Autobiography Of Childhood Research Articles

An Autobiography of Childhood: Anatoly Kuznetsov’s Babi Yar as Bildungsroman

Abstract This article represents an attempt to read Anatoly Kuznetsov’s Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel in its complete and uncensored version (published 1970) as a novel of education. Critical interpretation of this text has been dominated by the story of the mass shootings of the Jewish population witnessed by the adolescent Tolya, with the youngster’s own story often relegated to the background. But the analytic framework of the Bildungsroman makes it possible to see how, in addition to serving as a testimonial of the “Holocaust by Bullets,” the book demonstrates the full extent of the deformation of a child under conditions of war and occupation. The theoretical apparatus of the analysis is largely based on research in narratological theory (Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan). Discussion of the structural features of an autobiography of childhood also draws on Kate Douglas’s studies on autobiography, trauma, and memory. As a process of socialization, Bildung in Babi Yar turns into an anti-Bildung of adolescence: Kuznetsov’s novel shows how the experience of war deforms the personality on a variety of perceptual levels—optical, olfactory, haptic, and sonic.

The Tree of Love: Life Writing and ‘Seasons of Self’ by Former Child Soldiers in Colombia

ABSTRACT Autobiographies of childhood generally focus on narratives of nostalgia or trauma, depicting notions of lost innocence. This article posits that such a Global North perspective needs to be re-imagined when listening to the ‘self-stories’ of child soldiers from Colombia’s indigenous Nasa community in the Cauca region. They described their experiences of conflict in a series of narrative workshops located around the Tree of Love, (el árbol del amor)—a place where hopes and dreams are shared, its strength and constancy representing the resilience of the Nasa people in the face of violence. These shared narratives are presented as 4 chapters, each depicting a season, characterised by a different form of epiphany, constituting ‘liminal experiences connected to moments of … crisis’ [Denzin, N. K. 2017. Interpretive Autoethnography, Sage Research Methods Online. London: Sage. Accessed June 4, 2020. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781506374697, 52]. The article is presented in narrative style, enabling the researchers to stay close to the young child soldiers’ lives. Together these narrative extracts offer a mosaic of auto/biographical experiences that portray the journey from war child to child soldier to child survivor. The ability to resist re-recruitment in spaces that remain dangerous, where the cycle of violence is relentless, appears to be bolstered by an agency that comes from within, offering potential for post-traumatic growth.

INTIMIDAD Y RELATO DE INFANCIA

Resumen: El relato autobiográfico de infancia se entiende en este artículocomo una de las representaciones literarias más renovadoras de la intimidaden la medida en que implica la reconstrucción imaginaria de un yo infantilque ya no existe, pero habita como un fantasma la memoria del adulto. Estapresencia fantasmática toma formas diversas en los relatos de infancia deAnnie Ernaux y de Luis Landero, cuya escritura indaga en la persistenciaactual de los sentimientos de vergüenza (en la primera) y de culpa (en elsegundo), y en la dificultad de recordarlos y contarlos.Abstract: The autobiography of childhood is taken in this article as one ofthe most innovative literary representations of intimacy in that it impliesthe imaginary reconstruction of a childhood self that no longer exists butinhabits as a ghost the memory of the adult. This ghostly presence adoptsdifferent forms in the childhood autobiographies of Annie Ernaux andLuis Landero, whose writing explore the ongoing persistence of feelingsof shame (in the former) and guilt (in the latter), and the difficulty in remembering and expressing those feelings.

Інструменти конструювання автобіографії дитинства (на матеріалі повісті «Потерчата» Володимира Рутківського)

