Epilogue

Mirrored Loss ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 157-180
Author(s):  
Gabriele vom Bruck
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Politics Of Memory ◽  
Relational Perspective ◽  
Life Trajectory ◽  
Normative Constraints

This chapter analyses central foci of Amat al-Latif’s life trajectory and memory world. Recounting her life from a relational perspective, Amat al-Latif wishes to establish an enduring memory of her relationship with her father and exonerate him from accusations of treason. Asserting that allegations regarding his involvement in Imam Yahya’s assassination were belied by his devoutness and disapproval of violent overthrow, she offers an alternative appraisal of the events of 1948. Exploring women and men’s biographies, this chapter unsettles the notion of gendered memory, and argues that the normative constraints of gender on processes of remembering cannot be analyzed adequately without taking class into account. Selective twentieth-century biographies written by Yemeni men reveal that gender does not foreclose men’s employment of emotive parameters. Nor are they necessarily characterized by a disavowal of the personal and the domestic, often taken to be central features of women’s life writing. The chapter concludes that all (auto-)biographies studied in Mirrored Loss are none the less implicated in the politics of memory in different ways.

The Politics of Memory: Rededicating Two Historical Monuments in Postwar Germany

2008 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 255-280
Author(s):  
Sam A. Mustafa
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Politics Of Memory ◽  
Postwar Germany ◽  
The Past ◽  
Historical Monuments ◽  
Coffee Table

For much of the past two centuries German governments encouraged or even sponsored the construction of war monuments. By the turn of the twentieth century Germany was covered in more than a thousand such shrines, most of which had local or regional significance as places of annual celebration or commemoration. Government, media, and business all contributed to an elaborate hagiography of Germany's battles, war heroes, and martyrs, with monuments usually serving as the centerpieces. Millions of middle-class Germans attended or participated in commemoration ceremonies at war monuments all over the country, and/or filled their homes with souvenir trinkets, tableware, wall decorations, coffee-table books, and other quotidian items that reproduced images of the monuments or scenes from the events they memorialized.

‘Quivering yet still’: Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry and the Aesthetics of Attention

2020 ◽  
pp. 33-75
Author(s):  
Claudia Tobin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Communication Technologies ◽  
Still Life ◽  
The Past ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
Physical Presence ◽  
The Relationship

When Virginia Woolf sought to evoke Roger Fry’s qualities as an art critic, she reached for the image of him as a humming-bird hawk-moth, ‘quivering yet still’ in his absorbed attention to Post-Impressionist paintings. This chapter argues that modes of ‘active’ stillness and receptive, vibratory states of being were crucial to Woolf’s experience and representation of art. It traces ‘quivering’ as a talismanic word across a range of her fiction and non-fiction, and explores the pervasive figure of the insect in Woolf’s re-imagining of the human sensorium, with particular focus on her essay Walter Sickert: A Conversation (1934), and on Sketch of the Past (1939). The second half of the chapter addresses Woolf’s underexplored biography of Roger Fry and her confrontation with the problem of ‘writing’ Fry under the imperative not to ‘fix’ her subject, but rather to register his ‘vibratory’ non-physical presence. It considers the role of vibration more widely in Woolf’s life-writing and in Fry’s art theory, in the context of twentieth-century spiritualism, Quakerism and new communication technologies. It proposes that by examining the different functions and meanings of still life (visual and verbal) in Woolf’s and Fry’s work, we can further illuminate their approach to the relationship between art and life.

Alternative Modernities, or a Classical Woman of Modern China: The Challenging Trajectory of Lü Bicheng's (1883-1943) Life And Song Lyrics

NAN Nü ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 12-59 ◽  
Author(s):  
Grace Fong
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Modern China ◽  
Alternative Modernities ◽  
Life Trajectory ◽  
Song Lyrics

AbstractLü Bicheng is remembered today mostly for her accomplishment as a poet in the classical ci genre (song lyrics). Drawing on her writings and those of her contemporaries, this study attempts to reconstruct Lü Bicheng's multifaceted, cosmopolitan life trajectory that has become obscured by the nationalist turn in twentieth-century China. By excavating Lü Bicheng's many self-inventions and metamorphoses, I aim to show how the ci genre as her mode of self-inscription was transformed into a protean medium for the expression of progressive rhetoric, cultural identity, and the assimilation of new experiences. The complex cultural and linguistic dialogues exemplified by Lü's life and writings open up alternative readings of modernity.

scholarly journals Paul Goodman and the Biography of Sexual Modernity

2011 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 47-60
Author(s):  
David S. Churchill
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Sexual Experiences ◽  
Political Critique ◽  
The Relationship

This article is a preliminary exploration of the relationship between the auto-biographical writings of radical US intellectual Paul Goodman and his theorizing of sexuality’s links to the project of political liberation. Goodman’s life writing was integrated into his social and political critique of mid-twentieth century society, as well as his more scholarly pursuits of psychology and sociology. In this way, Goodman’s work needs to be seen as generative of the dialectic of sexually modernity, which integrated intimate queer sexual experiences with conceptual, intellectual, and elite discourses on sexuality.

Diaries Real and Fictional in Twentieth-Century French Writing

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sam Ferguson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Andre Gide ◽  
World War ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Diary Writing ◽  
Second World ◽  
The Way

This is the first study of the diary in French writing across the twentieth century, as a genre including both fictional and non-fictional works. From the 1880s it became apparent to writers in France that their diaries (or journaux intimes) – a supposedly private form of writing – would probably come to be published, strongly affecting the way their readers viewed their other published works, and their very persona as an author. More than any other, André Gide embraced the literary potential of the diary: the first part of this book follows his experimentation with the diary in the fictional works Les Cahiers d’André Walter (1891) and Paludes (1895), in his diary of the composition of his great novel, Le Journal des faux-monnayeurs (1926), and in his monumental Journal 1889–1939 (1939). The second part follows developments in diary-writing after the Second World War, inflected by radical changes in attitudes towards the writing subject. Raymond Queneau’s works published under the pseudonym of Sally Mara (1947–1962) used the diary playfully at a time when the writing subject was condemned by the literary avant-garde. Roland Barthes’s experiments with the diary (1977–1979) took it to the extremes of its formal possibilities, at the point of a return of the writing subject. Annie Ernaux’s published diaries (1993–2011) demonstrate the role of the diary in the modern field of life-writing, especially in comparison with autobiography. Throughout the century, the diary has repeatedly been used to construct an œuvre and author, but also to call these fundamental literary concepts into question.

Mamas on Mission: Retracing the Church through the Spiritual Life Writing of Single Female Evangelical Missionaries

2019 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 289-313
Author(s):  
Laura Chevalier
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Spiritual Life ◽  
Compassionate Care ◽  
Single Female ◽  
Feminine Spirituality ◽  
Women's Lives ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Church

Abstract This article plumbs the spiritual life writing of two twentieth-century single female evangelical missionaries, Lillian Trasher and Dr. Helen Roseveare, for evidence of the church. It rests on concepts of feminine spirituality and the history of women and mission. The historical analysis traces the women’s lives from their early formation through their mission work and looks at six themes of the church on mission that emerged from their writing. It argues that they served as mamas of the church in their contexts by nurturing life through their acts of compassionate care. Their small but deliberate acts of sacrifice and service continue to pose missiological invitations and challenges to the church. Therefore, the article also builds an initial “mama theology” of the church on mission by examining where images in Isaiah and impulses in mission today intersect with the themes in the women’s writing.

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