Form Of Biography Research Articles

The making of autobiographical memory: Intersections of culture, narratives and identity

Autobiographical memory is a uniquely human form of memory that integrates individual experiences of self with cultural frames for understanding identities and lives. In this review, we present a theoretical and empirical overview of the sociocultural development of autobiographical memory, detailing the emergence of autobiographical memory during the preschool years and the formation of a life narrative during adolescence. More specifically, we present evidence that individual differences in parental reminiscing style are related to children's developing autobiographical narratives. Parents who structure more elaborated coherent personal narratives with their young children have children who, by the end of the preschool years, provide more detailed and coherent personal narratives, and show a more differentiated and coherent sense of self. Narrative structuring of autobiographical remembering follows a protracted developmental course through adolescence, as individuals develop social cognitive skills for temporal understanding and causal reasoning that allows autobiographical memories to be integrated into an overarching life narrative that defines emerging identity. In addition, adolescents begin to use culturally available canonical biographical forms, life scripts, and master narratives to construct a life story and inform their own autobiographical narrative identity. This process continues to be socially constructed in local interactions; we present exploratory evidence that parents help adolescents structure life narratives during coconstructed reminiscing and that adolescents use parents and families as a source for their own autobiographical content and structure. Ultimately, we argue that autobiography is a critical developmental skill; narrating our personal past connects us to our selves, our families, our communities, and our cultures.

Questioning the relations between biography, theory and power in biographical teaching methods: a dialogue

This paper is structured around a dialogue between Hazel Wright, who is an experienced user and advocate of biographical teaching methods, and Paul Ashwin, who has some doubts about their benefits. A statement from Wright about the potential of biographical teaching methods is countered by Ashwin, who poses three challenges related to biographical teaching methods: the forms of biography that are legitimate; students’ relations to theory; and the impact of power relations. Wright responds to these by drawing on specific teaching–learning moments and the paper closes with an invitation to the reader to decide their position on the potential benefits and limitations of biographical teaching.

Automatic knowledge extraction for filling in biography forms from Turkish texts

This study presents a method for building an automatic knowledge extraction system for filling in biography forms from Turkish texts. Several biographies are analyzed in order to choose the set of biography categories to be studied. The fields of the biography form to be created are also defined based on this analysis. Information extraction techniques are used for implementation. A separate testing platform is designed to evaluate the accuracy of the extracted data. Results of the testing platform have shown this study to be a promising process to be further developed especially for creating forms in the Turkish language.

