Study Of Memoirs Research Articles

Autobiographical and Epistolary Heritage of the Merchants of the Regions of Russia: The Latest Research Areas and Perspectives of Study

The article is devoted to an overview of the latest trends in the study of the written heritage of the merchants of Russia. The author examines the principles and approaches to the study and publication of merchant autobiographical and epistolary texts set forth in the works of the last two decades. Special emphasis in the article is made on the study and publication of the written heritage of merchants from different regions in the context of the complex ethno-cultural structure of Russian society in the modern era. The main trends in the study of memoirs and epistolary complexes of the Russian merchants of the 17th - early 20th century are highlighted, and their main publications are characterized. The observations and remarks make it possible not only to characterize the current state of the study of the written heritage, cultural level, mentality and self-consciousness of the merchant class, but also to outline the prospects for such research area. The author comes to the conclusion that it is necessary to conduct complex interdisciplinary research, including historians, literary scholars, linguists, and carried out through the use of modern technical methods of working with handwritten texts.

ОРГАНІЗАЦІЙНА ТА НАУКОВА ДІЯЛЬНІСТЬ ОЛЕКСАНДРА ДОРОШКЕВИЧА В ГАЛУЗІ ШЕВЧЕНКОЗНАВСТВА (за архівними матеріалами)

This article dedicated to Ol. Doroshkevych (1889–1946), one who is the author more than thirty articles about the famous Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko. Ol. Doroshkevych also known as the head of the Kyiv branch of the Taras Shevchenko Institute in 1926–1931 years. The participation of the scientist in the organization of Shevchenko Studies in the 1920’s – early 1930’s is investigated. The achievements of the scholar to the study of Shevchenko age, the investigation of poet’s connections with friends and with the Slavic world are determined. The Doroshkevych contribution in the development of the textual principles of the publication of Shevchenko’s works, study of memoirs and letters about the poet are described. The role of Ol. Doroshkevych in Shevchenko Studies of the first half of the twentieth century is determined by using the archival sources of the researcher.

LEARNING TO BE A WRITER FROM EARLY READING

ABSTRACTThe role of reading in educating a future writer is discussed through the study of memoirs by writers including Janet Frame, James Baldwin, and Eudora Welty. The memoirs show reading books to have been a transformative way of melding forms of experience. The following features of childhood reading are examined: (1) the role of the physical book, (2) the cognitive-aesthetic-affective impact of letters, words and ‘voices’, (3) the partially unplanned and challenging path of children’s exposure to texts, and (4) absorption of models that can be imitated and outgrown. The discussion links sympathetically to views in philosophy of education about the importance of content and beauty and of influences whose impact cannot be planned, measured or captured as generic skills. The autobiographical evidence considered here suggests that these influences can nonetheless be crucial to expanding learners’ horizons and stimulating their educational and artistic progress.

Discursive Intersexions: Daring Bodies between Myth, Medicine, and Memoir by Michaela Koch

