (re)orientation, drawing, storytelling, and intellectual reflection. Dominant narratives of Italian migration redeem the struggle and shame of migration through individual success, upward mobility, and racial ‘whitening’. These three works challenge stereotypical representations of Italian migration, and Italian hyphenated identities, focusing instead on geographical, historical and autobiographical fragments that come together on the page to sketch provisional and fragile, yet emotionally and intellectually powerful patterns. Such patterns reveal histories and geographies of racism, class exploitation, violence, trauma, but also histories of physical, existential, cultural, linguistic and intellectual resistance, exchange, and creativity. Each of these memoirs locate Italian migrants and their descendants at the intersection of traumatic histories and geographies of nationalism, colonialism, racism, sexism, and class exploitation. In doing so, they provide an extraordinary opportunity to rethink the relationship between transnational histories and individual lives.

El rol de las narraciones autobiográficas en la comprensión histórica del sujeto y su comunidad

This article collects the results of an interventional research regarding the educational possibilities and obstacles that arose after the implementation in the classroom of a teaching and learning sequence that sought to link the historical narratives with the autobiographical fragments of young people around the Civil Military Dictatorship. in Chile (1973-1990). This qualitative research acquired the methodology of content analysis in thirteen stories written by high school students in a paid private school in Santiago de Chile. The results show that the student group elaborated narratives with different structures according to the temporal context. Thus, the autobiographical fragments acquire prominence in the present and future, since the students explained some personal ideas from conceptual quasi-characters (individualism) that were consolidated in the Chilean dictatorial context. Despite the above, the quasi-characters incorporated in the stories limited the spaces of freedom of the subjects and hindered, on some occasions, the incorporation of the individuality of the students. In addition, the presence of the past-present-future temporality allowed the autobiographical to be incorporated into a broader temporal context, characterized by negative judgments about the political conflict and by ways of acting as citizens restricted to individual spaces, preventing the encounter with others. In conclusion, the links between the content and skills of historical thinking with autobiographical narratives are not natural, but complex to work in school and present challenges on how students can understand themselves historically.

Plural linguistic biographies. Maps, stories, mixtures

«A multiplicity of languages and cultures has entered the Italian school environment»: that is what is written in the introduction of the Indicazioni Nazionali per il curricolo della scuola dell’infanzia e del primo ciclo di istruzione (MIUR, 2012, p. 8). The ministerial document, which forms the framework for school curricula, describes the de facto multilingual situation which can be observed in all kinds of educational environments and in communities. In infancy educational services and in schools, the presence of girls and boys who practice another language at home has long been widespread and on the increase. After describing the pluralistic linguistic repertoires featured in schools, the essay presents some evidence collected in two kindergartens in Milan, as part of a training course. Teachers were invited to use a map of intra-family communication during interviews with foreign parents, in order to outline the children’s language biographies, and to know the strategies and choices of the family. In the second part, the focus will be on some autobiographical fragments taken from literary texts in which the authors highlight the stages and steps they have gone through in their history of native bilinguals. Finally, a review of the legislation dealing with the themes of mother tongues, multilingualism and linguistic diversity in childcare and schools is presented.

Seven Late Twentieth-Century Lives: the Mass Observation Project and Life Writing

From its revival in 1981, the Mass Observation Project has collected life writing. In response to open ended questionnaires (‘directives’), MO correspondents send in what often amount to fragments of autobiography. While this material has been explored by researchers ‘horizontally’, to discuss attitudes and behaviour in relation to the themes raised by particular directives, my book Seven Lives from Mass Observation is the first attempt to use the material ‘vertically’, assembling the fragments of autobiography contributed by some individual writers who continued to respond over two or three decades. In an earlier book, Nine Wartime Lives, I used MO's original wartime diaries (and directive responses) to write biographical essays exploring a set of common themes, derived from the mature historiography of the period, from the contrasting perspectives of nine very different observers who had all participated as active citizens in public life. This article describes the very different challenges and insights posed by the use of the more recent MOP material. The longer time frame, and less developed historiography, demanded toleration of initial confusion in the research process before the key theme of a contrast between the 1960s and 1980s emerged. The reflective narrative of MOP's autobiographical fragments (different from the immediacy of the MO wartime diaries) shaped the sample chosen: a single older generational cohort, born between the two world wars, responding to the 1960s and the 1980s as adults formed by earlier experiences. Writing intimate biographies of living people, guaranteed anonymity when they first volunteered for MOP, required developing a set of ethical protocols in conjunction with the MO Trustees.