Gustave Flaubert: une maniere speciale de vivre

‘Madame Bovary, c'est moi.’ Flaubert never wrote those words. In his new biographical and critical study of Flaubert's life and work Pierre-Marc de Biasi tracks the sources of this famous citation, which speaks of the intense relationship between the writer and his created world. Like the story of a man who met a man who met a bear, Biasi chases down a trail of rumours: the quotation was first recorded by the critic René Descharmes, who knew someone who knew Amélie Bosquet, the correspondent to whom Flaubert reportedly made the claim about his affinity with his Normandy heroine. Biasi may show that Gustave Flaubert never did announce he was Emma Bovary, but in this book he nevertheless examines links between the life of the so-called hermit of Croisset, and the processes of writing. Despite — or perhaps because of — his renowned insistence on the impersonality of the author, the life of Flaubert has received much biographical attention in recent years. Biasi's study follows the publication of Geoffrey Wall's psychoanalytical biography in 2001 and Frederick Brown's mammoth 2006 volume, not to mention the thousands of debunking pages Sartre wrote in the 1970s. For Biasi, though, Flaubert-the-writer remains the central concern, and his study is a quirky, revealing, and affectionate amalgamation of perspectives. Drawing on his years of genetic research using Flaubert's notes and manuscripts, Biasi's book roughly follows a chronological approach to Flaubert's life, but is enlivened by essays and interviews. The result is a new form of biography, part detective story, part literary criticism. Always at pains to draw links between the writing and the life, Biasi, for instance, describes the sequence of events leading up to Flaubert's nervous attacks of 1844, but also notes the references to a burnt hand suffered around the same time. He puts together, detective fashion, a possible chain of events that could have threatened the writing ability of the ‘novelist's novelist’. A chapter on the references to ‘nous’ in Madame Bovary illustrates further connections between writer and text: ‘nous’ is a reference to the bourgeois classmates of Flaubert's own generation; when the voice fades after the first few pages of the novel, it suggests the way in which each member of a school year-group seems to disappear, almost anonymously, into society and into history. It also, of course, raises destabilizing questions about the narrating ‘moi’, and Biasi comes up with a range of answers, including speculation that the implied ‘je’ of the opening pages of Flaubert's most famous text might, in fact, belong to Charles Bovary himself. In this way Biasi interweaves questions of biography and literary criticism. One of the recurrent images of Biasi's work is the emphasis on Flaubert as a horseman: the energy of the rider parallels the energy of the writer. Biasi also considers writing as Flaubert's hobbyhorse, his ‘dada’. This study represents Biasi's own ‘dada’: a preoccupation with Flaubert, his life, and his writing. Not so much a portrait or a psychoanalyst's report, but a vibrant vision of a writer astride his literary steed, this is a book that expresses much about the life of Flaubert, providing a newly dynamic purpose for biography in a post-structuralist world.

Memoirs of Our Nervous Illness: The Queensland Police Special Branch Files of Carole Ferrier as Political Auto/Biography

In their memoirs, American feminists Robin Morgan, Karla Jay, and Brenda Feigen note how their activism in the late 1960s–early 1970s brought them to the attention of the FBI and/or the CIA, with resultant voluminous security files. This surveillance suggests that the new political movement of women's liberation was, from its beginnings, perceived as a risk to society, joining older political threats such as communism. Surveillance of women's movement activists also occurred in Australia by both federal and state agencies. In this essay we use one particular example of the security police file — the Queensland Police Special Branch file of the Australian socialist-feminist activist and English literature academic, Carole Ferrier — to explore just how security agencies tried to understand and record the life of a socialist-feminist in the 1970s and 1980s. That is, what did they make of this radically new form of politics and political subjectivity? In this article we position the secret police dossier as a form of political biography, and hence expand the forms and subject matter typically included within the genre. We argue that not only can the Special Branch file be read as a form of biography of Carole Ferrier, but also as an unwitting autobiographical text of the Special Branch.1

The Biography of Furniture

The intimate relationship of the designer and the client has led me to a parallel practice of investigating the built form of biography. The notion of working with biography is a device for avoiding willful design. It provides a conceptual guidance to make decisions. The medium that has been used is “furniture,” which is a smaller and more direct vehicle for ideas than architectural space.

Shakespeare and Marlowe: Re-Writing the Relationship

Like the Chorus in Marlowe's prologue to Doctor Faustus, let me begin by stating what this essay is not. This paper is not a detailed examination of the biographical character of either Marlowe or Shakespeare. Nor is it yet another attempt to show that Marlowe coauthored or, more conspiratorially, actually wrote some of Shakespeare's plays. Nor will it focus on the working and playing conditions of the early modern theatrical scene. What it will explore is the relationship between Shakespeare and Marlowe as it has been portrayed in biographical and fictional forms. More specifically, my essay considers the connection between Shakespeare and Marlowe, particularly as critics have portrayed them in the twentieth century. I will begin with A.C. Swinburne and T.S. Eliot, then move to Irving Ribner's 1964 essay and Anthony Burgess's works, before considering the film Shakespeare in Love (1999). I will conclude my survey with Katherine Duncan-Jones's Ungentle Shakespeare (2001) as a marker for the end of the century's work on the two playwrights. Such an overview should show the dominance of these textual renderings and also demonstrate how the last hundred years have affected our vision as well as our version of the two writers' relationship. Commenting on the aesthetics of reception, Hans Robert Jauss suggests that such an examination will allow us to 'conceive the meaning and form' of these various works in the 'historical unfolding of [their] understanding'.1 Ultimately, I hope to demonstrate how

