Genre Of Autobiography Research Articles

Ценностные доминанты советской ментальности в автобиографическом тексте

This paper considers the texts of natural written speech as a source of describing the author’s personality axiological dominants determined by the social norms and reflecting them. The authors substantiate the statement about the significant manifestation of the personal principle in certain genres of natural written speech, with texts not subjected to editing and censorship, which is one of the most specific features of this type of speech activity. The research materials are the draft versions of autobiographical texts that embody the personal element quite explicitly despite the cliché nature of the speech genre of autobiography due to its institutional nature. The axiological analysis of autobiographies is based on the concept of “autographeme,” considered as a life event transformed by a person into a text event. The axiological study of autographemes has revealed through the method of keywords the author’s axiological orientations, reflecting, ultimately, the value dominants of the Soviet mentality: “the Soviet person is a screw, a part of the socialist system,” “work as a socially useful creative activity,” “accessibility of education,” “social elevators,” etc. The dominants mentioned are centered by the superdominant “social justice of socialism,” integrating all the axiological meanings of the autobiographical text. In some autographemes (“parents and their social status”, “work path”), the transformation of the author’s social orientations (and to a certain extent the society) can be traced through the correlation of what was written with the sociocultural stage of Russian society when the autobiography was written.

Handbook of Autobiography/Autofiction Volume I: Theory and Concepts Volume II: HistoryVolume III: Exemplary Texts ed. by Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf

Reviewed by: Handbook of Autobiography/Autofiction Volume I: Theory and Concepts Volume II: HistoryVolume III: Exemplary Texts ed. by Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf Wilhelm Hemecker (bio) and Nicolas Paulus (bio) Handbook of Autobiography/Autofiction Volume I: Theory and Concepts Volume II: History Volume III: Exemplary Texts Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf, editor De Gruyter, 2019, xl + 2180 pp. ISBN 9783110279719, $590.00 hardcover. A pile of three heavy volumes containing 2180 pages all together is in front of us: a handbook concerning the genre of autobiography. The sole editor is Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf, well-known and intellectually well-equipped in this field of research, though “familiar mainly with the Western tradition of the genre,” as she notes at the very beginning of her preface (xv). The overall organization of the vast matter follows the tradition of splitting the access into “Theory and Concepts” (Vol. I) and “History” (Vol. II), supplemented by “Exemplary Texts” (Vol. III), which is by far the largest volume, comprising some 900 pages, with the aim of considering “plurality and heterogeneity as something positive and thrilling” (xviii). This volume contains content summaries, remarks on the historical origins, and analyses of “Exemplary Autobiographical/Autofictional Texts,” such as Augustine’s Confessions as well as Rousseau’s The Confessions, Montaigne’s Complete Essays and Goethe’s From My Life: Poetry and Truth, Kafka’s Letter to his Father, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Blixen’s Out of Africa, Elfriede Jelinek’s Sports Play, and J. M. Coetzee’s Boyhood and Youth. A few non-Western examples supplement the selection. Naturally, a massive undertaking such as this cannot be comprehensively reviewed by any one reviewer, and thus, we will focus on a few of the principal conceptual decisions behind this handbook. We will comment on some of the difficulties and inconsistencies that result from these decisions, and from the handbook format in general. Overall, the handbook contains 165 articles, and it undoubtedly closes a major gap in the international research on autobiography. A look at the list of contributors may raise doubts as to whether the handbook has fulfilled its stated policy to “allow and necessitate intensive collaboration with autobiography researchers from all over the world” (xv). The almost ninety contributing scholars are based mainly at European universities—the vast majority in Germany—and some contributors are from the US and Australia, but hardly anyone is from another part of the world, which should be considered a missed opportunity, to say the least. This is largely, but not exclusively, the case for the second volume, which traces the roots of autobiography and autofiction (in addition to in Europe, Asia, and Australia) in “The Arab World” (Susanne Enderwitz, Heidelberg), “Africa” (Susanne Gehrmann, Berlin), “The Americas” (Ulrich Mücke, Hamburg, on Latin America), and in “Autobiography in the Globalized World“ (Gabrielle Rippl, Berne), a very brief final chapter. This is of course not meant as a comment on the qualifications of these internationally renowned scholars, but as a question of perspective and a challenge to a broader view on the subject. [End Page 805] The Western tradition—the programmatic awareness “of this specific Western view when looking for authentic forms of the autobiographical in other cultures” (xvi)—certainly does not offer such a “specific view” as claimed. This is not the case in general, and particularly not with respect to the fundamental decision expressed in the title of the whole enterprise: that is, the decision to bypass the anglophone tradition of life writing, to neglect the genre of memoir, and to combine the term “autobiography” not with the broader term “autonarration” but with “autofiction.” Though “autofiction” sounds chic and may seem convincing at first glance, we need to dig in deeper here. The title of the handbook points towards a major issue with the project. It never becomes sufficiently clear how autofiction relates to autobiography, and if and how the concept could help further research on (auto) biography and life writing in general. Ultimately, it is not clear why autofiction is such an integral aspect of the handbook rather than the subject of a single chapter. There are of course long-standing debates about the meaning and viability of the term “autofiction” (for example, Doubrovsky...

