Autobiographical Reading Research Articles

Who Has Intention? Chaucer Studies and the Search for Meaning

Chaucer criticism has always grappled with the question of intentionality. While early critics saw no trouble in identifying the voices in Chaucer's texts with the author's intention, authorial intention—not to be confused with autobiographical readings—became the elephant in the room from the early twentieth century onward. This article reviews the various approaches critics have put forward within Chaucer studies to avoid ascribing intention to Chaucer the poet. Starting with the concept of the narrator (a twentieth-century invention), three different approaches to the Canterbury Tales and their narrative situations are discussed, in which authorial intention looms large: the “dramatic,” the “detached,” and the “animated.” Then a case is made for the unavoidability of intentionalist readings by drawing on cognitive literary theories, in particular the intentional stance. When engaging with Chaucer, critics need to embrace intention as a key generator in the meaning-making activity of interpretation.

Reading Kuunmong: The Cloud Dream of the Nine as a Liberal Arts Education Text in the Metaverse Era

By examining a series of classes engaged in the reading of <i>Kuunmong: The Cloud Dream of the Nine</i> with the concept of the metaverse in mind, this study aims at developing a method of how to instruct students when it comes to reading the classics. This study also aims at getting students to rediscover the value of <i>Kuunmong</i> as a liberal arts education text.In order to ensure that students read difficult classical literature properly, an instructor needs to choose a proper work carefully and to consider how best to let the students read it. In our classes, reading <i>Kuunmong</i> was connected to the concept of the metaverse, taking into consideration the times in which we live, along with the interests of the students. In the reading part, the importance of actually finishing the reading, reading from the view point of the present world, autobiographical reading, reading together with related works, and so forth, were emphasized. Reinforcing group discussion and peer feedback increased the students’ participation and interests.Through the explanation of the similarities between the dream world of <i>Kuunmong</i> and the virtual world of the metaverse, the students approached <i>Kuunmong</i> with more interest and understood the themes better. In addition, in essays they wrote after reading <i>Kuunmong</i>, they dealt with many related topics, such as the methods of love and communication, the attitudes toward desires, the importance of experiences and actions, the problems of losing one’s sense of reality, and the importance of integrated thinking. They also explored the solutions to these problems. These topics are not very different from the goals of liberal arts education and the themes of <i>Kuunmong</i>. In this regard, we can confirm that reading <i>Kuunmong</i> using the concept of the metaverse can contribute to the achievement of such goals and to improving the understanding of <i>Kuunmong</i> as a text.

An Autobiographical Reading of Drago Jančar’s Novel “Mocking Desire”

The novel Mocking Desire was published in 1993, when Drago Jančar was already a wellknown author, who had received some important literary awards. This hybrid and multifaceted literary work describes the Slovenian writer’s stay in New Orleans and in New York. Because Jančar visited the United States on a Fulbright Fellowship in 1985, his novel is read as an autobiography, although the author has not established an autobiographical pact with the reader (Lejeune). The aim of this study is to consider the autobiographical writing as a literary genre, the figure of reading, and the play with convention, in order to answer the question what provokes the autobiographical reading of Mocking Desire.

Tropes Revisited: Evert Sprinchorn'sIbsen's Kingdom: The Man and His Worksand Recent Historical Research in Ibsen Studies

Tropes Revisited: Evert Sprinchorn's<i>Ibsen's Kingdom: The Man and His Works</i>and Recent Historical Research in Ibsen Studies

Conflicting relations in Christine Angot’s Un amour impossible [‘An Impossible Love’

As a force that both sets apart and drives together, impelling a relationship even as it impedes it, conflict pervades Christine Angot’s œuvre. The incestuous abuse that she figures so insistently seems to encapsulate the violence of this double bind, and in narrative terms, its ‘victor or vanquished’ outcome. In several of her polemical works, which both invite and unsettle an autobiographical reading, the narrator ‘Christine’ compulsively articulates the harrowing details of her abuse. Her speaking out has the effect of suppressing her mother’s perspective, and the latter supplants the father as the focus of Christine’s hostility. Angot’s 2015 publication, Un amour impossible, by contrast, marks an attempt to accommodate the mother’s side of the story. By unpicking the narrative dynamics of the text, this article evaluates the success of this endeavour, and considers how the conflicting relations Angot portrays cut through illusions of balance and concord in relational life-writing.