У статті на основі узагальнення міркувань різних науковців щодо специфіки побудови автобіографічних наративів, застосування власної концепції дослідження, яка базується на моделі комунікації Р. Якобсона та теорії системного підходу до аналізу поетики Г. Клочека, проаналізовано інструменти конструювання художньої автобіографії дитинства у повісті-сповіді «Потерчата» Володимира Рутківського. Доведено, що Володимир Рутківський у повісті «Потерчата» не тільки розповів про свої дитячі роки, а створив автобіографію втраченого дитинства цілого покоління. При цьому відбулася актуалізація інструментарію трьох типів: психологічного, поетикального, рецептивного, які умовно співвіднесено з відповідними компонентами моделі комунікації (адресант, повідомлення, контекст, канал, код, адресат) та етапами її реалізації (креативним, референтним, рецептивним). Ця повість – результат саморефлексії письменника, вербалізації емоційного дитячого досвіду і мовного структурування дитячих спогадів з метою відтворення втраченого світу та звільнення від дитячих травм. На креативному етапі комунікації письменник актуалізує психологічні інструменти конструювання автобіографії. Автобіографію дитинства в повісті репрезентовано концептом «втраченого дитинства» та індивідуальною історією особистості; сконденсовано в образі головного героя та у відвертій сюжетній оповіді-сповіді про пережиті події та дитячі емоції; трансльовано гомодієгетичним наратором в інтрадієгетичній ситуації. Так В. Рутківський на референтному етапі комунікації актуалізував поетикальні інструменти конструювання смислу. Рецептивний інструментарій декодування тексту пов’язаний із процесами його сприймання й осмислення читачами різного віку з урахуванням контекстуальних чинників і потребує глибшого емпіричного дослідження.

Clio's Lives: Biographies and Autobiographies of Historians ed. by Doug Munro and John G. Reid

Reviewed by: Clio's Lives: Biographies and Autobiographies of Historians ed. by Doug Munro and John G. Reid Jaume Aurell (bio) Clio's Lives: Biographies and Autobiographies of Historians Doug Munro and John G. Reid, editors Australian National UP, 2017, 214 pages. ISBN 978-1760461430, $50. All critics dedicated to the analysis of autobiographies and biographies of historians have experienced, in one way or another, the extraordinary vitality of this genre in Australia. In an article published in 2007, Jeremy Popkin picked up on the notable propensity of Australian historians for autobiographical creation and the attendant exploration of the theoretical and practical borders between the subjective and objective ("Ego-histoire" 129). It is therefore a cause for celebration that a group of Australian historians and critics, coordinated by Doug Munro and John G. Reid, have brought together in one volume articles analyzing particular characteristics of these genres. To set out the volume's purpose and contents, the editors begin their elegant introduction by citing the seminal autobiography of Edward Gibbon, Memoirs of My Life and Writings (1796), the influential collective volume Essais d'ego-histoire (1987) [End Page 421] edited by Pierre Nora, and the two monographs devoted specifically to the subject of historians' autobiographies: Jeremy Popkin's History, Historians, & Autobiography (2005) and Jaume Aurell's Theoretical Perspectives on Historians' Autobiographies (2016). The editors go on to make it clear that the volume is inspired "by the increasing though still-limited body of scholarship connecting the writing of history directly with the lives of those who write it" (1), and that its main aim is "to examine the ways in which biography and autobiography can enhance historiographical understanding in four principal areas [historians' autobiographies; biography and national identity; academic biography; and collective biography], and to conduct a reconnaissance in each" (2). In the first contribution, "Writing History/Writing about Yourself: What's the Difference?", Sheila Fitzpatrick reflects on how autobiographical writing works, focusing especially on the rhetorical restrictions pertaining to its practice. The author of celebrated autobiographies (My Father's Daughter and A Spy in the Archives) and a specialist in Soviet Russia, Fitzpatrick has previously reflected on the complex links between history and autobiography. Her research now leads her to delve more deeply into such essential questions as truth, reliability, and accuracy in history. The steadily growing practice of autobiography in recent decades responds to the desire to explore the connections between the objective and subjective at the heart of a discipline affected by the relativizing tendencies of the linguistic and postmodern turns, and above all by its slide from among the predictive social sciences to the creative humanities. The practice of autobiography has led Fitzpatrick to recognize herself as a historian-writer rather than a historian-researcher: "A historian-writer is probably what I always wanted to be; I did not particularly enjoy the effort in my early years in America to remake myself as a social scientist" (36). Fitzpatrick's reflections allow for a better understanding of those intricate relations between history and biography, between the supposedly objective and the subjective, and enable her to conclude that "the writing of history can also be seen as an art, in which our storytelling is shaped (within the conventions of our craft) by aesthetic considerations; [. . .] it comes closest to the writing of autobiography, which can scarcely be regarded as a distinct craft and is certainly not a science" (37). Fitzpatrick's contribution serves as a theoretical introduction to the articles that follow, and, I would venture to say, to the whole volume. Doug Munro and Geoffrey Gray compare three accounts of childhood and early formation written from memory by historians. The autobiographies of childhood and youth by James Walvin, Sheila Fitzpatrick, and John Rickard demonstrate the natural tendency of historians to project their innate inclination for the conventional monograph genre when they write autobiography. Their writings from memory are paradoxically the result of retrospective investigations of their own lives carried out in a systematic fashion, rather than a creative exploration based on the spontaneous and emotive nature of memory. This is even more problematic when it comes to the subgenre "autobiographies of childhood," in which memory is naturally the...