Writing in Cars with Gertrude Stein and Jacques Derrida, or, The Age of Autotheory

Writing in Cars with Gertrude Stein and Jacques Derrida, or, The Age of Autotheory Ryan Tracy (bio) for anybody's L. "autotheory" is a term circulating in contemporary academic and literary criticism to designate theoretical writing that opens itself to autobiographical aspects of the writer's life. This term has been associated with the contemporary writers Maggie Nelson and Paul Preciado and seems to hail something of a new turn in scholarly writing (Nelson). Yet autotheory may not be as new as the neologism suggests. As Robyn Wiegman mentions in her introduction to this special issue, autotheory presumes a relation between the autobiographical and the theoretical that is not necessarily new to either critical theoretical writing or the literary archives (Wiegman). In this essay, I hope to affirm the structural and historical openness of autotheory by tracking the imbrication of autobiographical writing between two thinkers set on a collision course that has not yet been given sufficient critical attention: the so-called modernist writer Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) and the so-called post-modern philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930–2004).1 Both Stein and Derrida famously challenged the authority of autobiography by putting pressure on the fantasy of sovereignty and self-representation that undergirds common notions of autobiography, while at the same time, affirming "the autos" as a radically capacious and multiplying signifier. Moreover, each turned to the material, metaphoric, and deconstructive valences of the "automobile" in order to articulate the problems that circulate around self-identity. Writing (or riding) in cars with Stein and Derrida traverses the border between self and other without, however, surrendering the necessity (and risk) of theorizing from the grammatical position of the first person. [End Page 15] im-possible autobiographies But we are never ourselves, and between us, identical to us, a 'self' is never in itself or identical to itself. Jacques Derrida You are of course never yourself. Gertrude Stein There is a literary and philosophical kinship between Stein and Derrida that cuts through their thought on the self, and that is evident in their experiments with the genre of autobiography. It may come as a surprise to some scholars of deconstruction that Derrida read Stein, understood her historical importance as a major figure of feminist and modernist literatures, and was almost certainly aware that a generation of Stein scholars was coming to view her work as "deconstructive."2 Derrida cited Stein's proper name on at least three occasions. During a discussion of feminism in the interview "This Strange Institution Called Literature" (1992), Derrida includes Stein in a list of "immensely great modern writers" along with Virginia Woolf and Derrida's close friend Hélène Cixous (59). In The Animal That Therefore I Am (2008), he regards Stein as an "autobiographical animal," and includes her (again in a list) among a tradition of Western writers who demonstrate an irresistible urge to write about themselves (49). And in "Circumfession" (1993), an essay in which Derrida explicitly embraces the porousness of his own autobiographical signature while parasitically "[transforming] the autobiographies of others into his 'own'" (Hayes 166), Derrida quotes directly from Stein's Everybody's Autobiography (1937). While they never met—Derrida moved to Paris three years after Stein's death—Derrida and Stein shared the experience of being writers in exile. Stein was an American expat who lived and worked in France from 1906 until the time of her death in 1946. Fame in her native country had eluded Stein until late in her life with the best-selling The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), which allowed her to break into American publishing while gaining her a popular American audience.3 Because of her long absence, America came to feel like a foreign country to Stein. Stein viewed the arrival of American doughboys during World War I as America paying her a visit, which, as she wrote in The Autobiography, "was so much better than just going to America. [End Page 16] Here you were with America in a kind of way that if you only went to America you could not possibly be" (184). The friendships and correspondences that grew out of the American military presence in France made a deep...

