Autofiction and Photography: “The Split of the Mirror”

This chapter explores the relationships between life writing, memory, and photography and suggests that the incidence of photographs (actual or described) in life-writing texts is most prominent in autofictional works which possess generic hybridity and often represent identity itself in hybrid terms. The chapter explores images of seeing and mirroring in autobiographical texts, focusing first on transsexual life-writings (including works by Virginia Woolf, Jan Morris, Jay Prosser, and Susan Faludi), in which photographs play a complex role in negotiating continuity and change within the life-course, old and new identities. The second part of the essay turns to recent life-writing texts, including the work of Annie Ernaux (who, like many other French writers, makes substantial use of photographs) and the film and cultural theorist Annette Kuhn.

Verbalization of cognitive processes in the texts of bilinguals with alexithymia

This article describes certain fragments of verbal-lexical and linguistic-cognitive levels of linguistic personality of the bilinguals with alexithymia. The goal lies in their determination, description, and comparison with the corresponding fragments of linguistic personality of the Russians with alexithymia for outlining the parameters that correlate or do not correlate with nationality and alexithymia status of the respondent. The research leans on the linguistic, quantitative and qualitative content analysis of autobiographical texts. The essential condition for including in the number of respondents was a pronounced alexithymia status (diagnosed in accordance with the Toronto Alexithymia Scale), affiliation to Altai or Yakut ethnic group, and command of the corresponding language (bilingualism). The following conclusions were made: certain cognitive and lexical-semantic parameters remain constant, while morphological and punctuation parameters among Altai and Yakut people cease to be the criterion of the pronounced alexithymia status of a person. The acquired results can be used as a complementary instrument for the diagnosis of alexithymia and its correction. The relevance of this research is substantiated by incidence of the phenomenon of alexithymia and the need for conducting comparative study of the texts of persons with alexithymia who belong to different ethnic groups, which allows determining the framework of such supplementary instrument of diagnosis as text analysis.

Kindsein – Erinnern – Erzählen

Artikelbeginn:[English title and abstract below] »Erinnerungen aus der Kindheit kann man doch nur haben, wenn man selbst kein Kind ist« (de Velasco 2013, S. 10) – so kommentiert die 13-jährige homodiegetische Erzählerin Nini im Roman Tigermilch das Auftauchen einer ersten bewussten »richtige[n] Kindheitserinnerung« (ebd.). Angesprochen ist damit der zunächst paradox anmutende Zusammenhang von Kindsein und Erinnern. Sich selbst im umfassenderen Sinn daran zu erinnern, wie es ist, ein Kind zu sein, gehört zu den Fähigkeiten, die Kindern nicht zugesprochen werden. Die Kindheit gilt als das Lebensalter, in dem man ganz bei sich ist, in dem alles gegenwärtig und vieles möglich ist. Pläne und Perspektiven richten sich in die offene Zukunft, im Rückblick über Erinnerungen zu verfügen und sie als Teil der eigenen Biografie zu begreifen, wird selbst zum Zeichen der Differenz: ein Indiz dafür, dass die Kindheit bereits an ihr Ende gekommen ist. Recalling and Retelling ChildhoodThe (Self)Depiction of Childhood during German Reunification from Memory Culture and Generational Viewpoints Ever since the Peaceful Revolution paved the way for the reunification of Germany in 1990, texts and media for children and young adults have depicted these historical events from a range of narrative and generational viewpoints. This article addresses forms of childhood remembrance of this era of radical political and social upheaval in East Germany, focussing on autobiographical texts and media (essays and comics) as well as novels and stories. These are discussed through the lens of memory studies with respect to individual and collective identity and memory construction, and as functions of intra- and intergenerational communication. Using selected examples and with reference to the categories of the novel of remembrance and the novel of memory, the article identifies narrative strategies and image–text relationships employed to recall the events preceding and following German reunification. It shows how texts filter, interpret and condense individual memories, and link these to generational memory, and how they may ultimately be seen as contributions to communicative memory.