Ethnography Within an Autobiographical Portrait: The Case of Camara Laye’s the African Child

Africa as a continent has many ethnic groups. For most non-Africans, Africa is a homogenous society and therefore all African societies and cultures are lumped together. There may be many similarities between cultures. However, the subtleties in culture for each group are not obvious to people outside Africa and most often they are ignored. Early novelists from Africa like Camara Laye have sought to project their own unique stories and give an expose on what and why their ethnic group puts up certain practices. In these stories however, the artist also invariably writes the history or ethnography of the group. So, though Laye’s work is regarded as a novel and in most instances as an autobiography of childhood, the work has deep touches of ethnography and therefore provides a bridge between these two spheres. It becomes therefore important to have a close study of these two domains as shown in The African Child. This paper therefore aims at investigating some ethnographic concerns of the Mandinka society and analyzes the purpose and role of two prominent names used in the work. It is these apparently neglected part that aid in projecting Laye’s autobiography.

How the Reader Matters. Autobiographies of Childhood for Young Readers

In the 1990s, autobiographies of childhood were one of the most importantpublishing trends. These autobiographies challenge the Romantic notionof childhood, thus contributing to the contemporary societal debate aboutchildren and childhood in crisis. Taking into consideration that ideas aboutchildren and childhood are at the heart of children’s literature, it is remarkable that autobiographies of childhood for young readers go unnoticed in the discussion.

A Study on The Characteristics of Post-modernity in The Myth of Jilmajae : Focusing on The Intertextuality with The Childhood Autobiography of The Mi-Dang in The 1970s

A Study on The Characteristics of Post-modernity in The Myth of Jilmajae : Focusing on The Intertextuality with The Childhood Autobiography of The Mi-Dang in The 1970s

«Детство» Дж. М. Кутзее как эксперимент с формой автобиографии

The article deals with J. M. Coetzee’s Boyhood, focusing on the author’s experiments with the autobiography in the context of traditional genre conventions. Boyhood, the first part of Coetzee’s autobiographical trilogy, is analyzed as a deconstruction of the childhood autobiography (the absence of autobiographical agreement, third-person present tense narrative, a combination of multiple points of view: those of a child-protagonist and an adult author).

“ ‘Who knows, will I ever see you again,’ said the one-eyed duck.” Reflections on a Soviet Childhood in Leelo Tungal's Life Writing

The article focuses on the representation of childhood trauma in Seltsimees laps (Comrade Child 2008) and Samet ja saepuru (Velvet and Sawdust 2009), a childhood autobiography of a well-known Estonian children's author Leelo Tungal. These works offer a multilayered insight into sociopolitical and historical climate of the Soviet 1950s in Estonia from a young child's perspective who, as a result of the Stalinist repressions, has to spend the prime years of her childhood without her mother. Tungal creates an idyllic childhood scene that is interlaced with the traumatic story of a young child having to face a confusing world wrought with tension and insecurity. This article provides an analysis of Tungal's intricate textual strategies for tackling the traumatic impact of her childhood experience. This experience is mediated in her life writings through a portrayal of emblematic aspects of the era and the creation, in Lauren Berlant's terms, of an intimate public centered on a horizon of expectations about happy childhood.