BREAKING THE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL PACT: TRUTH AND LIFE-WRITING IN ALISON BECHDEL’S FUN HOME.

Much of the focus on truth in critical responses to Fun Home has surrounded the use of archival evidence and the access to truth provided by the graphic medium. This article will explore these issues as well as the relationship to truth established by the text’s metafictional devices and interactions with genre, particularly the genre of the Bildungsroman. This article will analyze the commentary the text provides not just on its own relationship to truth, but the role of truth in autobiographical texts in general, and in women’s and other marginalized groups’ autobiographical texts in particular. In the context of a critical landscape in which the veracity of autobiographical work by women is often subject to skeptical criticism, this article will argue that Fun Home acts, not as an exception to the genre of autobiography, but as a commentary on the gap between the presumed autobiographical pact and the historical, political, and aesthetic reality of autobiographical works.

Il paradosso del mentitore in Memorie dal sottosuolo di Dostoevskij

In this article the Liar’s Paradox is examined in reference to Dostoevsky’s novel Notes from the Underground (1864). First the concept of unreliable narrator is discussed and examined within the genres of autobiography and ‘confession’, where the narrator not always tells the truth but sometimes intentionally lies in order to obtain the reader’s sympathy and admiration. Then the narrative strategies of the Man from the underground are analyzed and a series of “extreme” narrative devices (Richardson 2006) are identified, such as epanorthosis, denarration, disnarration. All of these narrative devices realize verbally the Liar’s paradox which traps the Man from the Underground into a vicious circle from which it is impossible to exit.

The psychologist's biographer: Writing lives in the history of psychology.

How should historians employ psychological insight when seeking to understand and analyze their historical subjects? That is the essential question explored in this methodological reflection on the relationship between psychology and biography. To answer it, this paper offers a historical, historiographical, and theoretical analysis of life writing in the history of psychology. It touches down in the genres of autobiography, psychobiography, and cultural history to assess how other historians and psychologists have answered this question. And it offers a more detailed analysis of one particularly useful text, Kerry Buckley's (1989) Mechanical Man, to illuminate specific ways in which historians can simultaneously employ, historicize, and critically analyze the theories of the psychologists they study. Although ostensibly about writing biographies of eminent psychologists, this article speaks to a methodological issue facing any historian contemplating the role psychological theories should play in their historical narratives.

Different beasts? National and transnational lines in the German-Indian anthology The Elephant in the Room

ABSTRACTThis essay compares the contributions by eight Indian and eight German-speaking visual artists to the 2016 issue of the all-women magazine Spring, an issue in which they reflect on gender roles, the titular ‘Elephant in the Room.’ Searching for transnational and national trends, I zoom in on three larger aspects: themes, genre, and visual style. Transnationally shared themes concern motherhood and female beauty standards. However, while artists across national and cultural borders ruminate about voluntary non-motherhood and engage expectations of feminine attractiveness, they differ in the extent to which they describe actually lived motherhood. The issue also shows culturally-specific beauty ideals, such as the Indians’ preoccupation with fair skin. In a similar way, artists from both continents use the genre of autobiography, but go to different depths with a notable ‘Indian’ preference to explore a grandmother’s past. Visually, too, the artists show interesting commonalities such as the tendency to tell their stories in a traditional comics format, yet the surface aesthetics differ. Whereas the Indian artists tend to employ a polished, fine-arts style, several German-speaking artists relish expressive abstraction. I provide possible reasons for these differences and end with an appraisal of how women artists might try to access the comics scene in the future.

