Confessional Mode Research Articles

The Recuperative Power of Autopathographical Writing In Tess Gallagher s “The Women Of Auschwitz”

This study aims to examine the American author Tess Gallagher’s “The Women of Auschwitz” in terms of narrativization of illness as autopathography. In a confessional mode, the poem depicts Gallagher’s subjective experience of breast cancer and her medical treatment. The study attempts to demonstrate the ways the historical author makes use of poetry as a means of cancer wellness and a search for consolation as well as a meaningful confrontation with her breast cancer. It suggests that through the acts of writing and narrating, the author fights not only against the illness but also the metaphors and images collected around the concept of illness in such a way that the readers and the poet attempt to manage health-related stigma through recreating and reconstructing a new self, the poet through writing and narrating, and the readers through the therapeutic act of reading. Referring to the biographical details of the writer, the study deploys the theory of Susan Sontag concerning the metaphors of cancer and health-related stigma, and the terminology of Julia Kristeva regarding the recuperative power of writing.

Poems

In these poems Kristian Patruno cofessionally narrates autobiographical events which deal with the issues of extreme drug use, homelessness, and poor socio-economic conditions. “Coastal Drowning” narrates how swamped by myriad personal family and health issues a young (or any) person drowns in the extremities of circumstance. “Wildfire” narrates the extremities of heroin addiction and the complexities of a co-dependant relationship therein, while giving voice to the human cost of, and testament to, the will to survive drug addiction. “Slaughter House” also narrates extreme drug abuse occasioning homelessness and other extremities arising from such. Together these poems narrate in a confessional mode the extreme taboos of poverty and drug addiction. The power inherent in these poems underlines the power of poetry as testimony/witness to traumas such experiences purvey. They also give testament to the strength of human will to survive.

(Post)confessional mode and psychological surveillance in The Crown and Fleabag

Contemporary television’s portrayals of psychotherapy reveal anxieties surrounding surveillance and intimate self-disclosure in clinical and therapeutic settings. This paper analyses two twenty-first century television series featuring therapy sessions that observe...

Identity Exploration and Representation of Motherhood in the Poetry of Ranu Uniyal

Ranu Uniyal, one of the important personalities of confessional mode, is always under review for her obsessive openness and pervasiveness, but she reaches her destination by displaying the sterling image of patriarchy. Uniyal’s poems not only present the everyday lived reality of ordinary women but also the strong independent women having power and who must outbrave the societal regulations and norms to assert their identity as human beings full of love and affection. Ranu Uniyal’s poems incorporate the strong experience both as a mother and as the daughter of powerful mothers whose personalities shape their identity as women. Among the modern Indian poets who are writing in English today, she has been ranked with such poetesses of dissatisfaction and discontent as Kamala Das. By engaging with the everyday life of her mother and her motherhood, the poet tries to understand the reality of universal motherhood in a poetic way. The studies of Ranu Uniyal’s poems add a new dimension to Indian poetry in English through the subtle and honest probing of man-woman relationships. She does not debunk the whole ideology of motherhood in her writing. Instead, her critical understanding of motherhood paves the path for women’s agency, autonomy, and identity regarding motherhood.

Border Poetics: Gender, Essayism and Border Crossing in Sinéad Gleeson’s Constellations: Reflections from Life

As Julie Bates claims, “the most exciting new writing in Ireland is happening in the field of nonfiction” (2020: 228-229) and, more particularly, in the form of the essay. Sinéad Gleeson uses the confessional mode in her essay collection Constellations: Reflections from Life (2019) to recount her experiences of two deadly illnesses and to challenge ideas that readers might have about themselves or the world. She contemplates her body and life as an Irishwoman in her roles as daughter and patient, and in a variety of social and familial roles. Gleeson also explores the female body in pain, in sexuality, and in the struggle for recovery and change both in the Irish context and universally. This courageous example of essayism crosses many borders: the geographical and social, theory and practice, and thinking and creating.
 Border Poetics De-limited, edited by Johan Schimanski and Stephen Wolfe (2007), examines the role of art and culture in constructing and tracing borders, focusing on narratives and other symbolic forms, and on the important subjective dimension which cultural forms mediate in the public sphere. This article explores how and to what effect the devices proposed by the authors of this collection can be used to relate Gleeson’s essayism to several concepts of border crossing, such as how the border crosser and border-crossing narrative work from a feminist perspective.

