Autobiographical Texts Research Articles

Fleeing Nazi Persecution: Jewish Refugee Child Diarists as Family Chroniclers

This article examines the diaries of young Jewish refugees who documented their emigration from Germany and Austria in the 1930s and who wrote for family members, imagining future readers of their accounts. These diaries offer unique access to children's voices during the Holocaust, showing how some child refugees became family chroniclers, self-consciously documenting a story of Jewish resistance and survival, as well as a tragedy of loss. Their diaries became treasured material objects and autobiographical texts that perform a writing subject, a child as author and narrator, asserting agency in a situation in which they were multiply marginalised as children and as Jewish refugees.

Humanist Anecdotes in Hard Times: F. C. Weiskopf and Lenka Reinerová

This article examines humanist anecdotes about the turbulent times of the mid-twentieth century by F. C. Weiskopf and Lenka Reinerová. It provides a comparative reading of Weiskopf’s Elend und Größe unserer Tage. Anekdoten 1933–1947 (1950) and Reinerová’s “Tragischer Irrtum und richtige Diagnose” (published in Mandelduft, 1998). The anecdotal form of these texts harks back to the popular Enlightenment (Volksaufklärung) anecdotes of Heinrich von Kleist and Johann Peter Hebel, published in 1810–1811 during the Napoleonic Wars. The anecdote as a literary form is particularly well suited to the representation of wartime and political repression. While Weiskopf’s anecdotes explore cruelty and heroism under the Nazi dictatorship, Reinerová’s autobiographical text juxtaposes crisis points in her own life—her time as a political prisoner in France in 1939 and in Czechoslovakia in 1952–1953; her return to Prague as her family’s sole survivor; and her periodic cancer treatment from 1948 onwards. Reinerová describes how the kindness of ordinary people, and her own optimism and resilience, helped her through the worst times. Her lived experience gives her authority as a storyteller in Walter Benjamin’s sense. Both authors contrast human extremes—the good and the bad—yet both remain optimistic about the human capacity for good.

Punctuated Lives: Abortion, Ellipses, and Parentheses in Annie Ernaux’s L’événement (2000) and Line Papin’s Une vie possible (2022)

Abstract: This article examines the representation of abortion in two autobiographical texts: Annie Ernaux’s L’événement (2000) and Line Papin’s Une vie possible (2022). Analyzing their use of punctuation, particularly parentheses and ellipses, it argues that Papin inherits an aesthetics of hesitation from Ernaux, an aesthetics that allows both writers to make space for others’ experiences of abortion.

A Poetics of the Desert: Nina Bouraoui’s Emancipatory Geography in Garçon Manqué

Comprising roughly eighty percent of Algeria’s land mass, the Sahara is a significant part of its geography. As such, it often makes an appearance in Francophone Algerian literature in various ways, including at the level of personal and collective identity. The desert is often juxtaposed with the sea, and the Mediterranean Sea more specifically, with the latter’s liquid borders separating Algeria from its former colonizer, France. The ever-changing surfaces of sand and seawater are ideal for talking about fluid, hybrid identities that are the product of lingering friction between the two nations, as is the case in Nina Bouraoui’s first autobiographical text Garçon manqué (2000). In her poetics of the desert, the author envisions a feminist, emancipatory geography where her textual self can find refuge from the hostility and violence of the male gaze as well as from constrictive gender and sexuality norms. Movement through the different geographical spaces that reflect her identity forces her to constantly confront the contradictions within it to eventually be able to come to terms, at least temporarily, with a feminine, homosexual self. This could not be possible without a solitude, or desertedness, necessary to come into writing that is also a coming into herself.

Migration and Mental Health in Two Contemporary Memoirs.