Charles Dickens Post Mortem & Bare Life under the New Poor Law

The theme of this article is how life writing can bury things, sometimes for generations, and how secrets buried in life can re-emerge after death, and disturb.1 Lives often make best sense read backwards, so here we start with revelations that emerged only after Charles Dickens’s death: in his will, and in John Forster’s famous biography and its use of the important document known as the ‘autobiographical fragment’ written by Dickens himself in the late 1840s. Forster covered gaps in the biography by guiding attention away from certain aspects of Dickens’s life, in particular his family’s geographical origins. Forster’s decisions concerning what secrets could be shared have worked to influence generations of biographers. Recent discoveries have brought fresh light to Dickens’s life after both Dickens and Forster had been dead for over a century. Attention is given to why some of these discoveries had not been made sooner, their implications and reverberations, and a fuller understanding is shared of Dickens’s fierce antipathy to the cruelties of the workhouse regime under the UK New Poor Law.

Histoire et paysages dans quelques écritures de terrain contemporaines : Jean-Christophe Bailly, François Bon, Patrick Deville et Marie Richeux

Abstract This article reviews four works representative of current field writings and attempts to define their major characteristics. First it proposes to encircle in Paysage fer (2000) by François Bon, The Change of scenery. Travels in France (2011) by Jean-Christophe Bailly, Taba-Taba (2017) by Patrick Deville, and Climats de France (2017) by Marie Richeux a common modus operandi; then it identifies in these hybrid works a singular and original writing of the ego, made of biographical and autobiographical fragments, and finally, taking into account the contributions of geocritics, it suggests the viability of ‘egogeographies,’ kinds of own landscapes to each author that a content both testimonial and patrimonial impregnates strongly.

David Copperfield and the Autobiographical Fragment Reconsidered

David Copperfield and the Autobiographical Fragment Reconsidered

Revealing Fragments: Close and Distant Reading of Working-Class Autobiography

Focusing on the Burnett Archive of Working Class Autobiography, one of the largest collections of life-writing ‘from below’, this article explores the process of writing and the emotional framework within which they were penned. The autobiographies vary in length but, essentially, all are fragments of a life and memories shared. Some are fragmentary by nature of their brevity, while others seem to be incomplete. Often these autobiographical fragments provide snippets of a voice, remembered conversations, or work as collective histories of the common people. Amidst renewed interest in the ways that autobiographical writings can be used to trace changes in British culture and society in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this article investigates both individual memoirs and the Archive as a whole to explore how even the smallest fragment can illuminate our collective past and present.

The Construction of Paul’s Self in His Writings: Narrative Identity, Social Memory and Metaphorical Truth

The article aims to investigate – in two autobiographical fragments of the Pauline writings (1 Cor. 15:8-10 and Gal. 1:13-24) – how the narrative mode enables the apostle to grasp the continuity and coherence of his identity, while integrating in the construction of his self disparate and discordant elements (like the Damascus event) which continually threaten the “narrative unity of a human life” (MacIntyre). Furthermore, since “collective memory” precedes and shapes the individual representation of the past (Halbwachs; Assmann), the article also examines how Paul integrates and negotiates in his construction of self-identity the “communal memories” shared by his social group, and in particular his past as persecutor of the Church. Finally, we shall describe the integration of these autobiographical fragments within their respective literary contexts and explore the “metaphorical truth” – or the “refiguration” of reality – which is produced by these different “configurations” of Pauline identity (Ricoeur).