Reviewed by: Discursive Intersexions: Daring Bodies between Myth, Medicine, and Memoir by Michaela Koch Megan Walker (bio) Discursive Intersexions: Daring Bodies between Myth, Medicine, and Memoir Michaela Koch Transcript Verlag, 2017, 290 pp. ISBN 978-3837637052, $45.00 paperback. Discursive Intersexions: Daring Bodies between Myth, Medicine, and Memoir offers an innovative analysis of the representation of intersex experiences in life writing and fictional texts from the nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century. The purpose of Michaela Koch's book is to consider a topic that has not yet been broached in critical works: the analysis of literary and cultural representations of individuals with intersex variations, with the aim of encouraging debate and pluralizing normative understandings of intersex (14–15). The book is ordered chronologically and is separated into two parts, "Part I: Hermaphrodite Narratives" and "Part II: Intersex Narratives." Part I engages with materials from the nineteenth and early twentieth century (before the use of the term intersex), and Part II considers materials from the mid-twentieth to the early twenty-first century (after the coining of the term intersex in 1916). These two parts are used as markers of a contextual shift in discourse outside the literary texts in order to appreciate each text's position within the discursive history. Koch's complex but impressive methodology draws on the works of multiple theorists, such as (post)structuralist Michel Foucault, trauma theorist Kali Tal, narratology scholar Mieke Bal, and gender theorist Judith Butler, to name a few, with the aim of providing an overview of the historical and theoretical backdrop of each literary text. Discursive Intersexions opens with the chapter "Hermaphrodite Histories," which offers a broad and comprehensive history of medical and legal reactions to hermaphrodites from antiquity to the twentieth century. Koch highlights how early discussions about "hermaphrodites" were positioned alongside discussions about homosexuality in attempts to understand "the sciences of the sexes" (38). Throughout the book, a detailed history of sexology is provided, and these findings are examined alongside events presented in the selected autobiographical texts to map out the medical responses to the individuals at specific times in history. Part I of the [End Page 900] book closes with a study of memoirs from individuals considered retrospectively to be "hermaphrodites": Herculine Barbin and N. O. Body. Koch explores the use of autobiographical writing as a confessional mode, and how these texts employ medical sources as a method of reflecting and validating the "truth" about the body of the subject. In the case of Barbin's memoirs, first published posthumously in a medical textbook in the late nineteenth century and republished by Foucault in 1980, Koch argues that the mixing of genres—through the inclusion of memoirs in the medical textbook and the inclusion of the medical reports in Foucault's republication of the memoirs—reveals the ambiguity of Barbin's being. Thus, the memoir "challenges the medical discourse about 'true' sex" (22). In contrast, Koch likens N. O. Body's Memoirs of a Man's Maiden Years (1907) to medical case histories, given the use of a pseudonym and the fact that the text was published by and contains an epilogue written by Magnus Hirschfeld, who provided a medical report to support N. O. Body's legal transition from female to male (22). Koch argues that Hirschfeld's validation of the text and the use of a pseudonym strengthen the "reliability, authenticity, and decency of the account" (84). Part I of the book broaches the study of historical intersex life writing in an entirely unique and much-needed way. To my knowledge, there are no other critical texts in the field that provide a literary and critical analysis of these memoirs. The consideration of the memoir as a confessional mode of writing through the lens of theorists such as Foucault and Butler allows Koch, by conducting a close reading of the texts, to question the "truth claims" about the subjects' bodies, therefore revealing the dominant social, medical, and legal discourses surrounding the topic of intersex variations in the specific contexts of the memoirs. Part II begins with an overview of the development of what Koch calls "inter-sex discourses" from medical writings in the 1950s...

Structural and Semantic Features of People’s Memoirs in Internet Communication

People’s memoirs as a speech genre of Internet communication are discussed. The definition of people’s memoirs is given as memoirs, the author of which is not a professional writer, but an ordinary native speaker. The purpose of the author is dictated, firstly, by the linguistic interest in the study of memoirs from the perspective of one of the most actively developing directions of modern linguistics - genre studies within the context; secondly, by the need of studying the laws of change of the traditional (which had originally a paper base) genres in the process of developing the new communication space. The novelty of the research is seen in the fact that for the first time in this paper, Internet-genre of people’s memoirs acts as a linguistic object of study - along with existing philological tradition of the study of literary genre and traditional speech genre beyond the professional literary creativity. The structural-semantic parameters of Internet-genre of people’s memoirs are analyzed according to genre model developed by L. Yu. Shipitsina. In the framework of the description of these parameters the structural organization of the genre is set and described, as well as the content embodied in its structural elements. It is proved that the structural and substantial features of Internet genre of people’s memoirs are subject to modification compared to the traditional genre of people’s memoirs with a paper substrate.

Why “I” became a combatant: A study of memoirs written by Nepali Maoist combatants

ABSTRACTThis article analyzes combatants’ accounts of their engagement with the Communist Party of Nepal, Maoist—CPN (M). We use Self-Categorization Theory (SCT) as a framework and thematic analysis as a method to examine how social relationships and contextual factors contributed to political party identification during the ten-year-long Maoist insurgency in Nepal. Based on the study of autobiographical narratives written by Nepali Maoist combatants, we demonstrate that a) key social and political experiences cumulatively evoked feeling positively inclined to partisan attachment; b) CPN (M) party ideology, which was presented as a cure-all to socio-political difficulties, actuated the predisposed people’s partisan alignment; c) families were largely unsupportive of their members’ intention to take part in the war; and when they participated, the family responded with antagonism; and d) party ideologues of the CPN (M), who met the partisan-leaning individuals as close friends, accelerated and sustained their friends’ motivation to become involved in the armed conflict. Together the findings culminate in a view that engagement with CPN (M) during the insurgency occurred despite resistance from family and increased exponentially because of societal and political experiences, the strong appeal of party ideology, and social network dynamics.