This article examines two autobiographical texts that address the relationship between migration and struggles with mental health: Karla Cornejo Villavicencio's The Undocumented Americans (2021) and Dina Nayeri's The Ungrateful Refugee: What Immigrants Never Tell You (2020). Both memoirs help bring mental health issues to light in situations of precarity, and the texts indicate that it is not just the experience of physical dislocation that may cause or exacerbate struggles with mental health, but the disconnect from other people, from citizenship, and the nation itself. Nayeri and Cornejo Villavicencio do not focus on narratives of recovery or healing but provide space for the experiences of other undocumented migrants trying to navigate the European asylum system or difficulties in obtaining American citizenship. The article argues that the two authors use their experiences of migration and mental illness for greater advocacy purposes with regard to human rights. The struggles with mental health present in the two memoirs intertwine with the treatment of undocumented migrants as described by the two authors, going beyond the personal experience of mental health, or illness, connecting it with migration practices and policies in the United States and Europe.

Transcending Race and Nation: East Asian Identity in the Contemporary Spanish Autobiography

Over the last fifty years, as East Asian immigration to Spain has grown, so too has a desire to transcend identarian borders between race and nation. East Asian Spaniards born in democracy come of age chafing against a polarized paradigm that conceives of their race as fundamentally at odds with their nationality. I analyze two autobiographies by East Asian Spaniards that contend with and contest this binary: Chenta Tsai Tseng’s, pseudonym Putochinomaricón, Arroz tres delicias: Sexo, raza y género (2019) and Quan Zhou Wu’s La agridolce vita (2023). Each autobiography recounts its authors’ struggles to reconcile diametrically-opposed identities as members of the growing East Asian diasporic community in Spain. In centering transcendence as a textual act, I illuminate the ways in which new identities are created through the autobiographical text, and the way in which the act of writing offers an archive of alternative identities from which to establish textual selves as open to the heterogeneity of rapidly-diversifying Spain. I conclude by framing these autobiographies as spaces in which urgent, yet uncomfortable dialogues around heterogeneity and homogeneity in Spain take place.

Talking about Oneself to Talk about Christ: The Autobiographical Text of Philippians 3:1–4.1 in Light of Ancient Rhetorical Heritage

In this contribution, we will proceed in three steps. First of all, we will investigate the rhetorical approach for studying the Pauline letters, considering different methodological options. In this context, we will propose the approach of the literary rhetoric as the most valid. Secondly, we will analyse the autobiographical text of Philippians 3:1–4:1, starting from its delimitation, textual criticism, and its arrangement, according to oral and discursive models. Then, we will proceed with genre and literary origins; here, we will discover the periautologia as the point of reference of the Pauline autobiography. This eulogy of self is a genre, well known in the rhetorical tradition, to which Plutarch dedicated the treatise On praising oneself. This discovery determines the following exegetical analysis of the text. Thirdly, we will conclude with a reflection about Paul’s way of speaking about himself in this passage. In light of ancient rhetorical heritage, he does not use his autobiography to praise himself but to praise Christ, who completely changed his life. Ultimately, Paul’s talk about himself is a way of talking about Christ for the benefit of the addressees who should creatively imitate the Apostle and his Christian life.

“My head between blankets”: exploring trauma and affective injustice in the school life trajectory of a female student in Argentina

This article examines how trauma and affective injustice permeate the school life trajectory of a female student (Sofia) in Argentina. The study is theoretically grounded in the field of trauma studies in education and contributes to this literature by attending to affective injustice, a concept that has not received much attention yet. This study foregrounds Sofia’s experience of affective injustice and demonstrates that this concept is crucial in further understanding students’ experiences of affective trauma in school. Assembling rich materials (report cards, interviews, psychologists’ reports, social media posts, autobiographical texts) that span over a period of 17 years, the study uses qualitative perspectives to show how Sofia understands and experiences affective injustice in various phases of her school life. In particular, these experiences are presented in the form of an assemblage of expressions showing how Sofia communicates her claims of affective injustice using varied means and resources ranging from linguistic, behavioural, biographical, creative, emotional, bodily, and artistic expression. The paper concludes with a discussion of the educational implications of the study.