When the Margins Talk Back

Communication theory reminds us that listening is always interrogative, relational, and never without politics. The articles in this collection are the first attempt to witness as listeners to what young people have shared in this research, amplifying a “youth ecclesiology” (Benjamin Conner), the prophetic ministry of young people (Justin Forbes), the importance of aesthetics in confronting dehumanization (Katherine Douglass), the disruptive call of listening itself (Michael Mather), the persistent gaps in theologizing racial reconciliation (Kermit Moss), and the provocative love of Jesus (Megan DeWald). To this witness, I further probe how it is that marginal agitation can be found deeply faithful, draw out its theological contributions, and attempt to behold, yet not coopt, that radical openness that both Peter and Paul reveal to us as so slippery, subversive, and decentering. In other words, it is critical that theologians and congregations at the center not so much “let” the margins push back, because that fetishizes them, all the while subtly maintaining the center, but adopt the confessional mode that Conner, DeWald, Douglass, Forbes, Mather, and Moss lay out, while also witnessing to a Jesus, a God, and a Spirit that prod and agitate and transgress, because this God is at the margins, too.

Psychoanalysis, the Sufi, and the Story

Psychoanalysis, the Sufi, and the Story

Confessional Mode of Feminist Poetics: Sylvia Plath on Love, Life and Death

Confessional Mode of Feminist Poetics: Sylvia Plath on Love, Life and Death

On not writing back: Cosmopolitan paradoxes in new diasporic Malaysian writing today

ABSTRACT In this article, two contemporary writers, Jason Eng Hun Lee and Sreedhevi Iyer, combine to reflect on emerging issues in their writing practice as deterritorialized writers with connections to Malaysia. Unlike earlier generations of post-independence writers, neither Lee nor Iyer “writes back” to the former colonial centre nor, despite their designation as “Malaysian writers” by commercial publishers, do they “write back” to their condition as sectional writers in the Malaysian literary canon. Instead, taking on a confessional mode, the two writers examine the paradox of their cosmopolitan sensibilities in an age of deterritorialized national literatures. Iyer reflects on her story collection Jungle Without Water, and her use of vernacular Malaysian English to transcend cultural explication, while Lee draws on his poetry collection Beds in the East to suggest how a double perspective that pivots between Malaysia and the UK can strategically mediate the colonial/postcolonial gaze.

Healing Power of Personal Narrative

This study is an attempt to delineate the healing power of personalnarrative, and to identify autobiography as a genre based on the personalnarrative, recovered memories of psychological traumas and confessional mode,can transform into therapeutic tools of purgation in art resulting in catharsis. Inpsychological literature, autobiography is proved that human beings naturallyseek to understand how and why significant or life turning events happen intheir own lives or in the world they exist in. The autobiographical impulse hasundertaken to record the autobiographers' life stories as a form of self-therapy.To construct a story of their lives and to compose memory, emotion and internalexperience as well as autobiographical facts into a story helps them to becomewho they are. Storytelling is an important part of self-development, and thenarration that has gone awry can be addressed in psychotherapy. Thepsychotherapists used to discuss how creative writing can help authorsarticulate, accept and understand their vulnerability and suffering by releasingtheir thoughts in the secure medium of art. Discussing the implication ofcoherence for psychotherapy they maintain that constructing a personal storyfacilitates the comprehension of significant experiences because the process ofwriting allows the remembering of events during their organization in acoherent fashion while integrating thoughts and feelings related to those events.The study sets out to get the record right by redefining autobiography as healingfiction –assigning to its writers a vital role in psychological rehabilitation
 through the medium of art. Then it presents the theoretical questions and termsconcerning autobiography as a genre. The aim is to locate this study within itsliterary, psychological, socio-cultural, contexts to validate the central concept of- the healing power of autobiography and its implication to the individual andcommunity alike.