Paperno, Irina ‘Who, What am I?’ Tolstoy Struggles to Narrate the Self (review)

REVIEWS 331 Souls and Dostoevskii’s ‘Mr Prokharchin’. As in previous chapters, the discussion is firmly set within its historical, social and lexicological context. Porter convincingly shows that, despite Gogol´’s initial desire to offer up Dead Souls as a force for moral change (something he was to turn to only in the novel’s unfinished second part, thereby ironically draining it of its originality and vitality), the miserly Pliushkin, with his ‘grotesque destabilization of all distinct forms of value’ (p. 132), obstinately refuses to adopt this particular role. In her final paragraph Porter returns full circle to the question with which the study begins — Russian literature’s ambivalent relationship with France and French cultural and social paradigms. We see Mr Prokharchin labelled as ‘a Napoleon’, and the accusation that he is a prey to French ambition as a ‘death sentence that brings a new life of heightened significance’ (p. 141). This is an impressive addition to the rich corpus of Russian literary criticism. Not the least of its virtues is the inclusion of judiciously chosen illustrations that complement and enhance the argument. It concludes with an appendix on the contrasting definitions of the various words for ambition (the French ambition, together with the Russian liubochestie, chestoliubie and ambitsiia), followed by detailed notes and a comprehensive bibliography. Economies of Feeling may be a relatively slim volume, but it packs more of substance and interest in its pages than books twice its size. However familiar readers might feel they are with the texts discussed here, they will find a book that refreshes their minds, challenges any received ideas and, above all, encourages them to return to the stories themselves. University of Exeter Roger Cockrell Paperno, Irina. ‘Who, What am I?’ Tolstoy Struggles to Narrate the Self. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY and London, 2014. x + 229 pp. Appendix. Notes. Index. $35.00. Starting from the deceptively simple idea that Tolstoi’s central project was to transform his innermost (zadushevnaia) life into a book, Irina Paperno has written an invaluable study of the narratological and philosophical paradoxes at the heart of Tolstoi’s life and work. For despite Tolstoi’s remarkable philosophical and literary talents, his lifelong attempt to narrate ‘the book of his life’ was, from the very beginning, doomed. As Tolstoi understood better than most, even if it were possible for an individual to comprehend the unbounded and infinite nature of a consciousness that exists in a realm beyond time, space and language, it could never be adequately represented in written language. Yet despite his understanding of the philosophical and literary impossibility of the task, Tolstoi never abandoned this quest. While Paperno sees Tolstoi’s SEER, 96, 2, APRIL 2018 332 efforts as heroic, readers less captivated by the ‘Sage of Yasnaya Polyana’ might see it as a sign of obstinance and hubris. Although ‘Who, What Am I?’ is a short book, its author manages to cover all the major periods of Tolstoi’s writing career, beginning with his first attempts at keeping a personal diary in 1847 and ending in 1910 as a dying Tolstoi attempts to dictate his thoughts to his daughter Aleksandra and his disciple Chertkov. Few scholars can match Paperno’s mastery of the more than sixty volumes of non-fictional writings in Tolstoi’s collected works, her knowledge of modern European philosophy, literature and intellectual history, and even fewer can write about complex matters with such concise and intelligent lucidity. In an introduction and six closely argued chapters, she lays out Tolstoi’s decades-long obsession with ‘narrating the self’ in diaries, letters, personal confessions, autobiographical fragments and religious tracts, reading his works as a dialogue with philosophers like Hegel and Schopenhauer and literary autobiographers like Augustine, Rousseau, Goethe and Stendhal. The central paradox that emerges from her study is that Tolstoi’s utopian attempt to imagine a discourse adequate to describe his innermost life directly from the first person led him to reject the infinitely complex and subtle third-person representation of consciousness of fictional characters that he had achieved in his novels and stories (e.g., Natasha Rostova at the ball, Anna Karenina before her suicide, Ivan Ilych on his deathbed). Paperno’s...