"Beyond ideologies" – some remarks on the existential and ecocritical tone of Alfred Andersch's autobiographical report Die Kirschen der Freiheit (1952)

The article is an attempt to look at the autobiographical text of the leading writer of early German post-war literature and one of the founders of the famous "Group of 47" Alfred Andersch entitled Die Kirschen der Freiheit (1952) from the perspective of the existential philosophy of Jean Paul Sartre and selected aspects of ecocritical thought. The article discusses in detail the existential concept of individual freedom not determined by twentieth-century totalitarian systems and emphasizes its ecocritical sense, i.e. the dimension of humanity in the bosom of nature, the potential of free will and deciding about one's own fate, as well as the role of art as a special means of expression of free man and his relationship to the world.

Investigating the role of affects in additional language learning in the context of mobility through a multimodal autobiographical approach

This study focuses on the role of affects in additional language learning in the context of mobility. The starting point is the discovery of Francophone migrant literature by intermediate-level learners of French at an international university in Bulgaria. It concerns in particular the encounter with the Hungarian-Swiss writer Agota Kristof and her autobiographical text “L’Analphabète” [The Illiterate], which reveals a polarized attitude towards languages that have marked her life and career. Brought to reflect on the tension behind the way the author qualifies languages as “enemies” or “friends”, the learners share their own attitudes towards the languages of their repertoires through reflective drawings (language portraits), autobiographical narratives, and semi-structured interviews. Qualitative analysis of the collected data was conducted to examine in what ways students express their affects relating to languages with different status and how their attitudes are connected to the mobilities and other significant changes they have experienced. The results indicate that the participants express predominantly positive affects. All are attached to their initial languages, although this strong identification may be destabilizing in critical situations like mobilities abroad and significant life changes. English has an important place in the learners’ identity and is related to fluency, comfort, desire, and various opportunities. French is cherished mostly for its aesthetic values, although pleasure is often mixed with anxiety due to the lower levels of proficiency. Students feel attracted to additional languages, which they connect to cultural and leisure activities but have omitted other languages from their repertoires since they do not feel strongly attached to them. It appears that both teachers and learners can benefit from the multimodal autobiographical approach as it allows to explore the complexity of the learners’ plurilingual repertoires, the stories behind their construction, and the affects related to this process. / Keywords: additional language, affects, language portrait, migrant literature, mobility, multimodality, plurilingualism

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.

The Return of Memory: Architecture and Landscape in Wienfried Georg Sebald’s Austerlitz and in the Autobiographical Stories of Lithuanian Exiles

In the 1930s and 1940s, the mass destruction of ethnoses and deportations of populations, which shattered the fates of states and people, shock Eastern Europe. In contemporary theories of trauma and memory studies, in addition to the political evaluation of those events, the study of place-based memory has been gaining attention, turning the research of cultural and individual memory back to the fundamental conflict provoked by the loss of place—the erosion of the connection with the land (place), which forms the base of person’s identity. In this article, I analyze the narratives of different national experiences—Sebald’s novel Austerlitz and the egodocumentary of Lithuanian exiles—from the perspective of place, tracing the impact of landscape and architecture on the memory processes of genocide survivors, as expressed in the specific literary works and testimonies. By reasoning that the criteria of the historicity and documentary character and the qualities of the narratives as transmitting traumatic experiences validate the comparison of the novel and testimonies, I ask why the compositional role of the reflection of the place, i.e., landscape and architecture, in organizing the novel’s narrative has been missing in the autobiographical texts of exiles, who have experienced similar complications of their displacement and identity. Different assessments of the existential situation (the novel emphases the hopelessness and abnormality of the genocide, whereas the memoirs of the exiles focus on the effort to make the situation as normal as possible), which I treat as identifiers of the meaningfulness of the experiences, do not obscure the similarities in the narratives, that is, the subjects’ complicated relationship to and the symbolic meaning-making of the place, and the search for alternative topoi, which are evident throughout the stories. The metaphor of the abyss, used in Sebald’s novel to manifest the irretrievability of the past, can be recognized in the descriptions of the social abyss that appear in the memories of the exiles.