Psycholinguistics Analysis of Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorders Patients’ Writing and Oral Speech (on the Example of the Autobiographical Texts)

Introduction. There are speech disorders as one of the psychopathology diagnostics criteria in ICD and DSM. However, the linguistic component is not enough studied, so the study topic is actual. The use of text analysis allows to apply psycholinguistics approach to the objectification of thinking disorders. The objective of the study was aimed to detect psycholinguistics features of oral and written speech in patients with schizophrenia.Methods and materials. Participants were 29 schizophrenia patients, 20 patients with personality disorder and 25 healthy participants. Methods: expert assessment, anamnestic assessment, experimental-psychological (tests of thinking, collect memories), linguistic analysis, statistical analysis.Results. Oral speech of patients with schizophrenia is complex and volume, the writing speech is «factual», lexically varied and low communicative. In oral and writing speech of patients with schizophrenia, there are three text types correlated with thinking disorders. Texts of patients with schizophrenia are less volume, simpler in structure, describe more facts than thoughts and feelings, unlike patients with personality disorder and healthy participants.Conclusion. Texts of patients with schizophrenia, personality disorder and healthy participants are different in formal linguistics characteristics. Such characteristics of the speech of patients suffering from schizophrenia as a lot of impersonal sentences describing object attribute, complexly organized speech, emphasis on describing emotions and oneself using the pronoun «I» allow to suppose that the patient has thinking disorders: thinking distortion by formal and latent ways of object attributions, thinking purposefulness disorder, thinking «versatility».

Refuser d’être l’aveugle des autres Dynamiques et pratiques de l’écriture de soi, à l’encontre des représentations sociales de la cécité

This paper aims at exploring the autobiographical writing of blind, deaf-blind or partially sighted people from a sociopoetical perspective. It contends the following idea: for the authors to be considered, the first-person text opens up a space which allows them to refuse and deconstruct the conception of blindness shared by sighted persons. This literary process, from which the construction of a counter-discourse that can even go as far as subversion emerges, gives the author the opportunity to reappropriate his or her blindness beyond the imaginary, the myths and the fancies deriving from what is commonly understood and depicted as an impairment and a deprivation. Focusing on the fundamental concept of “préjugé de la cécité” (“prejudice of blindness”) developed by the French blind intellectual Pierre Villey, the article shall furthermore demonstrate that this common imaginary and these collective social representations are deeply rooted in culture and literature: They turn out to be an archetype one cannot easily avoid, inhabiting autobiographical texts and taking the form of stereotyped associations. This archetype is nevertheless swiftly challenged and deconstructed by the autobiographer’s writing, therefore leaving room for a representation of blindness from an internal point of view, based on individual experience and nurtured by everyday life. This paper thus argues that autobiographical space and textuality display a discursive power that the author can use as he or she wishes, in order to dismantle stereotypes and transform collective and social representations of blind people and blindness.

Comment ? Lamentations essayistiques chez Monique Bosco

Cet article entreprend une analyse des essais de Monique Bosco, publiés pendant les huit dernières années de sa vie, entre 1998 et 2006, à la lumière de la tradition des lamentations. En examinant le recours à l’intertextualité dans ces essais, notre étude privilégie la dimension de la lamentation qui vise l’interrogation plutôt que la complainte. Dans le contexte de la Shoah, Bosco cherche, à l’instar du Livre des Lamentations, à comprendre comment ce qui est arrivé a pu avoir lieu, une quête qui passe nécessairement par la lecture de textes historiques, philosophiques et autobiographiques.This article undertakes an analysis of Monique Bosco’s essays, published during the last eight years of her life, between 1998 and 2006, in light of the lament tradition. Focusing on the use of intertextuality in these essays, the article emphasizes lamentation as an interrogation rather than a lament, a notion that perhaps comes more immediately to mind. In the context of the Shoah, Bosco seeks to understand in the manner of the Book of Lamentations how what happened could have happened, a quest that necessarily involves the reading of historical, philosophical and autobiographical texts.