“Circe” and the Genesis of Multiple Personality

In this article, I propose a correlation between James Joyce's composition techniques that required multiple revisions and his interest in multiple personality, which eventually blossomed into that comedy of multiplicity, Finnegans Wake. The Wake's relation to multiple-personality phenomenon is well known through figure of Christine Beauchamp, who is associated with Issy,1 but theme of multiplicity and multiple personality emerges in early drafts of Wake independently of her character.2 Rather than provide details of this emergence or consider its meanings within Finnegans Wake, I will make case that it grew out of reflections on composition of Ulysses, in particular Circe, and experience of its composition. Such a thesis picks up on Michael Groden's suggestion that the processes by which [Joyce] wrote book cannot be separated from other aspects of its meaning.3 The result is an exercise in a form of biography that seeks to illustrate how, as Ford Madox Ford's biographer Max Saunders says, [t]he simultaneous processes of living and writing shape each other in complex and often surprising ways.4 While Joyce's characteristic methods of drafting, notetaking, redrafting, and revision had already been established before composition of Ulysses,5 one aspect of it-the revisions-intensified during composition of Circe. Through a genetic account of progress of Circe, it is possible to see that Joyce, even before he began its drafting, required a new intensification of method of multiple revisions he had already crafted. As he conceived, wrote, and rewrote book, and Circe in particular, events around him affected his method. These occurrences included strong responses of readers: enthusiasm of Little Review editors, refusal of United States Post Office to carry installments, burning of certain issues, action brought against Little Review in September 1920, and its trial in February 1921. Joyce's growing celebrity (or notoriety) and circumstances of writing itself affected his methods. Together these events intensified escalation of what can be called a strati-

Periodical Personae: Pseudonyms, Authorship and the Imagined Community of Joseph Priestley's Theological Repository

‘Anonymous and pseudonymous publication suggest that the freedom of expression and circulation of ideas depends on the ‘negation of persons in public discourse' (William Warner). Like anonymity, pseudonymity suspends the referential anchoring which ties an utterance to a person or place. Yet rather than negating the personal identity of authors, pseudonyms shield them through fictional identities which project them into alternative imagined communities. In this paper I analyse the use of pseudonyms in a dissenting periodical publication, Joseph Priestley's <em>Theological Repository </em>(1769-1771, 1784-1788, rpt 1795). By resisting biographical forms of identification and accountability, the journal explored, anticipated and projected its own reception.

Virginia Woolf: an inner life

Virgina Woolf is the greatest of all British women writers and one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century writing. She was a novelist utterly immersed in books, wholly original, passionate, vivid and with a steely dedication to her art. Yet given that what we value about Woolf's life is her nine great novels, most writing about her tends to revolve around her social life and the planet of the Bloomsbury set. Julia Briggs' aim in this fresh, absorbing new book is to put the writing back absolutely at the centre of Woolf's life; to read that life through her books, using the novels themselves to create a compelling new form of biography. Using Woolf's own matchless commentary on the creative process through her letters, diaries and essays, Julia Briggs has produced a book which is a convincing, moving picture of an artist at full stretch, but also a brilliant meditation on the whole nature of creativity.

以女性主義的觀點來閱讀西維亞•湯森•渥拿(Sylvia Townsend Warner)作品中女同志的主體性

Sylvia Townsend Warner has been exiled from the pages of literary history, marginalized as either a radical communist or a lesbian writer. Her contribution to women's political development as well as her expressions of lesbian subjectivity cannot be denied. In this article, I will discuss lesbian identity in her biographical and fictional forms. The following has four sections. Firstly, Warner's relationship with her father and with Valentine Ackland will be examined. Then the second section examines the issues of women's politics as located in Warner's biographical experiences and in her literary works. I shall then define a lesbian novel, and explore the oppressions that women and lesbians encounter in Warner's lesbian novels, Lolly Willowes and Summer Will Show. Finally, I will position such popular categories as the celibate and witchcraft within Warner's political categories, and examine the relation between her socialism, her claims for women's private property and her lesbian subjectivity.