World War II, the Paranormal, and Literature in Communist Poland: Unpublished Short Stories by Władysław Smólski

Władysław Smólski began his writing career as an author of plays and humoresque works. Between 1939 and 1945, he was involved in helping Jews. Smólski described his war experiences in two autobiographical texts Losy dziecka: Opowieść wojenna wojenna [1961; A Child's Fate: A War Story] and Zaklęte lata [1964; Enchanted Years]. However, not all of his works have been published. The paper examines Smólski's unpublished volume of short stories, Magie [Magic], whose manuscript is stored at the National Library in Warsaw. In the first part of the paper, I introduce crucial facts of Władysław Smólski's biography, with reference to the atmosphere of the interwar period. The second part discusses the formal features of the stories comprising the volume Magic and possible reasons why the volume have not been published. The third part of the article examines selected short stories, focusing on the representation of war and functions of the paranormal.

Письмо Лин Хеджинян. Поэтический язык как язык исследования

The article is devoted to the poetics of contemporary American writer Lyn Hejinian (1941–2024), considered one of the most consistent successors of Gertrude Stein's experimentalism in Anglophone literary writing. The study encompasses all stages of Hejinian’s poetic creativity: from early experiences of “language writing” in the 1960–70s, autobiographical texts and collective works of the 1980–90s, to theoretical and poetic quests in the first decades of the 21st century. The writer's main interest is the persistence and impermanence of memory and the subject, as well as the role of writing in their preservation and transformation. Descriptions of the writing process as a driving force of memory and experience come to the fore here. Syntax acts as the materialization of temporality in writing. Texts in a variety of formats explore natural and cultural worlds brought to life by language. Many of Hejinian's texts, both theoretical and artistic, explore the problem of language as a social space, as a philosophical search and as political pragmatics, as well as the problem of the relationship of time to language and language to time. The book The Language of Inquiry has become a kind of manifesto for poetic language, which is the “language of inquiry.” A special place in the book is occupied by essays about Gertrude Stein, which actualize the writing practices of the great American modernist in the contemporary context of language-oriented poetics. In her work of the recent years, Hejinian increasingly turns to social themes, never ceasing to experiment with the boundaries of the poetic. She puts forward a theory of so-called “allegorical activism,” which is understood as “artistic and political practice in the service of activating creative potential in everyday life.”

Strategic Acceptance of Queer Sexuality: A Critique

Queer sexuality and gender fluidity threaten the domination of heteronormative power structures. Gender fluidity dismantles the argument that gender is innately a binary structure, and reinstates that it is only an integration of performative acts. Once individual bodies start to experiment with gender fluidity, they shatter the manipulative control social institutions exercise over them. This is a drastic shift in power positions, as it uproots the hegemony associated with social institutions, such as family, marriage, and the economy. A pragmatically possible response to this manipulative encroachment of the individual body is to strategically undertake queer identity and present how gender performance is a personal choice of identity, rather than a pre-assigned norm. Jacob Tobia's Sissy: A Coming of-Gender Story and Billy Porter's Unprotected: A Memoir are two autobiographical accounts that boldly narrate their journey of self-doubt, acceptance, anger, retaliation, and proclamation to the world that gender binarity is a social and cultural construct, and that experimentation with gender fluidity should be a guilt-free personal liberty. Through these two autobiographical texts, this study investigates how body politics operate as a strategic tool for cis-conditioning. It also explores how queer sexual expressions reaffirm gender performance. Further, this study investigates whether strategic acknowledgement of gender fluidity is a possible response to heteronormative body politics. Finally, it discusses the scope of affirmative body politics, which is less authoritarian in nature and designed for individual advancement and better life.

DE LA ALEKSEI PEȘKOV LA MAKSIM GORKI. METAMORFOZELE UNUI SCRIITOR

In 1932 a number of soviet ideologues, at the behest of Stalin, declared Maxim Gorky the founder of Socialist Realism. Transformed into an ideological brand that endures to this day, the label makes it difficult to clearly delineate the politician from the talented artist in search of a new method of creation in Russian literature. The autobiographical trilogy (My Childhood, In the World and My Universities) is written in the tradition of romantic literature and highlights the national importance of politically committed works. The first part of the trilogy was written in exile. After the defeat of the Revolution of 1905 in which Gorky took an active part, emigration was an acceptable and even profitable option. Recollecting aspects of his childhood was an exercise that Gorky practiced voluntarily and consciously during 1912-1913 in Italy on the island of Capri, working deliberately and attentively after the autobiographical subject was brought up in a discussion with Lenin during the latter's visit to the island. Based on the autobiographical text in the novel My Childhood, our study aims to highlight the process of gradual liberation of the New Man from the Old Order and probe the sources of a new attitude towards the social and moral norms of life.