Edward Said’s Memoir Out of Place: Postcolonial Tenets, Dissonant Voices, and Divided Loyalties

Edward Said’s Out of Place (1999), a memoir written after his diagnosis with leukemia in 1991, was begun in 1994 to document his sense of cultural displacement and imminent death. This article examines the divided loyalties and dissonant voices Said vents in this book through the lens of cultural theories. It argues that such a conflicting vision can provide a proper context for understanding Said’s contributions to cultural studies and literary theory via the construction of the other, the out of place, at the levels of language, religion, environment, and homeland. Said presents himself as a postcolonial subject par excellence with divided loyalties and “unhomely” feelings. He uses a confessional mode to convey a constant sense of exile and identity crisis. Said’s life negotiated the postcolonial parlance he preached in his academic life, which offers a unique case on the relationship between theory and practice. The memoir emerges not only as an autobiographical text but equally as a contribution to literary theory and overlapping postcolonial discourses. Thus, this autobiographical memoir is useful for the literature classroom due to its theoretical value as well as non-fictional import.

Shakespearean Hypotexts in Ubu and the Truth Commission: Rewriting Renaissance Texts for the “New South Africa”’s Stage?

Ubu and the Truth Commission (Taylor 2015a) satirically rewrites Macbeth, yet also borrows more problematically from Jarry’s farce and other Shakespearean texts. Coterminous with the hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, this rewriting of Renaissance texts leads us to examine the relation between theatrical genres, the power of the theatre – between iteration and the singular nature of the theatrical performance – and its relation to the confessional mode.

The Poet and the Queen: Thomas Wyatt and Anne Boleyn in Historical Biofiction

This essay investigates a number of historical biofictions about the Tudor poet Thomas Wyatt’s relationship with Anne Boleyn, arguing that the persistent drive to read Boleyn into Wyatt’s verse represents an understanding of literature as a confessional mode. Wyatt becomes the Romantic poet-genius, inspired by his muse, Anne Boleyn.

The gift of shame

This short confession looks back at the confessional mode of a 2009 article, ‘The Object of Devotion,’ on the impact of religious orientation on my scholarly formation, before turning to a different sort of self-examination: the moment of shame that is at once a source of pain and a generous gift. The inventory offered here concerns not religious orientation but the shame that arises from being wrong. It also casts light on changes that have come to our profession, where racist structures of thought and their administrative and social manifestations have become more visible than before. It’s not that our work environment has changed; rather, the assumptions that were there all along have become visible, and recognizing them – and responding to them – has become imperative. In this way, when I make a confession, and talk about my own shame, it’s in part the product of my own experience, but it is also the product of our common situation. This confession also looks forward to the fruitful outcomes of this experience, including collaborative workshops on indigenous pedagogy, on the role of indigenous story, and on the stories we tell about the land.

The speaking wound: Gower’s Confessio Amantis and the ethics of listening in the #metoo era

John Gower’s version of the rape of Lucretia in the Confessio Amantis begins with an episode in which the rapist, Arrons, injures himself as a deceptive ploy. Gower’s depiction of this episode, often omitted from other medieval accounts of Lucretia, complements his description of Lucrece’s inarticulate explanations and highly visible suffering to emphasize the rhetorical impact of pain. In the present moment, this tale evokes the political power of the rape narrative, but it also suggests the potential for manipulation or the further victimization of survivors if these narratives are misread. In this article, then, I propose a reconsideration of Gower’s use of the confessional mode as a means of recontextualizing rape narratives within the Confessio and developing a politics of listening. Through careful reading of confession’s successes and failures in the text, audiences might cultivate new ways of understanding and productively responding to these stories.