Man of Letters, Literary Lady, Journalist or Reporter?

The enormous changes wrought in the British newspaper industry during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries brought about a revolution in newspaper reading habits, financing and influence, all aspects of which have been well documented by historians of the press. But what of the contributor, particularly the freelance whose millions of words formed, mostly anonymously, the content of the new mass market press? How did writers negotiate changes in the literary marketplace during this time as editors demanded more ‘news’ and less in the way of whimsical paragraphing, and sketches, the traditional newspaper output of the professional man, or woman, of letters? Through the study of memoirs, correspondence and the fictional output of contributors to the press during this time, it is possible to discern the often fraught relations between writers and their most lucrative market.

Reflections on Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking

In 1993, Anne Hunsaker Hawkins published Reconstructing Illness, a study of memoirs about the experience of disease, dysfunction or death for which she coined a new term: pathography. In a move familiar from the brief flowering of the 'personal criticism' movement in the late 1980s, Hawkins confessed that her academic interest had been motivated by her own father's death: the critical work thus shared the very impulse it sought to analyse. In Reconstructing Illness, Hawkins noted a striking fact: before 1950, she had discovered only a handful of published pathographies. After 1950, the genre had haltingly emerged but then accelerated, particularly in the 1980s, with hundreds of texts published. But even more strikingly, the number of pathographies doubled again in just the six years between 1993 and 1999, when the second edition of Hawkins' book appeared. (1) This spike in production placed pathography at the heart of the contemporary boom in the trauma memoir. In the 1990s, life writing was partially re-oriented to pivot around the intrusive traumatic event that, at a stroke, shattered narrative coherence. The sociologist Arthur Frank saw illness as 'narrative wreckage' and pathography as a literal narrative salve: 'Stories have to repair the damage that illness has done'. (2) This formulation owed much to the philosopher Paul Ricoeur, who regarded narrative as an act of con-figuration which 'grasps together and integrates into one whole and complete story multiple and scattered events'. (3) Trauma is a dis-figuration of that narrative possibility, but what the narrative memoir promises is a redemptive account of how the post-traumatic self might be re-configured around its woundedness. The trauma memoir is one of the cultural symptoms that follows from the securing of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder as a recognised psychiatric illness in official diagnostics in 1980, after a long campaign of psychiatric advocacy in the 1970s by a coalition of activists. It has been my contention that many forms of culture have played a significant role in articulating how PTSD seems to affect the narrative possibilities of selfhood after 1980. (4) The memoir boom is now a vast and complicated delta region with major channels but also curious back-waters, and is treacherous to map. However, it is important to distinguish the tributaries rather than subsume everything into an undifferentiated trauma discourse. For the record, we might distinguish five elements that converge to produce the memoir boom since the 1990s: 1) the feminist revaluation of the autobiographical utterance, at the level of therapeutic practice, life writing, and in critical theory; 2) a politicisation of the illness memoir by people with AIDS, producing a large body of testimony designed both to commemorate the dead and to denounce medical or governmental ignorance; 3) an expanding terrain of pathographies that began with cancer memoirs but soon moved into subsets including depression, exotic or bizarre disorders and parental illness or death; 4) the related rise of thanatography, or death writing, which might include memoirs by carers for the terminally ill, suicide in the family, or accounts of the mourning process; and 5) the re-programming of the celebrity expose to be organised around the revelation of the traumatic secret (a boom begun in England with the phenomenal success of the autobiography of the glamour model, Katie Price, Being Jordan). These elements run the gamut from honourable and political interventions to the plain tiresome and narcissistic. But they are also only the most immediate determinants of the boom. Many of the questions of the ethics and aesthetics of narrating extreme and deathly experience have been determined by Holocaust testimony. This has held centre place in many cultural theories of the representation of trauma that emerged in the early 1990s. In sum, we might regard the trauma memoir as the exemplary form of what Ross Chambers has termed 'aftermath cultures,' defined by a testimonial impulse that is nevertheless marked by 'a strange nexus of denial and acknowledgement'. …