Editor's Note

Editor's Note

An analysis of autobiographical tools in written reflection: implications for teaching critical thinking and goal-setting

ABSTRACTThis paper analyzes the results of an 18 month study of a variety of participants involved in written reflection on their learning, both in classes at two universities in the Southern US or in voluntary focus groups. The purpose of the study was to analyze the effects of including autobiographical tools in written reflection. Participants used three tools from the genre of autobiography as they reflected on their learning inside either course content, internship experiences, experiential learning, or goal-setting. Over 500 samples were gathered, offering a large data set for analysis of what kinds of best practice produce quality reflective writing. Through analysis of the data and student surveys and interviews, results show increased attention to critical thinking and metacognition; expressed flexibility, adaptability, and ability to handle ambiguity; and value in connection to others/empathy-building as a result of incorporating autobiographical tools in reflective prompts. The study indicated that reflections using the same autobiographical tool over the course of several sessions seemed to produce deeper levels of reflection and more engagement with the autobiographical tool. Of the three autobiographical tools used in the study, the tool that seemed most helpful to participants was reflection as storytelling that revealed aspects of the self.

Positioning the Autobiographer in the Arabic Translation of Eat, pray, love: A Study of the (re)Framing Techniques

A narrative is a means through which people can experience the worldwhich Mona Baker (2006) defines as the stories people tell themselves aboutthe world to construct reality and guide people’s behaviors. There are variousforms of narratives, and the genre of autobiography in which the writer decidesto share his/her experience with others is just an example of the ontologicalnarrative where the writer narrates his/her story. The significance ofautobiographies as an ontological narrative coincides with the rise of femaleautobiographers who chronicle their lives to guide other women towardsleading a better life. Autobiographers give themselves a certain position in thenarrative world which can be subjected to change and alteration when theautobiography is translated into another language. Retaining theautobiographer’s position is one of the challenges facing translators,especially, if the autobiography and its translation do not belong to the sameculture. Baker’s (2006) Narrative Theory is one of the theories which canaccount for the changes occurring to the autobiographer’s position whentranslated. The paper uses Baker’s (re)framing scheme to examine therepositioning of the autobiographer, Elizabeth Gilbert, in the Arabictranslation of Eat, pray, love: One woman’s search for everything across Italy,India and Indonesia. The study attempts to identify the (re)framing techniquescapable of changing the autobiographer’s. It also highlights the importance ofthe integration between the Narrative Theory (Baker, 2006) and thePositioning Theory (Davies & Harre, 1990), especially, that the narrative typecan change in the translation

Reading African American Autobiography: Twenty-First-Century Contexts and Criticism ed. by Eric D. Lamore