The unbearable whiteness of being (in) Shakespeare

What happens to the critical work of scholars, teachers, and performers of Shakespeare if we take very seriously the whiteness of our author and the critical epistemologies that develop and contour the body of his corpus? How is such work affected by the BIPOC identities of these scholars, teachers, and performers? In this essay I consider these questions through a sustained critique of Shakespeare’s whiteness and the whiteness of the critical gaze that has been directed at Shakespearean canon. My essay is subtended by the personal, which is an important facet of the confessional mode being considered, interrogated, and recapitulated in this issue. My confession, to which I turn at the close of this essay, rehearses a pedagogical experience wherein the wages of whiteness exact their usual cost from me and my students, demanding that we yield to white practices of knowledge-making in Shakespeare.

The adaptation and the different modifications of borrowed Arabic Plurals in Modern Turkish Kökende Çoğul Olarak Kullanılan Arapça Kelimelerin Türkçe’ye Geçmesi ve Türkiye Türkçesinde Kullanım Şekilleri

In the tenth century, Turks began to convert into Islam and adopted for official and literary use the Arabic language to study the teachings of the new religion they believed in. The use of many of the loanwords have become absolute in the Ottoman period, but even in Modern Turkish a large number of loanwords from Arabic can be often recognized because they are not subject to the strict rules of Turkish. Yet, some of these words lost its original meaning and acquired new different Turkish meaning. Moreover, some of the Arabic nouns of singular form in Turkish, modified the plural Turkish form. The present study entitled “the adaptation and the different modifications of borrowed Arabic Plurals in Modern Turkish” sheds light on the most important dictionaries of Turkish language that shows the different use as well as the adaptation of the borrowed Arabic plurals in Turkish. Özet X yüzyılda Türklerin İslamiyet’e tam bir şekilde girdikleri zamandan itibaren, onların girdikleri yeni dinin kuralını öğrenmeye başlamışlardır. Türklerin kendi inandıkları dinin kitabı, esası ve kuralları öğrenmek için Arap dilinin öğrenme çabaları o zamanlardan başlamıştır. O sırada Türkçenin kurallarına uymayan bir takım Arapça kökenli sözcükler Türkçeye geçip kullanılmaya başlanmıştır. Söz konusu kelimelerin en çok kullanıldığı dönem, Osmanlı devletinin bulunduğu dönem olup Türklerin Arap coğrafyasında bulunması böyle bir durum oluşturmaya büyük bir katkısı olmuştur. Yalnız Arapçadan Türkçeye geçmiş olan o kelimelerin bir kısmını anlamını kaybedip farklı bir anlamla veya farklı bir şekilde kullanılmaya başlanmıştır. Tekil anlamı veren Arapçadaki çoğul şeklini de kullanılan sözcükler de bulunmaktadır. Kökende çoğul olup Türkçede tekil olarak kullanılan bir takım sözcükler de bulunmaktadır. (Kökende Çoğul Olarak Kullanılan Arapça Kelimelerin Türkçe’ye Geçmesi ve Türkiye Türkçesinde Kullanım Şekilleri) adlı çalışmamızda Arapça kökenli çoğul sözcüklerin Türkçeye geçmesi açısından ve o sözcüklerin Türkiye Türkçesinde ne şekilde kullanıldığına dair tek tek Türkiye Türkçesinin sözlükleri tarayarak incelenecektir.

Audre Lorde's Who Said It Was Simple Characterized as a Confessional Mode

The research explores the confessional aspect in Audre Lorde's poem" Who Said It Was Simple ". Lorde depicts her personality under the stress of race, sex and sexuality. She discloses her own bitter experience concerning racism, sexism and sexuality in her poem to revive the retrospective truth of the Afro-Americans' life in the USA. This publicly manifestation of her personality and tribulation throughthe language ofpoetry has been regarded as the hallmark of confessional poetry.