Untold Tales of the Intra-Suburban Female

Untold Tales of the Intra-Suburban Female

Teaching & Learning Guide for: ‘I mak Bould to Wrigt’: First-person Narratives in the History of Poverty in England, c. 1750-1900

Teaching & Learning Guide for: ‘I mak Bould to Wrigt’: First-person Narratives in the History of Poverty in England, c. 1750-1900

Political Intuition and African Autobiographies of Childhood

This essay analyzes and provides an alternative reading of Camara Laye's L'enfant noir and Wole Soyinka's Aké: The Years of Childhood . It examines how the two texts defy codifications and ideological expectations of childhood autobiographical narratives, and explores their intricate autobiographical determinations and motives. It demonstrates that, when it comes to narratives situated in the colonial period, Camara Laye and Wole Soyinka have provided alternative engagements with colonialism, adding nuance to the literary representations and accounts of childhood in African letters.

Literary Studies

Literary Studies Denise Cruz, Chair Committee Members: Bakirathi Mani, Cynthia Tolentino Winner: Interventions into Modernist Cultures: Poetry from Beyond the Empty Screen, by Amie Elizabeth Parry Honorable Mention: Begin Here: Reading Asian North American Autobiographies of Childhood, by Rocio G. Davis Amie Elizabeth Parry’s Interventions into Modernist Cultures: Poetry from Beyond the Empty Screen is an ambitious, far-reaching project that represents innovative and exciting new directions in Asian American literary studies. Parry reconceptualizes the chronology and geography of modernism to place U.S. imperialist and neocolonial formations in conversation with avant-garde Taiwanese poetry and Cold War minority U.S. writing. Her study thus questions dichotomies that would separate canonical white American modernisms from Asian and Asian American literatures. In rethinking the definition, aesthetics, and politics of modernism, she creatively brings together uncanny partners: Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein with Yü Kwang-chung, Hsia Yü, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Yet as underscored by her book’s title, Parry’s interventions are numerous, as her study also argues for multiple ways of rethinking the boundaries of American, Asian, and Asian/American literary studies—including a comparative and transnational framework that examines texts produced beyond the geographical borders of the United States and literature in languages other than English, an emphasis on the forms and politics of U.S. and Taiwanese modernist and avant-garde poetry, and a consideration of literary connections between U.S. imperialism and Cold War geopolitics. While, as Parry observes, recent work in modernist literary studies has emphasized transnational or global production, influence, and circulation, Interventions into Modernist Cultures zeroes in on a more specific site of comparison—Taiwan—as a method of attending to the particularities of U.S.–East Asian relations. For Parry, the “empty screen”—a phrase she takes from Gertrude Stein’s Lectures in America—is a metaphor for modernist narratives and epistemologies (both U.S.-based and other national modernisms that are related to the United States through imperial or neocolonial ties) that suppress and erase other forms of knowledge. Moving beyond the empty screen that would render the work of Taiwanese poets [End Page 350] and writers like Cha invisible, Parry’s analysis connects canonical modernists and their formation during the development of U.S. empire to Cold War military neocolonialism in Taiwan and its resonances. But while such transnational interactions form the backdrop of her work, Interventions into Modernist Cultures also seriously considers the particulars of poetry, a genre that Parry contends has been ignored in postcolonial, diasporic, and Asian/American literary studies. For these reasons, the committee was pleased to honor Parry’s far-reaching and ambitious project with the inaugural award for achievement in literary studies. Rocio Davis’s Begin Here: Reading Asian North American Autobiographies of Childhood, awarded an honorable mention, also underscores a genre of Asian American literature that deserves more critical attention. Given the importance of autobiographies and memoirs as foundational texts in Asian American studies, this book is a long overdue and insightful contribution. Davis analyzes both tropes of childhood and the formal aspects of autobiography. The book’s attention to form is a concerted effort to depart from the use of autobiographies as sociological evidence or as ethnographic accounts of some notion of the real, lived experience of Asian Americans. For Davis, formal innovation in autobiographies does not necessarily equal political resistance, but it does indicate an authorial desire to destabilize essentialized versions of Asian North American identity. The project pulls together convincing evidence to diagnose and characterize specific thematic concerns of autobiography. Davis plays with the concept of childhood to theorize different aspects of Asian American autobiography as a genre: childhoods set outside of North America, generational autobiography, biracial autobiography, tropes of Americanization, and children’s literature (itself an undertheorized or unrecognized genre of Asian American literary studies). Copyright © 2009 The Johns Hopkins University Press