Reviewed by: Reading African American Autobiography: Twenty-First-Century Contexts and Criticism ed. by Eric D. Lamore Daniel Stein Eric D. Lamore, ed. Reading African American Autobiography: Twenty-First-Century Contexts and Criticism. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2017. 296 pp. $74.95. The genre of autobiography, or life narrative, to use a more inclusive term, has perhaps been the most crucial mode of public self-fashioning for African Americans as well as one of the most effective means of documenting the humanity and essential Americanness of black folk from the moment the first Africans set foot on North American soil. As pioneering scholars like Rebecca Chalmers Barton, [End Page 315] Sidonie Smith, Stephen Butterfield, Frances Smith Foster, James Olney, Robert B. Stepto, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and William L. Andrews have argued, the very existence of life narratives by African Americans, especially when published in book form or presented as oral testimony, constitutes one of the most powerful arguments against reigning racist ideologies of black inferiority. In light of the centrality of the genre in African American literary and cultural history, it is not surprising that the emergence of African American Studies was fueled in part by an extended academic investment with the study of black autobiography. It is within this scholarly trajectory that recent essay collections in the path-breaking Wisconsin Studies in Autobiography series, edited by William L. Andrews, such as Angela A. Ards's Words of Witness: Black Women's Autobiography in the Post-"Brown" Era (2015) and Eric D. Lamore's Reading African American Autobiography: Twenty-First-Century Contexts and Criticism (2017) must be placed. Lamore's excellent volume combines a number of revised essays that originally appeared in a special issue of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies in 2012 with additional pieces solicited for the present publication. As Lamore suggests in his introduction, the goal is to take stock of the current state of African American autobiography and expand the analysis beyond the canon and the printed word (3-4). The purpose of the book, he writes, is "to embrace newly recognized African American life writers from a wide range of historical periods, to widen the field's understanding of the myriad ways in which African Americans have engaged in examining the self, to analyze the more contemporary routes of dissemination that have been used to circulate autobiographical acts, [and] to trouble the 'texts' that have been traditionally housed in the canon of African American life narrative" (4). Recognizing the vastness of autobiographical materials, Lamore wisely foregoes any attempt at comprehensiveness and chooses a chronological order instead, beginning the volume with Lynn A. Casmier-Paz's close reading of one of the earliest existing examples of African American life narrative, The Life, and Dying Speech of Arthur, a Negro Man; Who Was Executed at Worcester, October 20, 1768. For a Rape Committed on the Body of One Deborah Metcalfe, and concluding with Kwakiutl L. Dreher's analysis of the feminist perspectives in actress Pam Grier's Foxy: My Life in Three Acts (2010). Lamore positions the book as "an 'age of Obama' assessment of African American life narrative" (10) in response to Robert B. Stepto's A Home Elsewhere: Reading African American Classics in the Age of Obama (2011). While this is an intriguing endeavor, it also marks the book as an assessment from what already seems to be a bygone era when a postracial society seemed to be at least a distant possibility for some. What's more, the book's potential to shake up established interpretations of the history and current state of African American autobiography remains largely confined to the individual chapters. Lamore gestures toward this potential when he speaks of the centrality of archival work for future investigations and encourages more "multilingual, transnational, and transatlantic" (11) perspectives on the genre, but it is ultimately left to the reader to draw larger conclusions (and there are several) from the book. Three thematic clusters inform the volume as a whole. First, all of the chapters acknowledge and investigate what Casmier-Paz calls "the limits and the possibilities of life writing" (19) for black Americans. If autobiography is understood as a textually or...

The Plot Thickens: Illustrated Victorian Serial Fiction from Dickens to Du Maurier by Mary Elizabeth Leighton and Lisa Surridge

