scholarly journals The Autofictional in Serial, Literary Works

2022 ◽  
pp. 101-118
Author(s):  
Ricarda Menn ◽  
Melissa Schuh
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Doris Lessing ◽  
Life Narratives ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Dorothy Richardson

AbstractThis chapter approaches serial literary autofictions as a distinct variant of autofictional writing. While discussions of life writing often focus on male authors, the chapter redresses this imbalance by considering women writers, specifically the works of Dorothy Richardson, Doris Lessing, and Rachel Cusk. The approach is new in exploring the autofictional in serial, literary works, and tracing connections across an author’s oeuvre. Such a focus leads to an extended understanding of autofiction and the autofictional as challenging autobiographical unity and coherence. The chapter distinguishes between different forms of seriality (including series, serial, and serialized life narratives), and argues that serial publications and structures enhance literary and autofictional tendencies in that they draw attention to the complexities of autobiographical representation.

Via Ripetta 155: The last piece of Clara Sereni’s life writing story

2021 ◽  
pp. 001458582098651
Author(s):  
Giulia Po DeLisle
Keyword(s):  
Life Writing ◽  
Public Realm ◽  
Political Thinking ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
The Public ◽  
Bear Witness

Clara Sereni’s writing journey began in 1974 with Sigma Epsilon and went on to flourish through the years with the publication of numerous inspiring and thought-provoking literary works. Many of her autobiographical and fictional texts delve into the years between 1968 and 1977, a crucial decade that changed Italy and forever impacted the author’s life and political thinking. In Via Ripetta 155, Sereni found a renewed desire to bear witness to those politically revolutionary times by revisiting the experiences of her private self and her interaction with the public realm. This study engages with the analysis of this last piece of the complex puzzle that encompasses the written story of her life, and argues that the text represents a final self-empowering act in which the apartment of Via Ripetta becomes the stage for a dialectical discourse between personal achievements and socio-political changes, personal conflicts and public turmoil.

Narrating Dalit womanhood and the aesthetics of autobiography

2017 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-37
Author(s):  
Laura R. Brueck
Keyword(s):  
Textual Analysis ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Critical Reception ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Life Narratives ◽  
Community Based ◽  
Narrative Authority ◽  
Dalit Women ◽  
Hindi Language

This article will consider two Hindi-language autobiographies by Dalit women, to explain how we can emphasize the collective, relational, and specifically gendered character of Dalit women’s life writing without simplistically categorizing them as testimonio, “witnessing”. Nor should we over-privilege their gendered specificity, thereby effacing the very real narrative authority, purposefulness, and perspectival control of their authors. Instead, we must be especially attentive to the language of a text and understand how the relationality and collectivity of experience is not accidental or necessarily organic to a woman’s view on her world, but is actively, politically, and consciously constructed in the course of a narrative. Predicated on a reasonable concern over the appropriation of a revolutionary new literary voice, attention to narrative form has been slow in coming to the critical and scholarly analysis of Dalit literature, somewhat paradoxically resulting in the rendering of this literature too as “untouchable”. In exploring what is therefore only a nascent formal criticism of the Dalit autobiographical genre, I believe it is important to express a note of caution against replicating the same kinds of essentializing processes of differentiation (the kind we have seen before in the critical reception of life writing in other cultures and languages) between men’s and women’s Dalit life narratives as ego-driven and individualistic linear progressions to political awakening versus relational, community-based, politically and purposefully diffuse “witnessings”. In this exciting moment in which we have the opportunity to engage with a critically important and rapidly expanding rhetorical movement such as Dalit literature, it is, I believe, a diligent recourse to textual analysis that may yet save us from such facile stereotyping.

scholarly journals From a double margin: Anglophone translation of women's writing from Croatia and Serbia

Reci, Beograd ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (13) ◽  
pp. 29-41
Author(s):  
Sibelan Forrester
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Women's Writing ◽  
Literary Canon ◽  
Canon Formation ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Global Context ◽  
Women’S Writing

This article examines Anglophone translations of women's writing from Eastern Europe with particular focus on writers from Croatia and Serbia. After outlining the presences and absences of these women writers in Anglophone translations, it raises some questions about the significance of gender in literary canon formation and the emergence of literary works into a global context through translation.

scholarly journals Transformation From Aesthetics to Activism: An Analysis of Select Dalit Women Personal Narratives

2021 ◽  
pp. 2455328X2110389
Author(s):  
Surya Simon
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Personal Narratives ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Political Activism ◽  
Narrative Technique ◽  
The Past ◽  
Dalit Women

Dalit resistance gained prominence in postcolonial India through Dalit literature, with Dalit life writing emerging as a significant way to address ongoing problems and issues faced by Dalit communities. Dalit personal narratives are not mere reflections into the past but lived experiences with a timely and current sociological base. Dalit narratives have become a platform for social and political activism against various hegemonic discourses that otherwise exclude the experiences of the Dalit population. Moreover, Dalit women suffer many layers of oppression and violence, and there is a necessity to understand the intersectionality of Dalit women’s realities. Hence this article analyses select personal narratives of two Dalit women writers: P. Sivakami’s The Grip of Change ([1989] 2006) and ₹Author’s Notes: Gowri’ ([1999] 2006); and Bama’s Karukku ([1992] 2005). The ₹Author’s Notes: Gowri’ is a reflection on The Grip of Change and the two narratives are collectively referred to as The Grip of Change. This article attempts to understand the extent to which Dalit personal narratives transform from aesthetics to activism. This article analyses the narrative technique and form used in the narratives and explores how the narratives expose embodied issues to foster activism in and through the content.

8. Autobiographies, autobiographical novels, and autofictions

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Marcus
Keyword(s):  
James Joyce ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Personal Essay ◽  
Katherine Mansfield ◽  
Secondary Importance ◽  
Autobiographical Writing ◽  
Dorothy Richardson ◽  
Journal Entries

Few of the great modernist writers produced explicit or fully fledged autobiographies, but the expansion of the ‘life-writing’ category has made visible the prevalence of autobiographical novels, including works by Katherine Mansfield, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Dorothy Richardson, and Virginia Woolf. ‘Autobiographies, autobiographical novels, and autofictions’ explains that in the late 19th and early 20th centuries there was an increasingly ‘aesthetic’ approach to autobiography. New genres arose that blended life-writing and fiction, such as the personal essay, the ‘imaginary portrait’, and novels which incorporated authentic letters and journal entries. Since the 1980s, it is argued, the novel has been eclipsed by autobiographical narrative, reversing the earlier sense that autobiographical writing was of secondary importance.

Orality and Improvisation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erik Simpson
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Complex Relationship ◽  
Alternative Mode ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Creative Processes ◽  
Theory And Criticism ◽  
Walter Scott

The presence of orality or improvisation in literary texts implies a process of remediation, or the reworking of one medium (speech) into another (print). This chapter addresses ways in which British Romantic writers effected this remediation, especially when portraying the creative processes of minstrels and improvisers in literary works. After introducing key works of theory and criticism bearing on Romantic orality, the chapter analyses the rise of literary minstrelsy in the work of writers such as Walter Scott, who used editorial paratexts to frame the content of minstrelsy in the scholarly conventions of print. It then examines the growth of improvisation as an alternative mode to minstrelsy and shows how literary improvisation was notable for the prominence of women writers in its creation and practice. The chapter closes with a treatment of later blackface minstrelsy’s complex relationship to Romantic representations of orality.

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