Тоска по автобиографии: к теме “Пастернак и Ходасевич”

The article deals with two major figures in Russian literature of the 20th century, Vladislav Khodasevich and Boris Pasternak. It describes the situation in which Khodasevich's autobiographical fragment called ‘Mladenchestvo’ (‘Infancy’) was created, almost immediately after the publication of Pasternak's Okhrannaia gramota (Safe Conduct) and the numerous critical responses to it, especially by G.V. Adamovich and A.L. Bem. It is assumed that Khodasevich started work on his own autobiography after reading Оkhrannaia gramota.

Five Autobiographical Fragments, or She May Have Been a Witch

Five Autobiographical Fragments, or She May Have Been a Witch

Anima and Psychic Fragmentation in Olive Schreiner's <i> The Story of an African Farm</i>

This essay argues that Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm, a novel based on autobiographical fragments, depicts an all-pervasive psychic fragmentation with respect to the unconscious. In particular, two Jungian systems - the Kore and the stages of eroticism - reveal the characters' psychic fragmentation with respect to the anima. Among the novel's male characters, Waldo Farber and Gregory Nazianzen Rose receive detailed analysis, especially with regard to the anima's maternal aspect. Waldo is associated with the maternal through his creation over two nine-month periods of a sheep-shearing machine and a burial post. Also, his attraction to the primitive and his shadow work with other men precede and enable his interest in marrying Lyndall. Gregory, though his relationship to the anima is complicated by cross-dressing, achieves a motherly Christ-like orientation as Lyndall's nurse. His name alludes to Saint Gregory Nazianzen, whose theological positions point affirmatively toward individuation, wholeness, and unity. But while both young men make some progress, neither properly overcomes his psychic fragmentation to achieve an ideal contra-sexual relationship. As the novel closes, significant individuation remains a far-off destination.

An attenuated philosophical gentleman.

Dr. Joseph Black had at one time, a house near us to the west. He was a striking and beautiful person; tall, very thin, and cadaverously pale; his hair carefully powdered, though there was little of it except what was collected in a long thin queue; his eyes dark, clear and large, like deep pools of pure water. He wore black speckless clothes, silk stockings, silver buckles, and either a slim green umbrella, or a genteel brown cane. The general frame and air were feeble and slender. The wildest boy respected Black. No lad could be irreverent toward a man so pale, so gentle, so elegant and so illustrious. So he glided, like a spirit, through our rather mischievous sportiveness, unharmed. He died seated, with a bowl of milk upon his knee, of which his ceasing to be did not spill a drop; a departure which it seemed, after the event, might have been foretold of this attenuated philosophical gentleman.

Double Visions: Autobiography and the Ends of Philosophy

In Contingency, irony and solidarity Rorty attempts to solve what Robert Pippin calls the ‘Modernity Problem’ by outlining a new self-understanding for the intellectuals of the ideal liberal society. The so-called liberal ironists of this post-philosophical milieu are no longer characterized by the quest for what Rorty describes as ‘a single vision’. This paper evaluates Rorty’s attempt to conceptualize the self-image of post-philosophical intellectuals in the light of two similar endeavors; namely, Nietzsche’s and the ancient Sceptics’. The preliminary conclusion is that although Rorty’s attempt fails, it points to an alternative way of interpreting the desire for a single vision; namely, as a form of autobiography. Drawing on Nietzsche, Nagel and Mill, the paper proceeds to argue that Rorty’s own autobiographical fragment exemplifies the way in which the narration of a failed attempt to find a ‘single vision’ can itself be seen as the achievement of such a vision.