Reading Autofiction: The Cognitive Turn

Reading AutofictionThe Cognitive Turn Alison Gibbons (bio) Writing about autofiction in The Guardian, Rebecca Watson christens the 2010s, in the words of the article’s title, as the “decade we’ve become obsessed with reading—and writing—about ourselves” (2019). This obsession did not end at the stroke of midnight as the fireworks heralded 2020’s beginning. Rather, readers continue to experience what Jessica Winter, in her New York Times article of the same name, calls “our autofiction fixation” (2021): in other words, we enjoy reading autobiographical traces, even in works labeled as fiction. As these articles demonstrate, discussions of autofiction in the popular press frequently point out that readers have a literary appetite for autofiction. Yet despite this, academic criticism of autofiction has predominantly traced the historical development of the genre, debating the provenance of its name and considering its major themes. Only more recently are a select few scholars turning their attention to the innovative and important question of how readers experience and approach such works. To be clear, earlier research in autobiography and life writing was not uninterested in readers. In his highly influential essay “The Autobiographical Pact,” printed in English in On Autobiography (1987), Philippe Lejeune takes pains to state that his theorization of the differences between fiction and autobiography begins “from the position of the reader.” Thus, while Lejeune maps the stylistic properties that signal to a reader that they are entering into either an autobiographical or a fictional contract with a work’s author, he does so by considering the influence of textual features on a reader’s felt sense of a work’s fictional or nonfictional status. In this sense, for Lejeune, “the reader often tends to think of himself as a detective, that is to say, to look for breaches of contract (whatever the contract).” Likewise, in Touching the Void: Reference in Autobiography (1992), Paul John Eakin feels “no doubt that readers do read autobiographies differently from other kinds of texts, especially works they take to be ‘fictions.’” Without meaning to discredit the writings of Lejeune and Eakin (both of whose thinking I greatly admire and have found extremely influential), what differentiates them as the old guard [End Page 32] from an emerging vanguard of scholars interested in life writing’s readers is what we might speak of a nascent cognitive turn in the study of autofiction. In The Phenomenology of Autobiography (2017), Arnaud Schmitt draws on some cognitively informed research to offer philosophical reflections on autofictional and autobiographical reading experiences. Schmitt rebuffs claims that autofiction is a hybrid genre in which fiction and autobiography blend indistinguishably. Rather, he claims that autofictions have a dominant frame of interpretation—fiction—within which exist “visible ‘junctions’ with a remote reality, like a distant horizon with no real consequence for the readers’ interpretive frames.” In Schmitt’s view, when readers encounter a historical figure in fiction, such as a version of the real author, “source tagging” allows them to recognize that these characters have a basis in reality. However, “the more the historical person will linger in the fiction and interact with the fictional characters, the more she or he will be modified semantically.” Consequently, he argues that reading autofiction (and autobiography) as referential nonfiction requires “additional cognitive effort.” To capture this effort, Schmitt proposes the concept of “emersion”: this signals readers’ rejection of a total immersion in the narrative world by instead undertaking a “a form of resistance, a refusal to lose track of the reality beyond the text, as opposed to the reality of the text.” In contrast, in the chapter “A Cognitive Perspective on Autofictional Writing, Texts, and Reading” in the collection The Autofictional, edited by Alexandra Effe and Hannie Lawlor (2022), Effe and I do not restrict readers’ interpretations to a global frame of fiction. Instead, we take our cue from the many preceding theorizations of autofiction that discuss it as vacillating between fictionality and factuality and from studies in experimental psychology showing that readers treat fictional and nonfictional texts differently. Effe and I adopt the construct of “cognitive schemas” from cognitive science, which models the conceptual bundles we use to organize our knowledge and that can consequently influence expectations...

A Form to Dwell In: Narrative and ‘Rhetorical’ Unreliability in Alejandra Pizarnik’s Diaries

This article examines the impact of form on the delivery of information in Alejandra Pizarnik’s Diaries. Literary unreliability - both narrative and what I call ‘rhetorical’ - questions the one-to-one correspondence between content and form. Through rhetorical strategies such as paradox and metaphor, the Diaries subvert notions of authorial control, revisiting the ‘death of the author’, as well as the relationship between the literary and the psychological. Instead of promoting an autobiographical reading of this work as a linear story marked by tragedy, these considerations suggest an alternative, interpretive path: one in which the diaristic text tends towards the absurd and the production of a fruitful ‘nothingness’. Considering linguistic manipulation in this way allows us to situate the Diaries within Pizarnik’s aesthetic evolution, not in terms of biographical content, but according to its critical and experimental engagement with a central, theoretical issue: the (im)possibility for language to represent a reality beyond itself.

Pedagogy of Validation: Autobiographical Reading and Writing Courses for First-Year, Low-Income Students

This embedded case study leveraged Rendon’s (1994) validation theory as well as theories connecting self-reflection and transformative learning (e.g., Mezirow, 1990, 1997) to examine an autobiographical reading and writing course designed for low-income, first-year students in a comprehensive college transition program at an institution in the Midwest region of the United States. We used interviews with course instructors, longitudinal digital diaries with students, and course observations to understand the nature of the course and how participants experienced it. We found that building community was essential to supporting students’ learning. Within classroom communities, instructors structured opportunities for reflection, validated students’ stories, used culturally relevant texts, and encouraged sharing narratives with peers. These practices in combination cumulatively enhanced students’ writing skills, their confidence, and their sense of belonging. Participants also reported that the course deepened students’ self-awareness and fostered empathy for peers. Our participants highlighted the benefits of incorporating autobiographical reading and writing into first-year composition courses, particularly for low-income students and those with minoritized identities.