Producing a Received View of Gold Coast Elite Society? C.F. Hutchison'sPen Pictures of Modern Africans and African Celebrities

In the early 1920s British West Africa saw a flurry of colonial activity, in which the formation of the colonial state—originally started in this region in the 1870s—was brought to a higher plane. The introduction of Indirect Rule in the newly-amalgamated Nigeria by governor Frederick Lugard called for a rethinking of colonial political and administrative structures. Where before, the relatively small administrative units were dominated by Europeans and western-educated Africans, now the position and role of “traditional” leaders was enhanced on all levels of colonial government. Control over the economy came more and more into the hands of European businesses and business conglomerates, at the expense of African firms. As a result, relations between African elites, who had vested economic and political interests in the colonial states, and the growing European colonial establishment hardened.In the case of the Gold Coast, the African urban coastal elite of merchants, educators, missionaries, and others faced an overwhelming onslaught of change and modernization in all parts of society. In many cases these changes undermined the elites' social status, as well as their political and economic position. One of the weapons in the battle between British colonial authorities and African urban elite society was the written word. Within this context, expert knowledge about African achievements, molded in the form of biographies, was the two-edged sword of African cultural nationalists of diverse plumage.

Identitätskonstrukte in Texten junger ostdeutscher Autoren nach 1989/90. Zu Kerstin Hensel: &lt;i&gt;Tanz am Kanal&lt;/i&gt; (1994)

Since the German reunification biographical, personal identities and various forms of collective identity have become the focus of increased attention. However, the ways in which identity is constructed and which role various forms of representation play in this construction has remained surprisingly underresearched. Using the example of Kerstin Hensel's Tanz am Kanal (1994) and employing postcolonial theory, the present paper will demonstrate how narrative patterns not only reflect social structures, but shape and indeed create these structures. Hensel purposely avoids the conflation of authorial and narrative voice, and thus invents new stories with new memories and identities. She is thus able to show that identity and the quest for identity are not constant in either content or intensity; rather, they remain in perpetual change.

The Broad Church: a biography of a movement

TOD E. JONES. The Broad Church: A Biography of a Movement. Lanham, Maryland.: Lexington Books, 2003. Pp. xi + 345, bibliography, index. $85.00. Tod Jones has produced an engaging and informative history of Broad Church Movement. As his title suggests, he has undertaken his subject as a form of biography. By doing so he has effectively drawn a complex set of intricate and interleaved portraits, many of them accounts of academic careers of most eminent of those scholars and theologians who shaped religious revival of Church of England during crisis years of its struggle against disestablishment and, perhaps more significantly, its efforts to counter parochial and spiritual disenchantment in an age of positivist improvement. What emerges is a deeply nuanced account of intellectual and spiritual revival of nineteenth-century church. While this is clearly a deeply personal study of Victorian Anglicanism, one grounded in author's own self-described passion, The Broad Church is far more than an exercise in Anglican hagiography, for it also considers emergence of a broader cultural and educational movement and tensions implicit in project of rationalizing religion. Jones's study offers reader an in-depth etymology for what some scholars have described as Anglican Liberalism. There are three important arguments in Jones's Biography. The first of these is a strong extension of arguments which Charles Sanders pioneered in late 1940s. Sanders traced Broad Church to Coleridge and Coleridgeans, most notably John Sterling and F. D. Maurice. Jones goes beyond Sanders's argument to assert that Coleridge was more than a mere influence on movement. Indeed, the Broad Church may be called Coleridgean movement and Coleridge is justly given paternal status of father of Broad Church Movement (43). The defining contribution of Coleridge to this new theology was his Platonism, which Jones describes as root of natural theology. But it was also Coleridge's introduction of German Learning into English thought via his popularizations of Kant, Fichte, Schlegel, Schelling, and Lessing which critically shaped theology of Broad Church Movement. The second important plank of Jones's account of Broad Church is his criticism of long-standing and false dichotomy between scholastic orthodoxy of Oxford and heterodox and radical inclinations of Cambridge. While there are certainly generalizations to be made to support this juxtaposition, Jones helpfully suggests that these have been so greatly overstated as to suggest a complete separation of these intellectual spheres. He instead points to cross-fertilization of Oxford and Cambridge scholarship (and scholars) with respect to what might be described as mixed parentage of Broad Church Movement. By doing so, Jones avoids old high/lowOxford/Cambridge characterizations of Broad Church and Oxford Movements. He traces first flowerings of Broad Church to common rooms of Oriel College and emergence of or intellectuals at Oxford in decade or so before emergence of Cambridge Apostles. The Apostles shared classicism and philo-Germanism of Noetics of Oxford. However, they were comprised of those evangelical undergraduates who initially gathered to converse at Trinity during closure of Cambridge Union between 1817 and 1820. …