Radical Voices in Indian English Poetry: A Study of the Poetry of Kamala Das

The creative genius of Kamala Das, one of the most prominent voices of protest in Indian English Literature is often compared to the American poet Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton as both of them used the confessional mode of writing in their poetry. Kamala Das, born in 1934 in Thrissur district of kerela emerged as a distinctive poetic voice with the publication of the first volume of her poetry Summer in Calcutta. In her poems Kamala Das has always raised a voice against the conventionalized figure of a woman, seeking a more dignified and honourable position for woman as an entity. In fact her poetry addresses the most critical issue in the contemporary society-the need to awaken the women. Her poetry collections include- Summer in Calcutta (1965), The Descendents (1967), The Old Playhouse and Other poems (1973), Tonight, This Savage Rite (1979), The Collected Poems (1984). My Story published in 1976 is her autobiography.

True Confessions

True Confessions Speer Morgan In 2007, during the events surrounding the funeral of my mother, Betty Speer Morgan, who was one of my heroes, my brother and I shared childhood stories, including one that our mother herself had told us not that long before. When we were children—he about six, I three—we had driven her nuts with endless sibling bickering, breaking things, and chasing each other around the house. One day, when one of us broke yet another china dish, she had had enough. She got so angry that she proceeded to throw the rest of her china, all of it, piece by piece, out the front door of the house. In the confessional mode, I then remembered that for three or four years after our family had moved to the small motel where we lived, and which we ran as a business, with both my brother and I renting rooms to soldiers and their families from Fort Chaffee, I had stolen money out of the cigar box that we used for a cash register— as much as a couple of dollars at a time to go to the movie or buy cokes. My brother was surprised and mildly shocked by this and expressed as much. Later, as we were driving past the place where the motel had stood, he asked if I had forgiven him for throwing me through the glass shower door. I told him that I hadn’t because I didn’t remember his doing it. “I did it three separate times,” he told me. “I felt guilty about it for years afterward.” Almost all of us have things we feel guilty about, many of them more substantial than childhood misconduct. Serious literature explores human flaws and follies and people’s efforts to change, whether failing or successful. Because of that, confession is an inevitable part of both its methods and subjects. One of the more interesting aspects of literary [End Page 5] confession is that it is less about guilt or shame than an effort to be truthful and engage the hearer on a personal level, or even to suggest humankind’s higher abilities. One of the best-remembered passages in St. Augustine’s Confessions is not the account of his more dramatic youthful deceptions, cruelty, or “jungle of erotic adventures” but his and his teenaged friends’ seemingly innocuous theft of a basket of pears. He takes the pears home and forgets to even eat them. Speculating on it from a nonplatonic point of view, he sees this as an example of how the restlessness, misconduct, and sinfulness of humankind is ultimately an urge to be like God—in part to possess and control but finally also to be at peace. Rousseau’s highly influential two-volume Confessions, published during the French Enlightenment, is similarly honest and paradoxical. Rousseau readily admits to flaws and failures and prurient behavior, including being beaten as a child by his effective guardian Mlle. Lambercier and enjoying it so much that he desperately wants to be beaten by her again. Yet Rousseau feels that he and all of us are fundamentally good, with all our physical experiences and personal oddities. Because of his belief in the value and relevance of the subjective and the sensory, he is often seen as one of the inspirations for the Romantic movement. Thomas de Quincey’s 1821 Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, another contribution to Romantic literature, is less philosophically driven. It speaks of his slide into drug dependency as a homeless youth and the terrible symptoms in later life of full addiction, yet it is also filled with a contradictory appreciation for opium’s mind-altering “assuaging,” transcendent visions, and gift of the “hopes of youth,” no matter how delusional. The poetry that interested me as a young reader was the confessional work of Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell from the late 1950s and ’60s. Among the paradoxes in their poetry was that they and indeed many of the memorable poets of that generation spoke with a raw personal sublimity reminiscent of the Romantic classics of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Thoreau. The broad themes of true confession indeed come from the...