The Afterlife of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Jane Kingsley-Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. vi+286.

<i>The Afterlife of Shakespeare’s Sonnets</i>. Jane Kingsley-Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. vi+286.

On the Kindness of Readers

On the Kindness of Readers Paul A. Bové (bio) The only thing a book can hope for is readers and in this symposium, Love's Shadow (2021) has been truly fortunate. Ten distinguished and busy scholar critics have taken the time to read and comment, to give the book place and value. They honor the book with time, attention, and care. Each response reveals facets of the book that provoke or inspire. Certain responses make Love's Shadow very much about the academy, academics, or their beliefs and practices. Others make it about poetry and imagination. Some take it as a performance of inevitable patterns or of planned agons. Love's Shadow's form invites responses to its elements, for example to its reservations about messianism, allegoresis, or utopian belief. Critics who accept those invitations illuminate the strengths and weaknesses of each section or each discussion of a major motif. These responses sometimes object, correct, or supplement. They make clear that Love's Shadow does not earn their consent to its evaluations of various theoretical notions or figures influential for a time within the disciplines. Of course, those who are unconvinced realize that the book predicts such responses and finds confirmation of its own judgments in the corrective disagreements it sometimes provokes. Other commentators see Love's Shadow as a late work justifying a career with judgments based on experience. In such a view, the book is not only critique but apologetics. Seeing the book this way gives it heft coming at the end of a career by its own testimony abandoned. Responses that register their disbelief in the book's accomplishments tell stories centered on academic debates, requiring scholastic method to settle or contest claims. In a way, such responses discredit Love's Shadow as academic work, present it as flawed, incomplete, biased, prejudiced, polemical, and mystified. Other responses set the book outside academia as well. While they may also disbelieve the book's claims about academic matters and figures, they read Love's Shadow for its autobiographical traces. They read it as the story of conversion, of abandonment, of a life-change. While this notion can coalesce with responses that grace the book as an apology for a life's claims and efforts, in the hands of even sympathetic academic readers it has a discrediting effect as well. The book's mistakes, in such responses, lie in its judgments about academic practices, beliefs, and investments. Its brilliance as critical writing on Stevens, Rembrandt, or Shakespeare aside, [End Page 631] its unsatisfying claims about the academy, its Leaders, and their ephebes puts it out of bounds as a schoolman's text. The autobiographical reading tells a story of finding value outside the academy and its figures. The book becomes a "turning the back" story. Such responses live in a binary world, where a book might succeed as criticism in such a way as to leave in place the academy the book abandons. Astute readers grasp that there is more than one voice in the book, that it is crafted as performance, and structured to enact many of its own claims. The book offers guides to its own reading, noting for example the poisonous possibility that imagination's work can repress and imprison itself. A response that sees the poison's potential in imagination's work also realizes that as the book opens, writing in the mode of high critique to double back upon the authority of mainstream practice and institutions, it makes use of exhausted devices to clear the ground for better things. Many readers note the differences in prose style among chapters and especially between earlier "theoretical" chapters—but what then of "The Socratic Interlude"?—and the later critical chapters. Those responses that take the structural movement of the text seriously, to understand and explain what the book is trying to do. An early reviewer noted that the book is not a book "about."1 This leaves it as writing, as something that invites responses that ask what it does or how it creates. Various readers notice how the book summons older figures in criticism and art to the present as figurations within its own project. The time...

Ecos de las novelas de artista en Black out de María Moreno

Going beyond an autobiographical reading of María Moreno’s Black out (2016), this article analyzes its intertextualities with late 19th century modernist novels. Moreno’s novel, set in the late 20th century, reveals thematic and formal resonances with narratives that novelized the life and times of the artist. This reading of Black out as an artist novel is based on the relationship it establishes with the modernist archive (constant similarities and also important differences), such as the newspaper form, the defense of a particular aesthetics, and the definitions and positions toward literary labor.