Constructing an Axis of Evil

A major phenomenon in recent decades within Orientalist discourse is the indigenous Orientalism that can be seen in the works of some scholars, writers, and thinkers. These writers are sometimes referred to as “captive minds,” “brown sahibs,” or what Malcolm X would call the “houseNegro.”1 Defined by their intellectual bondage and dependence on the West and, at times, likened to pop psychologists in their writings about the “natives,” their western counterparts believe them because, as native informants, they are seen to be in a position to produce authentic representations of the Oriental psyche. This paper offers a brief study of memoirs written by members of the Iranian diaspora in western countries over the past decade, particularly in the United States. Among these writers are Azar Nafisi, Marjane Satrapi, Roya Hakakian, Afshin Molavi, and Azadeh Moaveni, and others. A few books with thriller-like titles, such as Prisoner of Tehran (Marina Nemat: 2008) or Living in Hell (Ghazal Omid: 2005), will not be studied. In the eyes of many Iranian intellectuals, such writers are often viewed as examples of the Iranian intellectual comprador class or members of the gharbzadeh (a term made current by JalalAle-Ahmad, the Iranian critic and intellectual, that can be rendered in English as westernized, west-struck, or westomaniac), rather than as intellectuals.

Constructing an Axis of Evil

A major phenomenon in recent decades within Orientalist discourse is the indigenous Orientalism that can be seen in the works of some scholars, writers, and thinkers. These writers are sometimes referred to as “captive minds,” “brown sahibs,” or what Malcolm X would call the “houseNegro.”1 Defined by their intellectual bondage and dependence on the West and, at times, likened to pop psychologists in their writings about the “natives,” their western counterparts believe them because, as native informants, they are seen to be in a position to produce authentic representations of the Oriental psyche. This paper offers a brief study of memoirs written by members of the Iranian diaspora in western countries over the past decade, particularly in the United States. Among these writers are Azar Nafisi, Marjane Satrapi, Roya Hakakian, Afshin Molavi, and Azadeh Moaveni, and others. A few books with thriller-like titles, such as Prisoner of Tehran (Marina Nemat: 2008) or Living in Hell (Ghazal Omid: 2005), will not be studied. In the eyes of many Iranian intellectuals, such writers are often viewed as examples of the Iranian intellectual comprador class or members of the gharbzadeh (a term made current by JalalAle-Ahmad, the Iranian critic and intellectual, that can be rendered in English as westernized, west-struck, or westomaniac), rather than as intellectuals.

'Auf dab sie entsteigen der Dunkelheit': Die literarische Bewaltigung von KZ-Erfahrung

In this literary study of memoirs describing at first hand the horrors of German concentration camps, the principal question asked is: how did the survivors find the words to talk about experiences hitherto unknown, even unimaginable? Beyond being a mere ananlysis of discourse, this book reflexts the situations in camp that triggered these responses, and shows how the professional authors adapted certain literary genres (e.g. the travel story, the Hassidic tale) to serve as models for communication, while the vast majority who were not trained as writers merely used the form of the report. A comparison between these memoirs and the more frequently discussed camp novel identifies the different narrative strategies by which the two are determined. The concluding chapter deals with the question of meaning. While few survivors attach any meaning to camp life itself, most agree that coping with its misery, and with the memory of that misery, was greatly enhanced if some purpose could be found for their existence, whether in the form of physical or psychological resistance or of hope for a future life, reunited with their loved ones. Writing about their experiences has helped all survivors to come to terms with their ordeal, but the Holocaust has not turned any vicitim into a professional writer who was not destined to become one anyway. Most of the 130 texts discusses here were published in German between 1934 and the present; some famous Italian, French and Polish texts and a small amount of archive material have also been included for comparison.