Reviewed by: The Plot Thickens: Illustrated Victorian Serial Fiction from Dickens to Du Maurier by Mary Elizabeth Leighton and Lisa Surridge Julia McCord Chavez (bio) Mary Elizabeth Leighton and Lisa Surridge, The Plot Thickens: Illustrated Victorian Serial Fiction from Dickens to Du Maurier (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2019), pp. v + 331, $85.00 hardcover. The Plot Thickens: Illustrated Victorian Serial Fiction from Dickens to Du Maurier, by Mary Elizabeth Leighton and Lisa Surridge, provides illuminating new answers to a foundational question for Victorian periodical studies: “How does the form of the illustrated Victorian serial novel invite readers to read?” (2). Drawing upon an impressive range of archival research and invoking an eclectic set of case studies that range from canonical works such as David Copperfield (May 1849–November 1850) and The Small House at Allington (September 1862–April 1864) to lesser-examined works such as The Tower of London (January–December 1840), Griffith Gaunt (December 1865–November 1866), and Peter Ibbetson (June–December 1891), Leighton and Surridge convincingly argue that images and letterpress in Victorian serial fiction most often function as coequal modes of representation that “impel reflective and complex reading strategies” (50). Anchoring their analysis in narratology, the theory of how fiction is narrated, Leighton and Surridge demonstrate that illustration does more than simply picture a novel’s text; instead, images add complexity and “thicken” serial plots by infusing Victorian novels with a second source of narrative influence (19). Interdisciplinarity is at the heart of The Plot Thickens, and this is reflected in an astute methodology that embraces historical, materialist, and formalist approaches to the illustrated Victorian serial. The introductory chapter, “Material Matters,” provides a detailed history of the developing technologies of book illustration (from steel etchings and engravings [End Page 806] to wood engravings to photomechanical reproduction); an overview of the Victorian literary marketplace informed by the work of Robert L. Patten, Brian Maidment, Julia Thomas, Linda K. Hughes and Michael Lund, Catherine Golden, Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, and others; and a new theoretical lens for reading serial illustration. The innovative application of narratology to images as well as letterpress is a significant contribution to the field of periodical studies because it provides a precise vocabulary for describing verbal-visual relationships. As Leighton and Surridge point out, “Narratological terms—such as prolepsis, analepsis, mimesis, diegesis, iteration, repetition, and extradiegesis—can help us to identify and understand these complex relationships between visual and verbal plots” (20). The remaining chapters of the book, grouped by genre, apply narratological analysis to representative texts from the birth of the format in the 1830s through the waning of the serial novel during the fin de siècle. The first chapter focuses on the genre of autobiography through two case studies: Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield, illustrated by Hablot K. Browne, and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cousin Phyllis (November 1863–February 1864), illustrated by George Du Maurier. Analyzing the representation of reading and the presence of word pictures within these illustrated serials, Leighton and Surridge argue that “the technology of the illustrated book became a potent metaphor for inner life, memory, and self making” (53). Historical serial fiction is the focus of chapter two, which examines The Tower of London by William Harrison Ainsworth with illustrations by George Cruikshank, William Makepeace Thackeray’s self-illustrated Vanity Fair (January 1847–July 1848), and Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities (1859). Looking specifically at the two dominant modes of visual historical representation—metaphorical and metonymic—the authors argue that the illustrations in each example interact with the letterpress to produce a distinctive theorization of historical change. The Tower of London uses metonymic wood engravings, for example, to inspire readers to preserve national monuments. Vanity Fair, on the other hand, “deploys verbal and visual sign systems to play ironically with both imagined scenes and metonymic representations of the past” (95). Even two different illustrated versions of the same novel, in the case of A Tale of Two Cities, provide contrasting visions of history. The American version in Harper’s Weekly (May 7–December 3, 1859), illustrated by John McLenan, uses “matching mimesis” to create for readers “an illusion of immediacy and immersion in history” (95). In contrast...

Мир детства в «Воспоминаниях» Т. Л. Сухотиной-Толстой

The article analyzes the world of childhood of a girl-noblewoman in the memoirs of T. N. Sukhotina-Tolstaya, the eldest daughter of Leo Tolstoy. It is shown that the world of childhood in “Memories” is represented in a number of images typical for the genre of autobiography (memories of childhood), and for the manor metatext. Among them, the author pays special attention to the following: space of a children’s room, environment of a child (brothers and sisters, significant adults - parents, educators), organization of activities and leisure, holidays, games, favourite toys, food and smells in the estate. It is proved that in the text of “Memoirs” childhood is described by the laws of the manor idyll, allowing contradictions. Thus, a child’s life is perceived by the memoirist as the happiest time lived “in Paradise” and gone forever. At the same time, childhood-Paradise is adjacent to the world of death (the death of the older generation and the death of the child), as well as opposed to adolescence (“difficult years”) and subsequent adult life (“without a father”). Attention is also drawn to the fact that the heroine’s growing up is shown through the implementation of the motif “expulsion from Paradise.” It is concluded that these contradictions do not remove the “Paradise halo” from the image of childhood and are organically perceived by the memoirist as a part of life.