Writing the Self, Creating Community: German Women Authors and the Literary Sphere 1750–1850 ed. by Elisabeth Krimmer, Lauren Nossett

 Reviews it as a second-rate exercise for his talents. Indeed, when, amazingly, in August  d’Annunzio finally managed to send a dra of his article to Olschki, he half apologized for the long delay, implying the impossibility for him (or anyone) of compressing into a small compass anything new concerning the grandeur of Dante. More immediately, however, creditors had formed noisy queues outside the gates of his baronial mansion, the Capponcina, where auction sales of his goods, including all furnishings and ornaments, were organized for the beginning of  June. Melosi shows how preoccupied the nervous Passerini became in his analysis of the mood in Florence, where, he reported to d’Annunzio, bets were being laid on whether or not he would accept the contract. Disdain and discomfort forced d’Annunzio to take refuge in flight using the temporary pseudonym of Gerard d’Argan. He continued on to Genoa and then to Paris, where he stayed for six months on the fourth floor of the Meurice, in Rue de Rivoli (fellow guests in the hotel were Guglielmo Marconi and the Italian Ambassador Tittoni). In secrecy, and under another assumed name, Guy d’Arbes, d’Annunzio le Paris for Arcachon. U  O J W Writing the Self, Creating Community: German Women Authors and the Literary Sphere –. Ed. by E K and L N. Rochester, NY: Camden House. . viii+ pp. £. ISBN –– ––. In this varied and accessible collection of essays, conventional period boundaries are subordinated to the steady rise of women writers and readers to become signi- ficant factors in German-language literature for the first time. While not ignoring canonical literary movements or the persistent opposition to women’s authorship during these years, its contributors concentrate on exploring and celebrating the roles—both historical and imagined—that women of letters were able to create for themselves and the networks in which they participated. A good balance is struck between well-known figures (Sophie von La Roche, Karoline von Günderrode) and investigation of largely forgotten authors; the fascinating Polyxene Büsching, for instance, whose brief stint as literary confidante of Catherine the Great is analysed by Ruth P. Dawson, together with her letters to fellow poet Johanna Charlotte Unzer as a female community of practice (pp. –). Variety as a characteristic of the collection also applies to its methodological approaches and the appeal its essays will have for readers. Some will be particularly useful as teaching resources as they provide introductions to the history of reading, women’s education, and the overall social and political context as well as to the author in question (for example, the two opening articles by Monika Nenon and Lauren Nossett on La Roche). Others are more speculative and aimed at a more specialist audience in their detailed focus on individual texts or re- MLR, .,   search paradigms. Angela Sanmann contributes a stimulating discussion of the anonymous  French translation of La Roche’s Die Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim, attributed to Marie-Elisabeth de La Fite, herself an author of moral tales for children (pp. –). Sanmann reflects on what the alterations and additions tell us about La Fite’s progressive views of womanhood and her understanding of her dual role as writer and translator; she also reconsiders the relationship between this first French translation and Joseph Collyer’s  English version. Further examples of more specialist essays include Amy Jones’s comparative analysis of vampirism as a metaphor for authorship in the writings of Günderrode and Clemens von Brentano. Jones inspires with a persuasive combination of Motivgeschichte and close readings, made all the more valuable as she decisively breaks with autobiographical readings of Günderrode’s poetry (pp. –). Also inspiring is Sara Luly’s essay on ‘Ghostwriters’ (pp. –), which for the first time brings together texts by Benedikte Naubert and Sophie Albrecht to consider how their spectral protagonists represent not only the dilemmas faced by women writers of the day (self-censorship!), but also possible solutions (self-Othering). In an important addition to the volume’s predominant focus on individual writers and/or works, Julie L. J. Koehler examines uses of the ‘Märchenoma’ tradition as a strategy for legitimizing women’s claims to literary authorship...

Model Bacaan Anak Berbasis Kearifan Lokal

This paper is generally aimed at generating an innovative multicultural-based learning model that meets the basic educational goals that can be used in schools and madrasah. Multicultural-based learning model in the form of preschool children's reading models, traditional literature, fiction, biography and autobiography, science, poetry and poetry. Reading is based on local wisdom is a reading about the cultural life of the surrounding community or area of education location. Writing a local-based story is an open story of local cultural themes. Local-based education is education that utilizes local and global advantages in economic, arts and cultural aspects, human resources, language, information and communication technology, ecology, etc. into the school curriculum which ultimately benefits the development of competencies of learners that can be utilized for competition global. Local wisdom sources are human potential, religious potential, cultural potential. While the purpose of local wisdom-based education or the advantage of providing knowledge, skills and behavior to learners so that they have a solid insight about the state of the environment and the needs of the community in accordance with the values / rules prevailing in the region and support regional development and national development. While the specific purpose of local wisdom-based education is so that students more familiar with and become more familiar with the natural environment, social, and cultural. Students have the provision of skills and knowledge and knowledge about the area that is useful for themselves as well as the community in general. Students have attitudes and behaviors that are in harmony with the values / rules that apply in the area and preserve and develop the noble values of local culture in order to support regional development and national development.