Begin Here: Reading Asian North American Autobiographies of Childhood (review)

Reviewed by: Begin Here: Reading Asian North American Autobiographies of Childhood Gordon O. Taylor (bio) Begin Here: Reading Asian North American Autobiographies of Childhood. By Rocío G. Davis. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2007. In this originally conceived and persuasively developed study, Rocío G. Davis explores—in the contexts of Asian American and Asian Canadian cultures—how autobiography may be seen over time, as well as in the contemporary moment, not only as testing the boundaries of the self but also as reshaping the contours of culture. In the process, she shows, across a spectrum of well-chosen examples, how the reclaiming of personal memory through autobiographical return to childhood can work not only towards completion of individual identity, but also towards a redefining of the inherited cultural memory from which, in a way, the autobiographical act took its initial impetus. [End Page 239] A precisely focused introductory section, "To Begin Here," sets forth the conceptual groundwork for chapters to follow. Professor Davis states her "twofold" concern: first, with the literary-representational as well as the self-interpretive processes through which writers re-imagine themselves in autobiographical engagement with their early years; and second, with the intensified performative aspect of the resulting narratives, aimed at refining or revising cultural memory in its more collective or communal aspect. "These texts," she asserts, "present subjects actively negotiating their own histories, part of a creative adaptation and manipulation of a dynamic network of concepts that transforms them into artists of their own lives and protagonists of America and Canada's narratives of their history." "The Asian Childhood" provides points of departure drawn from Yan Phou Lee's When I Was a Boy in China and Ilhan New's When I Was a Boy in Korea, late-19th- and early-20th-century publications in a series designed to present to American readers recollections of the "foreign" childhoods of immigrants to North America. Due as much to the formula of the series as to authorial assumptions in these early examples, the personal is largely subsumed into the culturally didactic, "translation" of Asian childhood into predefined terms of American receptivity seeming to dominate. Yet, as Davis demonstrates, within the confines of such limited autobiographical transactions, both Lee and New reflect "insurgent possibilities of the genre of the Childhood from its earliest appropriations by Asian American writers," possibilities advanced in Younghill Kang's The Grass Roof and a range of other texts representing a spectrum of ethnic and cultural loci. Such "insurgencies" of self, and their consequences for cultural consciousness, are at the heart of Davis's book. Subsequent chapters constitute less a linear sequence than a richly reciprocal cluster of considerations, each with its distinct focus. "Cultural Revolutions and Takeovers: War as Structure" examines personal narratives of childhood in times of extreme social and political stress, as exemplified in Rae Yang's Spider Eaters: A Memoir and Da Chen's Colors of the Mountain, set during the Cultural Revolution in China, and in Loung Ung's First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers and Chanrithy Him's When Broken Glass Floats: Growing Up Under the Khmer Rouge. In these and other works, by "engaging traumatic experiences and making readers aware of the silenced histories behind immigration," writers not only attest to the personal resiliencies of youth, but also transmit new forms of cultural understanding, reincorporating Asian experience into North American awareness, a sense of the past newly usable toward the future. [End Page 240] "The Liminal Childhood: Biraciality as Narrative Position" probes the ways in which narratives by biracial children "complicate our views on the inscription of Asian experiences in both Asia and North America." Norman Reyes's Child of Two Worlds, Heinz Insu Fenkl's Memories of My Ghost Brother, Kien Nguyen's The Unwanted, and Michael David Kwan's Things That Must Not Be Forgotten—against the re-envisioned backdrops of the Philippines, Korea, Vietnam and China respectively, and with a white and an Asian parent figuring in retrospect in each case—provide the basis for discussion of "a hybrid position that is increasingly common in Asian North American society but that has not yet received...