Portraits from Life: Modernist Novelists and Autobiography by Jerome Boyd Maunsell

Reviewed by: Portraits from Life: Modernist Novelists and Autobiography by Jerome Boyd Maunsell Dennis Kersten (bio) Portraits from Life: Modernist Novelists and Autobiography Jerome Boyd Maunsell Oxford UP, 2018, 304 pp. ISBN 978-0198789369, $28.95 hardcover. In Cynthia Ozick's short story "Dictation" (2008), the female secretaries of Joseph Conrad and Henry James concoct a plan to write themselves into literary history by secretly inserting passages from Conrad in James's stories and vice versa. This never actually happened (although we can never be entirely sure), but early twentieth-century authors did appear in each other's writing, both fictional and nonfictional. As Jerome Boyd Maunsell shows in his new study about the interconnectedness of the lives and life stories of a group of Modernist novelists, these authors reinvigorated the genre of autobiography, often by employing the narratological techniques they had experimented with in their innovative fiction. Portraits from Life: Modernist Novelists and Autobiography takes as its main subject the life writing of Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, Henry James, Edith Wharton, H. G. Wells, Gertrude Stein, and Wyndham Lewis with the aim of "revealing interactions" between them (5). Its seven chapters function as "platforms" from which to view these authors' lives, so the book doubles as (group) biography. Each chapter first discusses the writing process of an author's autobiography or memoir, including his or her views on life writing in general. Then, and this is where the emphasis in each chapter lies, there is a close reading of primary texts with a focus on their story-shaping and/or fictionalizing strategies. Lastly, the chapter pays attention to the reception and afterlives of these texts. Running through the book, and especially in the early pages, is a sense of regret at not being able to get to the "truth," which explains the special interest in how some of the authors' autobiographies excel at "evasion." The opening paragraphs set the tone: they focus on the artificiality of self-portraiture, which offers only "achingly close simulacra" of truth (2; my emphasis). Boyd Maunsell seems to be especially on his guard with his novelist subjects. Surely, these writers will be even more adept at evasion and fictionalization in their autobiographies than others. Their "very métier consists in making things up," he writes in his introduction (3). Portraits from Life is a meticulously researched and thoroughly sourced book, presenting vivid portraits of its main (life) writing subjects in an accessible and engaging style. Despite their level of detail, its chapters are admirably concise and on-topic; they will undoubtedly entice many readers to seek out the largely forgotten autobiographical works by Conrad et al. (and possibly even reevaluate their more strongly canonized fictional oeuvres). The book certainly succeeds in its aim to contextualize the novelists' life writing, and it shows how a study of the creation of their autobiographies and memoirs provides insight into both their private and professional lives. There is a point to be made for the idea that the scrutiny of an author's struggles with his or her autobiography will be most insightful biographically. And it is true, or at least convincingly argued by Boyd Maunsell, that the way [End Page 908] novelists view and write about autobiography is indicative of their poetics, and thus produces a glimpse into their authorship. Indeed, it makes sense to read, for example, Virginia Woolf's essays about the art of biography in conjunction with her reflections on realism and the representation of reality in fiction elsewhere. In fact, in a book about Modernist authors and their fascination with autobiography, it is rather puzzling to find Woolf relegated to the epilogue, even if it initially reads like a discarded "proper" chapter on her autobiographical practice. This choice raises the question of why exactly Portraits from Life focuses on Conrad, James, Ford, Wharton, Wells, Stein, and Lewis. Were they chosen as exemplary life writers, or was their status as canonical authors of fiction the first criterion of selection? In other words, are these the most interesting autobiographers in the 1900–1945 period, or are they the most interesting among the authors whose fiction has been most heavily consecrated since? With Stein, yes...