Trayectorias personales de lectura: autobiografías lectoras de estudiantes de pedagogía en una universidad chilena

In recent years, studies about teachers’ reading practices have emerged, based on the assumption that future reading mediation is related to their own trajectory in this field. In this context, a qualitative research was developed that analyzes 279 reading autobiographies written by eight generations of Chilean pedagogy students, throughout the last decade. This exploratory and diachronic study worked with the “life stories” technique to collect information about the personal trajectories and forms of reading appropriation. The data was addressed by means of mixed analysis (statistical and of content) that established structural categories and subcategories related to the reading experiences in pre-school, primary, secondary and university education; the moments and places where the reading takes place; the mediators role and the value attributed to literature. The main results highlight the centrality of shared reading, the family members acting as mediators and the limited participation of the school and the library in this task. The reason would lay in the compulsory nature of reading in the school context, taking it away from pleasure and aesthetic enjoyment.

Dreaming of Creativity: Imaging and Imagining the Creative Self in Memoir

Dreaming of Creativity: Imaging and Imagining the Creative Self in Memoir

Shifting Identities: The Influence of Sex and Religion on Irish American Women Autobiographers

Shifting Identities: The Influence of Sex and Religion on Irish American Women Autobiographers Sally Barr Ebest (bio) Any research on Irish American identity begins with Charles Fanning. His seminal study The Irish Voice in America (1990/2000) not only detailed the characteristics of Irish American literature—an emphasis on family, community, religion, nationalism, and politics—but also argued that these traits endure. In the ensuing years, however, questions have risen about this endurance of Irish American traits. In a 2003 study of six Irish American novelists, Shaun O’Connell notes that “nationality, language and religion no longer clearly determine identity in a world of instant communication, easy mobility and cultural internationalism.”1 Jennifer McClinton-Temple’s 2013 examination of three recent Irish American autobiographies exemplifies how these traits have changed, adding feelings of paralysis and insularity to the definition. Similarly, in Irish-American Autobiography (2016), James Rogers suggests that identity includes a growing interiority expressed in a sense of difference, feelings of abandonment, spiritual homelessness, silence, or secrets, often—but not always—due to the impact of the Catholic Church. Autobiography is the perfect medium to trace these shifting identities. In Reading Autobiography, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson maintain that the genre creates multiple selves as a result of self-reflection throughout the composing process. Rather than presenting a static or universal persona, autobiography becomes an amalgamation as authors shape their identity out of shapeless subjectivity. Consequently, life writing may be viewed as both cultural and literary artifact since it represents society and the self. Autobiography defies generic definitions, because there are at least 64 different types.2 One type of life writing, the serial autobiography, is usually published as chapters or volumes focusing on different periods of the author’s life; however, because life stories tend to span decades or eras, they may be revised (as Mary McCarthy did) based on additional information or self-reflection.3 They may be written in first, second, or third person. Mary Karr and Mary Cantwell generally write in the first person; however, they shift to the second person when discussing sex. Depending on their age or subject matter, the authors may change voices or points of view.4 McCarthy is the naïf in Memories of a Catholic Girlhood but a cynic in Intellectual Memoirs; Mary Karr is a foul-mouthed [End Page 169] adolescent in The Liars’ Club but an older and wiser mother in Lit. Between Just Kids and The M Train, Patti Smith morphs from itinerate artist to widow, yet remains a poet. Autobiography opens up space for creative as well as political explorations;5 as a result, this genre is the ideal site for marginalized groups such as women and ethnic minorities. For Irish American women—often marginalized by a patriarchal church and society—such work has been empowering. Like their Irish foremothers, these women have used life narratives not only to establish their identity but also to place it within the context of their changing socio-religious culture.6 This is particularly true for serial autobiographers. Mary McCarthy (b. 1912), Mary Cantwell (b. 1930), Patti Smith (b. 1946), and Mary Karr (b. 1955) composed multiple volumes of bildungsromane tracing different stages of their personal development. Their plots include “escape from a repressive family, schooling, and a journey into the wide world of urban life with a series of mentors, romantic involvements, and entrepreneurial ventures,” which for some women culminate in an unhappy awareness of “gender-based limitations.”7 By writing memoirs covering multiple decades, these authors illustrate how identity has shifted from external to internal markers; rather than explore family, community, religion, nationalism, or politics per se, they discuss their sense of paralysis, insularity, and difference as well as feelings of abandonment and spiritual homelessness. In every case, sex is the common denominator, the nexus in a Venn diagram conjoining family and religion. This connection is most evident in second memoirs recounting the authors’ middle years, which focus on sex and erotic pleasure, issues previously excluded from accounts of Catholic girls’ lives. By addressing such topics, these writers reveal the Church’s view of extramarital sex as illness or disease and of women as sexualized, inferior beings...