De la Commune à l’anarchie de Charles Malato : le destin de l’écrivain libertaire

From the Commune to Anarchy by Charles Malato: the destiny of the libertarian writer Charles Malato has gone down in posterity as the author of novels, memoirs and especially plays in which he castigates the excesses of power. Two events are at the origin of the birth of Malato’s vocation as an anarchist writer: the condemnation of his parents to banishment in New Caledonia and the meeting of the young Charles with Louise Michel. It is in this context that this article proposes to study the autobiographical text of the French author From the Commune to Anarchy which allows us to understand the inner evolution of the somewhat carefree adolescent towards destiny of a revolutionary able to use his pen as a formidable weapon. From then on, the analysis of the text accounts for Malato’s political awareness and his subsequent involvement in social issues, as well as highlighting the style of his language, as cruel as it is grotesque, which will upset the fragile minds of the bourgeois. In short, the exploration of the work constitutes a kind of propaedeutic to the subversive work of Malato whose universality attests to its undeniable topicality.

Narrating the Self: 200 Years of Autobiographical Texts

Scholarly consensus as to defining the genre of autobiography has largely coalesced around the determination that there can be no fixed and overarching definition of genre. In this study, we turn to the autobiographical texts themselves in order to discern large-scale conventions and commonplaces of writing about the self. Employing the machine learning technique of statistical topic modeling, this study analyzes over 83,000 pages of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century autobiographical texts written in English. In doing so, it reveals common autobiographical conventions, subjects, and discourses, while shedding light on current scholarly understandings of autobiography.

Families in Times of Crisis: Narratives of Family and Care during the COVID-19 Pandemic in Slovakia

Societal narratives about families, ranging from individual discourses to public discourse, do not always reflect the reality of family lives. This is also valid for Narratives of Return (NoR), which propose a return to a “natural” family order and lean on conservative ideological values. However, such a notion does not rely on actual past and present social practice but tries to reshape it. It deliberately omits the variety of existing forms and relationships present among families. During the COVID-19 pandemic in Slovakia, many processes, patterns, and problems in society became more visible. The crisis put particular pressure on families and intergenerational relationships, mainly regarding care. This paper analyses micro-narratives about families, relationships, and care, juxtaposed to actual practice, during the pandemic. We rely on data from a two-year-long ethnographic research project using online surveys, ethnographic interviews, and autobiographical texts. We compare these data with political discourse and its presentation in media, where we looked for aspects of NoR. It seems that the political discourse was primarily focused on securing public health but was at the same time oriented towards particular problems (such as natality or abortions), constructing an ideological narrative with specific family structures in mind (in accordance with NoR). Simultaneously, it put older adults at the forefront as a uniform social group that was vulnerable and dependent on others, omitting their function as caregivers of the youngest generation in the family.

Their Bodies, Their Selves: Reflexivity and Embodiment in 2010s Women's Autobiographical Author-Performer TV Dramedies

Abstract During the 2010s, American television witnessed a growing attention to and presence of women, both in TV representation and in TV creation and production. As part of that development, the self-representation of women who are both the creators and the stars of their shows — such as Lena Dunham (creator and star of Girls; HBO, 2012 – 17), Tig Notaro (creator and star of One Mississippi, Amazon, 2015 – 17), Issa Rae (creator and star of Insecure, HBO, 2016 – 21), Pamela Adlon (creator and star of Better Things, FX, 2016 – 22), and Frankie Shaw (creator and star of Smilf, Showtime, 2017 – 19) — has been on the rise. This article examines these five dramedies in which women both exert authorial voices in telling their own stories and bring to bear performative embodiment in starring in these autobiographical texts. The textual multilayeredness of these author-performers’ autobiographical dramedies, the article shows, reveals the ways in which authorship and performance operate in the realm of women's televisual representation.