Oblique Translations in David Mitchell’s Works

Translation crops up in David Mitchell’s work both as a fictional theme, for instance in Black Swan Green (2006) and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2010), and as a personal practice when Mitchell and his wife Keiko Yoshida translated two non-fiction works by a young Japanese boy with non-verbal autism: The Reason I Jump (2013) and Fall Down Seven Times, Get up Eight (2017). Interestingly, these four books are all related to the genre of autobiography, and three of them focus on Japan. Drawing from an investigation into the specificity of the Japanese tradition of translation and into theories of translation as intertextual and multi-temporal, we will start by exploring the notions of relay and voice in Mitchell’s use of translation. To further investigate the particular nature of the association of translation and autobiography in Mitchell’s work, we will discuss the concept of devolved testimony developed by French historian Emmanuel Bouju and that of the ‘born-translated novel’ by Rebecca Walkowitz. We will finally contend that the notion of “oblique writing”, defined as the practice of rewriting or writing over a lost voice from a lateral perspective, captures the spirit of these works, enabling him to navigate both issues of power play and the delicate relation between intimacy and distance.

Wilhelm Dilthey’s Views on Autobiography

ABSTRACTThe paper examines the role of autobiographical literature in Dilthey’s ‘critique of historical reason.’ The purpose of the essay is (1) to offer an in-depth analysis of Dilthey’s concept of autobiography, (2) to place it into the larger framework of his lifelong epistemological project, and (3) to investigate the influence of Dilthey’s ideas on an early study of autobiography, Georg Misch’s History of Autobiography in Antiquity. The key argument is that Dilthey’s choice of the genre of autobiography to model his theory of understanding was not only a symptom of his misguided epistemological attempts, as many have suggested, but a potential cause of them. The article concludes that the inconsistencies of Dilthey’s argument regarding the value of autobiographical self-reflection for historical knowledge are most pronounced in the work of those who applied Dilthey’s concepts to the interpretation of actual autobiographical material, such as Georg Misch.

“Let me tell you my life in a song” On Autobiography and Begging in Broadside Ballads of the Blind

What can street ballads tell us about the lives and realities of “common people”, of experiences “from below”? This article discusses the functional aesthetics and social context of one particular genre that has circulated in ephemeral song prints (skillingtryck) in Sweden: beggar verses of the blind. For centuries, such songs were sold in the streets and at market places as a means for the blind to earn a living, and a major part of them tell the life story, the sad fate, of their protagonists. Many prints declare the genre of autobiography on their very front page, quite literally selling the story of the protagonist’s life and addressing the audience’s compassion. How, then, do these narratives relate to real life? How is individuality and authenticity expressed within a genre that to a large extent relies upon conventions and formulas? As is argued, songs of this kind are a suggestive source material of vernacular literacy, as well as of social and personal history from below. Simultaneously, the discourse is marked by and shaped in a dialogue with the sighted world’s view of the blind.

Being Jacob: Young Children, Automedial Subjectivity, and Child Social Media Influencers

Being Jacob: Young Children, Automedial Subjectivity, and Child Social Media Influencers

The Automedial Zaniness of Ryan Trecartin

The Automedial Zaniness of Ryan Trecartin

“I too call myself I”: Madhavikutty-Kamala Das and the Intransitive Autobiography

This paper scrutinizes some of our most enduring assumptions about the genre of autobiography. More particularly, it examines the predicative links, the transitivities, which bind notions of self-life-and-writing. It comes to this exercise through a reading of Madhavikutty-Kamala Das’ Balyakala Smaranakal (Memories of a Childhood) (1987). This autobiography promises to trace the self from its incipience—only to side-step the self’s emergence and to hide this deferral in plain sight. The paper argues that Balyakala Smaranakal (BS) uses our expectations of the genre and our presumptions about the writer—particularly her abiding preoccupation with self-production—as accomplices. It invites us to witness the textual densities which the child-protagonist gathers and then deploys these strategies to un-do the self’s emergence. By deferring the production of the self BS stages the autobiography as “intransitive”. This paper goes some way in examining the reasons why it becomes impossible for BS to produce a legible self; for the child-protagonist to step into the social category that it summons forth. It examines the formal as well as socio-historical conditions within which this autobiography becomes the place of self-postponement—rather than of self-presentation and self-actualization.