Postcards from Europe: Dubravka Ugrešić as a Transnational Public Intellectual, or Life Writing in Fragments

The article explores Dubravka Ugrešić's ongoing project of interrogating and challenging different constructions of Europe from the perspective of “minor transnationalism”, focusing on the relationship between European minority cultures and the West. She has developed a hybrid form of political life writing that I call the autobiographical fragment, which mixes autobiography, personal essay, cultural criticism, travel writing, autoethnography, epistolarity, and diary. I argue that the autobiographical fragment is uniquely suited to address the discontinuities and ruptures of history, experience, and memory that have accompaniedEurope’s post-communist transformations. In the texts that I examine, including "Have a Nice Day: From the Balkan War to the American Dream", "The Culture of Lies", "Thank You For Not Reading", and "Nobody’s Home", she confronts the trauma of ethnic and gendered violence and integrates the personal and the “global”, linking the former Yugoslavia, present-day Croatia, the European Union, the United States, and the globalized cultural marketplace.

Miracles for the Marginal?: Gender and Agency in a Nineteenth-Century Autobiographical Fragment

In this article the question of agency is explored in the autobiographical fragment of a nineteenth-century poetess of Punjab, Piro. In this “pre-modern” text Piro portrays an enormous sense of self-worth and presents herself as loquacious and active. She simultaneously adheres to the norms of her bhakti devotional world where the guru was held in high esteem and often displayed his elevated status through miraculous interventions in earthly matters. Piro refers to such a marvelous encounter at a moment of crisis in her own life, attributing her redemption to the miraculous powers of the guru. Between Piro’s depiction of self-worth and her self-abnegation in front of the guru, how does one read her agency? This article views western understanding of agency in the genre of autobiographies, and also follows the critique of the western liberal feminist positions on the issue. It underscores the significance of context to understand women’s agency in different cultures.

Dallas Bower: A Producer for Television's Early Years, 1936–9

Having worked in the film industry as a sound technician and then director, Dallas Bower (1907-99) was appointed in 1936 as one of two senior producers at the start of the BBC Television service. Over the next three years Bower produced as well as directed many ground-breaking live programmes, including the opening-day broadcast on 2 November 1936; the BBC Television Demonstration Film (1937, his only surviving pre-war production); a modern-dress Julius Caesar (1938), in uniforms suggestive of a Fascist disctatorship; Act II of Tristan and Isolde (1938); Patrick Hamilton’s play Rope (1939), utilising extended single camera-shots camera-shots; numerous ballets, among them Checkmate (1938); and ambitious outside broadcasts from the film studios at Denham and Pinewood. Developing the working practices of producing for the theatre, film industry and radio, Bower was a key figure in defining the role of the creative television producer at the start of the medium. Among his innovations, according to his unpublished autobiographical fragment ‘Playback’ (written 1995), was the introduction of a drawn studio plan for the four cameras employed in all live broadcasts from Alexandra Palace. Using Bower’s writings (among them his 1936 book Plan for Cinema), his BECTU History Project interview, the BBC Written Archives and contemporary industry coverage, this article reconstructs the early development of the role of staff television producer in order to consider the questions of autonomy, agency and institutional constraints at the BBC in the pre-war years.

Competing Life Narratives: Portraits of Vita Sackville-West

This article sets out to examine the fraught, often contested relationship between multiple and competing life narratives, taking as its focus the case of Vita Sackville-West and her infamous love affair with Violet Trefusis. Vita wrote her account of this relationship in a short, autobiographical fragment (1920–21), and this text now forms the basis of nearly all subsequent accounts of her life. By examining how Vita's confession has been appropriated and revised by successive generations of the Nicolson family—in Nigel Nicolson's biography of his parents, Portrait of a Marriage (1973) and Adam Nicolson's recent television documentary, Sissinghurst (2009)—this article will identify the relational structures that exist between texts and across different life-writing genres and media. Contemporary studies of life writing and relationality have emphasised the intratextual connections between subjects. By contrast, the example of Vita Sackville-West highlights the importance of intertextuality. This article explores how intertextual relations—the construction of lives in response to extant accounts; the repetition, revision and accumulation of life narratives—has served to sustain an open-ended industry of life writing.