Misogyny and Auto-Biographical Fiction: The Corbaccio's Ambiguity in Bernat Metge's Lo somni

Misogyny and Auto-Biographical Fiction:The Corbaccio's Ambiguity in Bernat Metge's Lo somni Pau Cañigueral Batllosera Giovanni Boccaccio is known as the author of a vast Humanistic work in Latin, as the creator of the Decameron, the first large collection of short stories in vernacular, and as one of the three Crowns, along with Dante and Petrarch, that represent the crossroads between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Boccaccio was an admirer of Dante. He wrote a biography of Dante and a commentary of the Divine Comedy. He was also a friend of Petrarch, with whom he maintained an epistolary relationship and even met in person in 1351 (Branca, The Man 86–96). However, the image that stands behind his creative works in vernacular could not be more different from these two other authors. If Dante's Comedy embodies the ideal fusion of poetry and theology and Petrarch's the Canzoniere is the highest expression of stylistic perfection, Boccaccio has been portrayed as the champion of sensual love and licentiousness (Hollander, Boccaccio's Two Venuses 3). No other proof is needed than the numerous lascivious passages of the Decameron where female characters seem to always find a way to satisfy their sexual appetite while keeping their honor, or the Elegy of Lady Fiammetta, the memories of a young woman who will use any argument to justify her adultery. The Corbaccio seems to contradict this assumption of Boccaccio's literary production. Written between 1354 and 1366 (Padoan, "Sulla" 199–201), right after or during the composition of the Decameron, this [End Page 367] work contains one of the harshest misogynistic diatribes of medieval Romance literatures. In the prologue, the main character, who is also the narrator, calls the work "umile trattato" and thus he suggests that his book does not come without a moral message. In the afterword, he claims that his work should be a warning to those young men who are in love and he begs to keep it out of women's reach. In the middle, this narrator recounts us the vision he has after being scorned by his lover, a middle-aged widow. He finds himself lost in a dark valley when suddenly the spirit of the widow's husband appears to reveal to him the degenerate nature of women and, particularly, that of his old wife. The plot is very simple: a man who has lost his way because of lust will start a spiritual journey towards salvation. This is the same framework of Dante's Vita nuova and Comedy but with a radical change on the argumentation. While Dante focuses on the male lover's weakness to resist sexual temptation, Boccaccio highlights that women play a prominent role in men's damnation by pushing them into sin. As Hollander pointed out, criticism of the Corbaccio can be divided into three main groups (Boccaccio's Last Fiction 42). The first group includes critics who have read it as an attack against women from the author himself. According to this interpretive line, Giovanni Boccaccio would have presumably had some sort of frustrated love story with a widow when he was past forty, and wrote the Corbaccio to take revenge of her. Critics of the second group distance themselves from any autobiographical reading, but maintain the assumption that Boccaccio would have been completely serious about the misogynistic content of his work. Finally, the third group includes critics claiming that the Corbaccio is neither autobiographical nor a condemnation of women's morality but a parody of misogyny—an act of rejection of those moralists who had attacked the Decameron. Even though this essay sides with the last group of critics,1 I need to assert from the beginning that I do not attempt to offer a definitive reading of the Corbaccio. The reason why critics have been coalescing around three different interpretive lines is due to the nature of the work itself. Hollander states that "the Boccaccian narrator is distinguished by being always unreliable or, at best, enigmatic" (Boccaccio's Last Fiction 25). The behavior of Boccaccio's narrators is stated as one thing, but then immediately contradicted by the narrators themselves, who do the opposite...