Incomplete histories: Steve Biko, the politics of self‐writing and the apparatus of reading

This paper gathers together deliberations surrounding Steve Biko's I Write What I Like as it simultaneously registers the critical importance of the text as an incomplete history. Rather than presupposing the text as a form of biography or following a trend of translating Biko into a prophet of reconciliation, I argue that the text leads us towards the postcolonial problematic of self‐writing. That problematic, I argue, names the encounter between self‐writing and an apparatus of reading. The paper stages the encounter as a way to make explicit the text's postcolonial interests and to mark the onset of an incomplete history. This, I argue incidentally, is where the postcolonial critic may set to work to finish the critique of apartheid. Incomplete histories call attention to how that which is unintelligible in a text makes an authoritative reading difficult.

Encyclopedia of life writing: autobiographical and biographical forms

Encyclopedia of life writing: autobiographical and biographical forms

Tanganyikan Nationalism as ‘Women's Work’: Life Histories, Collective Biography and Changing Historiography

Although nationalism in Tanzania, as elsewhere in Africa, has been criticized for its shortcomings, and a ‘Dar es Salaam School’ has been charged with succumbing to its ideological biases, few historians have revisited or questioned Tanzania's dominant nationalist narrative – a narrative created over 25 years ago. Biographies written in aid of this narrative depict nationalism in the former Trust Territory of Tanganyika as primarily the work of a few good men, including ‘proto-nationalists’ whose anti-colonial actions set the stage and provided historical continuity for the later western-oriented ideological work of nationalist modernizers.The life history narratives of women who became activists in the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) in the 1950s disrupt this view of progressive stages toward an emerging nationalist consciousness which reflected and borrowed heavily from western forms and ideals. They suggest that Tanganyikan nationalism was also and significantly the work of thousands of women, whose lives and associations reflected trans-tribal ties and affiliations, and whose work for TANU served to both construct and perform what nationalism came to signify for many Tanzanian women and men. Women activists did not simply respond to TANU's nationalist rhetoric; they shaped, informed and spread a nationalist consciousness for which TANU was the vehicle.Neither ‘extraordinary’ individuals (the usual subjects of male biography) nor ‘representative’ of ‘ordinary people’ (often the subjects of life histories), TANU women activists' lives reveal the severe limitations of the dichotomous characterizations of traditional biographical forms. Together, their narratives constitute a collective biographical narrative of great significance for our understanding of nationalism and nationalist movement in the former Tanganyika.