Secretions

DNA profiling, in which individual being is identified by its cellular structures, was first developed by the geneticist Alec Jeffreys in the 1980s. That this source of identity also forms the instructions through which living organisms are generated has complicated profiling’s place in the cultural imaginary of the late twentieth century. So, while profiling actually deals only in non-coding regions of the genome—matter often referred to as ‘junk DNA’—the significance of DNA as a substance of forensic analysis, in the late twentieth century imaginary, is its resonance as the apparent blueprint of existence. The notable features that this blurring of concepts brings about include a conceptualization of identity as a mass of information; notions to do with codes and coding; the presence of the body in the fluids which spill beyond its bounds; and a sense of the body as an archive of heredity and primitivism. In writing specifically about genetic research, Richard Powers’s The Gold Bug Variations (1991) serves a dual function in this chapter, as both an explicatory document and thematic example. But the more substantive analysis is reserved for the work of J. G. Ballard which, from its science fiction origins in novels such as The Drowned World (1962), through the controversial era of Crash (1973), to its trilogy of autobiographical texts (Empire of the Sun (1984), The Kindness of Women (1991), and Miracles of Life (2008)) articulates a form of identity that has close, though often oblique, affinities with all the most prominent features of DNA profiling.

Philippe Artières, Un Séminariste assassin: L’affaire Bladier, 1905

At the end of the nineteenth and in the early years of the twentieth century, encouraging violent criminals to write their life stories became an accepted tool of forensic medicine. The autobiographical texts which emerged became vital building blocks in the psychological diagnosis of the subject. One of the leading international exponents of this method was the Lyon-based professor Alexandre Lacassagne, who developed a science of criminal anthropology guided by the principles of heredity and phrenology (the idea that mental functions could be precisely located in specific parts of the brain). Lacassagne was fascinated by abnormal behaviour and urged the inmates of Lyon prisons to write their autobiographies. He took a paternal interest in them, studied their tattoos, and used their life writing as a key to understanding the criminal personality. Philippe Artières has been working on Lacassagne’s papers for over 25 years, and they formed the basis of his previous work Le livre des vies coupables: autobiographies de criminels, 1896-1909 (The book of guilty lives) (Paris, 2000 and 2014). In this new book, he revisits one particularly disturbing case – the Bladier affair of 1905.

Collective Memory and Political Mythologies: Eleftherios Venizelos in Greek Postwar Historiography, 1945–1967

During the first decades after the Second World War, Greek society had to deal with a vast array of issues, including its relationship with the past. In this context, Eleftherios Venizelos, a great statesman of the early twentieth century, was frequently used both as a symbol in contemporary political debates and as a metonymy in various attempts to contextualise the history of the first half of the century. An important part of these attempts was the corpus of public narratives produced about Venizelos and his era, either as historiographical accounts or autobiographical texts. These narratives, published in newspapers and books, were not, for the most part, academic; their authors were usually journalists, retired military officers, or politicians, who formed a political-historical nexus and who produced a new discourse on a historical period which had hitherto received little or no historiographical attention. In fact, this discourse left its mark on Greek political and historical culture for decades to come.

Historiography of life and creative path of the devotee of the Crimean Tatar literature and enlightenment Y. N. Baiburtlu

This article gives a brief overview of the life and creative heritage of the figure of Crimean Tatar literature and enlightenment of the early XX century Yahya-Naji Bayburtlu (1876-1943). The author introduces into the scientific discourse the poorly studied biographical and bibliographic archival materials, which include the prewar literary and historiographical texts transliterated from the Arabic script to the Roman script. The article also employs the reminiscences of the relatives and contemporaries of Y. N. Baiburtlu that have been published in modern national press and give a better perspective of the creative path and environment of Y. N. Baiburtlu: the newspaper article of the writer's daughter Niyara Baiburtlu, autobiographical texts of the prominent Crimean Tatar publicistic writer Shamil Alyadinov. The methodological framework is comprised of the biographical, comparative-typological, and meta-critical analysis. The theoretical framework is based on the works of Arslan Krichinsky, Cemil Kermenchikli, Ismail Kerimov, Dmitry Ursu, Natalia Yablonovskaya, Mukhiddin Khairuddinov, Enisa Abibullayeva. Therefore, the overview of the life and literary-enlightenment activity of Y. N. Baiburtlu reveals his creative personality, outlines the prospects for the aspectual research of his biography as a writer and playwright, translator of literary works, public figure, and enlightener of his time. The author believes that the examination of the versatile literary-pedagogical heritage may significantly enrich the scientific representations of the traditions, factors of development and formation of the Crimean Tatar literary elite of the prewar period in Crimea.