Begin here: reading Asian North American autobiographies of childhood

An analytically innovative work, Begin Here widens the current critical focus of Asian North American literary studies by proposing an integrated thematic and narratological approach to the practice of autobiography. It demonstrates how Asian North American memoirs of childhood challenge the construction and performative potential of national experiences. This understanding influences theoretical approaches to ethnic life writing, expanding the boundaries of traditional autobiography by negotiating narrative techniques and genre and raising complex questions about self-representation and the construction of cultural memory. By examining the artistic project of some fifty Asian North American writers who deploy their childhood narratives in the representation of the individual processes of self-identification and negotiation of cultural and national affiliation, this work provides a comprehensive overview of Asian North American autobiographies of childhood published over the last century. Importantly, it also attends to new ways of writing autobiographies, employing comics, blending verse, prose, diaries, and life writing for children, and using relational approaches to self-identification, among others.

Small Worlds: Constructions of Childhood in Contemporary Postcolonial Autobiography in French

This article explores the resurgence of narratives of childhood in contemporary postcolonial writing in French. The first section will trace the rise and fall of the récit d'enfance, before going on to examine the commodification and packaging of the genre by metropolitan publishers, a tendency which could be seen to be complicit with an exoticizing view of the colony. While the upsurge in narratives of childhood is widespread throughout the francophone world, it is in fact remarkably concentrated in the French Caribbean. The second section of the article will attempt, then, to account for this preference. It will argue that for Caribbean writers, the confluence of geography and history means that the island functions, on a metaphorical level, as both a powerful child-land and an I-land. The spatial contours of the island, and its topography, strongly influence the ways in which childhood is imagined. We will look in particular at two autobiographies of childhood, Daniel Maximin's Tu, c'est l'enfance and Emile Ollivier's Mille Eaux. These works demonstrate a particularly acute island consciousness, exemplifying the tensions and contradictions inherent in the apprehension of island space, and the imbrication of space and a (highly individualized) sense of identity.

Reading Asian American Biracial Autobiographies of Childhood: Norman Reyes’ Child of Two Worlds and Kien Nguyen's The Unwanted

Biracial autobiographies of childhood evidence particular processes of hybridity and liminality through a rewriting of an established Euro-American literary genre. The manner in which Reyes’ Child of Two Worlds and Nguyen's The Unwanted engage biraciality highlights the intersection of genre and theme. Issues of indeterminacy, location, identification, and affiliation are central, as the protagonists negotiate a process of racial ambivalence that exhausts the supposed fixity and impermeability of racial boundaries. They transform biraciality into a literary strategy by their enactment of a revisionist agenda: by appropriating and subverting the prescribed model for the Childhood, they revise generic prescriptions, stress multilayered positioning, and problematize uncritical inscriptions of identification as Americans.

Destiny Obscure. Autobiographies of Childhood, Education and Family from the 1820s to the 1920s

Destiny Obscure. Autobiographies of Childhood, Education and Family from the 1820s to the 1920s

Retrograde amnesia: A study of its relation to anterograde amnesia and semantic memory deficits

This group study of 24 amnesic patie nts and 40 control subjects examined the hypothesis that retrograde memory deficits result from a combination of two impairment mechanisms: (1) a deficit in the retrieval of contents that is related to dysfunctioning of the hippocampal anterograde memory system, and (2) a deficit in the storage and/or retrieval of contents that is related to concomitant neocortical lesions. Retrograde amnesia was evaluated with the use of new Famous Persons and Autobiographical Memory Tests. The postulated components of retrograde memory impairment were assessed using the Wechsler Memory Scale and a new Semantic Memory Test, respectively. Regression analyses showed that recent episodic autobiography was exclusively related to the hippocampal component, while memory for famous persons and childhood autobiography was related to the neocortical component. In the case of details concerning people of recent fame, both components were identified as independent determinants. The temporal gradient of patients' impairment at the Famous Persons Test was marked for detailed knowledge, but small for overlearned knowledge. The present results thus support the combination hypothesis. They conform to the view that the transition from a hippocampus-dependent to a neocortex-dependent mnemonic representation of new contents is mediated by reiteration, and occurs within 5–10 years. © Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.