Psychoanalytic Hagiography: The Case of Ignatius of Loyola

TRADITIONAL HAGIOGRAPHY is a form of biography that has its own special style, intents, and purposes. The biographer most often has a spiritual or theological frame of reference, and aims at edification or some doctrinal emphasis. Traditional hagiography, therefore, is more often than not embedded in a religious matrix that selects, focuses, and articulates the relevant elements in the biographical account of the saint and his works that are pertinent to that context and intentionality. The approach I will be describing here strikes a rather different emphasis. The psychoanalytic approach does not attempt to write the life of a saint, but rather the life of a man who happened to become a saint. The shift in emphasis brings with it modifications in methodology, approach, and emphases; it selects different data from the wealth of information about the saint's life and times, even from his spiritual works and teachings. The reason is that what is relevant to the understanding of the theological or spiritual meaning of the saint's life may not be meaningful to the psychological understanding of the human dimension of his spiritual torments and triumphs. The psychoanalytic hagiographer is less interested in the spiritual or religious aspects of the saint's accomplishments than he is in the fundamental human motivations, conflicts, developmental influences, goals, intentions, and purposes that determined the course of the saint's spiritual journey. When the psychoanalyst enters the world of history or biography, he enters an unfamiliar, foreign territory, in which all the usual and familiar landmarks that he has habitually used to guide his explorations are missing. While he is used to dealing with a living, talking, and responding subject, he now finds confronting him all the obscurities and opacities of the historical process. The immediacy of the psychoanalytic situation is replaced by the distant removal and the concealing veil of time. Instead of the vitality and spontaneity of a patient's associations, he is met with the residues of history: faceless facts, dates, names, monuments, and the infinitely obscure impenetrability of documents. One can only conclude that the project before us is fraught with pitfalls of many kinds.

The Theory of Biography

I have tried elsewhere to suggest the relation between biography and selfconsciousness and to show (chiefly with reference to political biographies) what happens when we abandon biographical intuition. Here I want to keep modern literary biography in mind as a paradigm and to look, first, the expressivist anthropology, to borrow Charles Taylor's term, in biographies in the West. I contend that the first biography to display a new romantic anthropology (seen clearly in the writings of Herder and Goethe) is Boswell's Life of Johnson (1791); but it will be evident to any reader of the century's literature that the is at least evident glimmeringly in both Rousseau and Voltaire and in British practice in the novel long before 1791. Richardson's novels example are expressivist just in the Herderian sense. I must keep in mind what (I think) might be the admonitions of eighteenth-century scholars such as my friends and betters Gwin Kolb, Edward Bloom, and the late Geoffrey Tillotson, and remember that it is difficult to speak confidently of direct influences in the realm of ideas after 1740: indeed, here, we need only look relationships. I contend that we have wrongly criticized the form of Boswell's Life because we do not see the general European theory that underlies it; when we isolate the underlying theory, we find adequate criteria modern biographical forms and thus a working theory of biography. It is important biography that while a new expressivist anthropology is formulated with optimism in the 1770's it gets a gloomy, anxious defense later. Underneath the famous rosy serenity in the Gespriiche mit Goethe (those conversations recorded by Eckermann between 1823 and 1832) is Goethe's despair over the concatenation of urban forces threatening the unique thing that man has been found to be. And, only a few years later, we find a Goetheadmirer and reader of Senancour and Girardin cataloguing all that is against us. It isn't perverse of me to approach the new expressivist anthropology through Arnold, because Arnold indicates some of the real pressure the theory is under in the twentieth century. Arnold is at Thun, in 1849, recovering from an affair with the blue-eyed Mary Claude who was baptized at Friedrichstadt and who has relatives at Geneva; a summer or two she has been intimate with Arthur and Anne Clough and Matthew and Tom Arnold (of the Clougho-Matthean set); and Arnold's letter to Clough reveals impatience with his old friends. He will not think of his brother Tom, for my dear Tom has not sufficient besonnenheit it to be any rest to think of him any more