Garous AbdolmalekianLean against This Late Hour by Ahmad Nadalizadeh Idra Novey

Every Riven Thing’s “Lord Is Not a Word” (“you did not know / you knew”), thus voiding them of their meaning. Here, in “A Sketch,” there are “Derringer words” one “hardly needs to use, to use.” With regard to the related content, Wiman will underline the materiality of the brain and mind that, to him, marvelously , enhance the wonder of faith—however delicate it might be—like in “To Grasp at the Mercury Minnows Are” and here in “Spirits.” What is new, however, is that this slim book of poems reads as if it were the husk of a magnificent novel. This is partly the effect of Wiman’s style, which has deepened—allowing for some of the lighter touches that admirers of his memoirs will recognize. Furthermore, it is achieved structurally through the gravity of the long central poem “Parable of a Perfect Silence,” which in turn engages the rest of the book. Wiman accomplishes a single narrative arc through the idiosyncrasies of a poetry that will always honor the word over the message. That word is mortal, its survival a style. Arthur Willemse University of Maastricht Pascale Quiviger If You Hear Me Trans. Lazer Lederhendler. Windsor, Ontario. Biblioasis. 2020. 342 pages. ONE OF PASCALE Quiviger’s narrators calls “love” a “hole punched in reality”; though from an earlier novel, it aptly describes the situation in If You Hear Me. David falls from the scaffolding on a Montreal construction site and enters a comatose state. His wife, young son, and parents “gather around an emptiness, a family shaped like a donut.” Quiviger captures the hospital perfectly : “its incomprehensible blend of cordiality and coldness, humanity and protocol.” The space between extremes is meaningful. Caroline’s memories of her husband are simultaneously “too far away, too close”: “Touch him, don’t touch him.” David is “inexplicable, a husband neither dead nor alive.” But he is also “both mysterious and unchanging .” Borders between similar states are also explored: dormancy and recovery; living and surviving; “necessary support ” and “unreasonable obstinacy.” The narrative accommodates its characters’ changing responses to David’s new reality. Chapter headings are units of time; minutes and hours are initially important, but the nomenclature adjusts to reflect developments. For some, “hours dissolve”; for others, it’s an “endless dawn.” Irony proliferates : David worked in construction but now seems to disintegrate, and preferred foods are identified by the floor’s vending machine codes even while numerical expressions of time become meaningless. Simple language and structure suit this complex subject, along with Quiviger’s attention to detail. An apartment building ’s individual floors are each identified by different smells, for instance, just as each character’s engagement with David’s circumstances is unique, depending on whether or how they consider the possibilities surrounding levels of consciousness . Readers can choose to dwell in “curry, bleach, fried food, raspberry shower gel, overripe trashcans,” in “invisible worlds, Books in Review Garous Abdolmalekian Lean against This Late Hour Trans. Ahmad Nadalizadeh & Idra Novey. New York. Penguin. 2020. 160 pages. DESPITE DISPARITIES IN time, space, and language, even in translation, Baudelaire ’s address to the reader (“—Hypocrite reader,—My duplicate—My brother!”) has a particular way of feeling personal, as though it is you, the embodied reader, and not a general, undefined public, who is implicated in the hypocrisies that the speaker has in mind. The address is direct, to be sure, but, perhaps more interestingly, it also creates a sense of immediacy because it is delivered in such an obviously affected stage voice. That is to say, it is easy to locate yourself in Baudelaire’s hypocrite reader in large part because the poetic voice resists a literal, autobiographical reading. You assume that the real person named Charles Baudelaire did not in fact experience “the deadly poison , daggers . . . Monsters screaming” and so on that are so vividly invoked. Rather, the use of stage voice, the overt and deliberate dissociation of the poetic “I” from the historically occurring individual who composed the words or, for that matter, the dissociation of “you” from anyone in that poet’s personal life, opens a possibility for a different kind of correspondence between the reader and the text. If you see traces...

Pascale QuivigerIf You Hear Me by Lazer Lederhendler

Every Riven Thing’s “Lord Is Not a Word” (“you did not know / you knew”), thus voiding them of their meaning. Here, in “A Sketch,” there are “Derringer words” one “hardly needs to use, to use.” With regard to the related content, Wiman will underline the materiality of the brain and mind that, to him, marvelously , enhance the wonder of faith—however delicate it might be—like in “To Grasp at the Mercury Minnows Are” and here in “Spirits.” What is new, however, is that this slim book of poems reads as if it were the husk of a magnificent novel. This is partly the effect of Wiman’s style, which has deepened—allowing for some of the lighter touches that admirers of his memoirs will recognize. Furthermore, it is achieved structurally through the gravity of the long central poem “Parable of a Perfect Silence,” which in turn engages the rest of the book. Wiman accomplishes a single narrative arc through the idiosyncrasies of a poetry that will always honor the word over the message. That word is mortal, its survival a style. Arthur Willemse University of Maastricht Pascale Quiviger If You Hear Me Trans. Lazer Lederhendler. Windsor, Ontario. Biblioasis. 2020. 342 pages. ONE OF PASCALE Quiviger’s narrators calls “love” a “hole punched in reality”; though from an earlier novel, it aptly describes the situation in If You Hear Me. David falls from the scaffolding on a Montreal construction site and enters a comatose state. His wife, young son, and parents “gather around an emptiness, a family shaped like a donut.” Quiviger captures the hospital perfectly : “its incomprehensible blend of cordiality and coldness, humanity and protocol.” The space between extremes is meaningful. Caroline’s memories of her husband are simultaneously “too far away, too close”: “Touch him, don’t touch him.” David is “inexplicable, a husband neither dead nor alive.” But he is also “both mysterious and unchanging .” Borders between similar states are also explored: dormancy and recovery; living and surviving; “necessary support ” and “unreasonable obstinacy.” The narrative accommodates its characters’ changing responses to David’s new reality. Chapter headings are units of time; minutes and hours are initially important, but the nomenclature adjusts to reflect developments. For some, “hours dissolve”; for others, it’s an “endless dawn.” Irony proliferates : David worked in construction but now seems to disintegrate, and preferred foods are identified by the floor’s vending machine codes even while numerical expressions of time become meaningless. Simple language and structure suit this complex subject, along with Quiviger’s attention to detail. An apartment building ’s individual floors are each identified by different smells, for instance, just as each character’s engagement with David’s circumstances is unique, depending on whether or how they consider the possibilities surrounding levels of consciousness . Readers can choose to dwell in “curry, bleach, fried food, raspberry shower gel, overripe trashcans,” in “invisible worlds, Books in Review Garous Abdolmalekian Lean against This Late Hour Trans. Ahmad Nadalizadeh & Idra Novey. New York. Penguin. 2020. 160 pages. DESPITE DISPARITIES IN time, space, and language, even in translation, Baudelaire ’s address to the reader (“—Hypocrite reader,—My duplicate—My brother!”) has a particular way of feeling personal, as though it is you, the embodied reader, and not a general, undefined public, who is implicated in the hypocrisies that the speaker has in mind. The address is direct, to be sure, but, perhaps more interestingly, it also creates a sense of immediacy because it is delivered in such an obviously affected stage voice. That is to say, it is easy to locate yourself in Baudelaire’s hypocrite reader in large part because the poetic voice resists a literal, autobiographical reading. You assume that the real person named Charles Baudelaire did not in fact experience “the deadly poison , daggers . . . Monsters screaming” and so on that are so vividly invoked. Rather, the use of stage voice, the overt and deliberate dissociation of the poetic “I” from the historically occurring individual who composed the words or, for that matter, the dissociation of “you” from anyone in that poet’s personal life, opens a possibility for a different kind of correspondence between the reader and the text. If you see traces...

The Land of Letter-Lovers: The Year in the Netherlands

The Land of Letter-LoversThe Year in the Netherlands Monica Soeting (bio) In comparison with the US and the UK, the term "life writing" came to the Netherlands rather late. It wasn't until the first years of the twenty-first century that it was introduced to Dutch readers in publications like Marijke Huisman's 2008 book Publieke levens: Autobiografieën op de Nederlandse boekenmarkt 1850–1918 and in Dutch journals like Biografie Bulletin and De Gids. Yet the term is still being contested by Dutch biography scholars Hans Renders and Binne de Haan of the University of Groningen. Renders sees "life writers" as idealistic therapists who want to offer "retrospective justice" by sustaining "overwhelming attention for the deprived in history" ("Biography in Academia" 172) like "women, coloured people, homosexuals, victims of the Holocaust, and so on" (170), in order to "show that the authors of these autobiographical documents were victimised by their social context" (169). "Life writing," De Haan writes, thus can only be described as "subjective identity politics" (194), in which "Life Writers" use documents and other texts as "vehicles for emancipation" (186). However, most Dutch scholars find no problem in using "life writing" as an umbrella term, i.e., in the sense Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson have defined it in their renowned book Reading Autobiography: "a general term for writing that takes a life, one's own or another's, as its subject" (4). Outside the academy, the term "life writing" is still largely unknown to the general reading public in the Netherlands. Moreover, the catalogue of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB), the National Library of the Netherlands, which holds copies of all books published in the Netherlands, does not use "life writing" as an index term; searching the KB website for "life writing" only turns up book titles containing the words "life" and/or "writing." This doesn't help to popularize "life writing" as an umbrella term. Therefore, to assess the lifewriting publications that hit the Dutch book market in 2019, one must search the KB catalogue for all the different genres that one would consider part of life writing, such as biographies, autobiographies, memoirs, diaries, and collections of letters. [End Page 137] To start with "biography" as a search word, the KB catalogue shows no more than ten books published by Dutch and Flemish authors in the Netherlands in 2019, which does not reflect the actual number. The KB catalogue does not categorize as "biography" one of the most interesting and enjoyable Dutch biographies published last year: Verhalen van de drakendochter by Willem Gerritsen, a book about the life and work of internationally renowned Dutch literary scholar and the second Dutch professor of Celtic Studies, Maartje Draak (1907–1995), of whom Gerritsen was a student. Instead, the book is categorized as "levensbeschrijving" (literally, "life description"), an outdated term, which is also used for several biographies of male politicians, like Chris Hietland's dissertation about Dutch socialist politician André van der Louw, Mathijs van de Waardt's biography of nineteenth-century liberal politician Dirk Donker Curtius, and the biographies of famous prime ministers, Joop den Uyl and Wim Kok, by Dik Verkuil and Marnix Krop, respectively. Also listed as "levensbeschrijving" are the biographies of two male scientists: a life history of R. P. Cleveringa by sociologist Kees Schuyt, and a biography of Franz Joseph Gall by Theo Mulder. In the "stories of the dragon's daughter" ("draak" is Dutch for "dragon"), Draak's self-fashioning, self-presentation, and representation as one of the very few Dutch female professors in the fifties and sixties of the twentieth century take center stage. In this regard, the biography complies with the elements of what Dutch historian Mineke Bosch calls the "new biography" in her article "Persona en de performance van identiteit," published in the unfortunately no longer existing biography journal Tijdschrift voor biografie in 2012. Bosch writes, "In de nieuwe biografie wordt afscheid […] genomen van het zoeken naar de crux van een leven in termen van (jeugd)trauma's en geheimen onder invloed van het twintigste-eeuwse psychoanalytische complex" [The new biography takes leave of searching for the crux of a life in terms of (youth) traumata and...