On Life History

Author(s):  
R. A. W. Rhodes

This chapter turns from ethnography to contemporary history, focusing on ‘life history’ as another example of blurring genres. The British tradition of political life history has six conventions: ‘tombstone’ biography; separation of public and private lives; life without theory; objective evidence and facts; character; and storytelling. The chapter reviews each before turning to the swingeing critique by ‘the interpretive turn’. Postmodernism deconstructed grand narratives by pronouncing the death of the subject and the author. The chapter outlines an interpretive approach that reclaims life history by focusing on the idea of ‘situated agency’: that is, on the webs of significance people spin for themselves against the backcloth of their inherited beliefs and practices. It explores, with examples, the implications of this approach for writing life history, stressing different uses for biography open to political scientists. It briefly discusses why the British tradition of political life history has proved resistant to change.

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-131
Author(s):  
Jenn M. Jackson

The American imperial project exploits race, class, gender, and sexual differences in the name of the state. But in what ways has the transformative nature of American imperialism intervened in the public and private lives of Black women? This essay asks, What impact has the American imperial project had on Black women’s self-making throughout the twentieth century? The author draws on the autobiographical works of Black enslaved, postbellum, queer, and transgender contemporaries to show how Black women have resisted the fungibility of their bodies through processes of self-formation and self-reclamation. The author also relies on the theoretical works of critical race, queer, and feminist scholars to frame how that resistance—whether in the form of sexual freedom, reproductive choice, or independence from traditional systems of labor—represents a critical site of possibility for understanding Black women’s social and political life worlds today.


2009 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 143-153 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anastasia Christou

This article explores the theoretical and methodological implications of the study of second generation migration through the use of life stories, a narrative and biographical approach. It presents a theoretical contextualisation of life history research in addressing the direction it has taken in the study of migration and identity in order to problematise how the subject and subjectivities in narrative research have been framed by social categorisations such as gender, ethnicity, class as well as social experiences such as trauma, exile, memory and imagination. The paper develops the analytical contribution of researching the biographicity of everyday migrant lives. 


2015 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-77
Author(s):  
Peter Mercer-Taylor

The notion that there might be autobiographical, or personally confessional, registers at work in Mendelssohn’s 1846 Elijah has long been established, with three interpretive approaches prevailing: the first, famously advanced by Prince Albert, compares Mendelssohn’s own artistic achievements with Elijah’s prophetic ones; the second, in Eric Werner’s dramatic formulation, discerns in the aria “It is enough” a confession of Mendelssohn’s own “weakening will to live”; the third portrays Elijah as a testimonial on Mendelssohn’s relationship to the Judaism of his birth and/or to the Christianity of his youth and adulthood. This article explores a fourth, essentially untested, interpretive approach: the possibility that Mendelssohn crafts from Elijah’s story a heartfelt affirmation of domesticity, an expression of his growing fascination with retiring to a quiet existence in the bosom of his family. The argument unfolds in three phases. In the first, the focus is on that climactic passage in Elijah’s Second Part in which God is revealed to the prophet in the “still small voice.” The turn from divine absence to divine presence is articulated through two clear and powerful recollections of music that Elijah had sung in the oratorio’s First Part, a move that has the potential to reconfigure our evaluation of his role in the public and private spheres in those earlier passages. The second phase turns to Elijah’s own brief sojourn into the domestic realm, the widow’s scene, paying particular attention to the motivations that may have underlain the substantial revisions to the scene that took place between the Birmingham premiere and the London premiere the following year. The final phase explores the possibility that the widow and her son, the “surrogate family” in the oratorio, do not disappear after the widow’s scene, but linger on as “para-characters” with crucial roles in the unfolding drama.


1942 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 19-32
Author(s):  
H. Barnett

Much has been written of William Duncan, "the Apostle of Alaska", who came to the coast of northern British Columbia in 1857 as a missionary to the Tsimshian Indians. Although he deplored it, in the course of his sixty years' residence in this area controversy raged around him as a result of his clashes with church and state, and his work has been the subject of numerous investigations, both public and private. His enemies have called him a tyrant and a ruthless exploiter of the Indians under his control; and there are men still living who find a disproportionate amount of evil in the good that he did, especially during the declining years of his long life. On the other hand, he has had ardent and articulate supporters who have written numerous articles and no less than three books in praise of his self-sacrificing ideals and the soundness of his program for civilizing the Indian.


1969 ◽  
Vol 89 ◽  
pp. 87-96 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. C. McCail

The Cycle of sixth-century epigrams edited by Agathias Scholasticus is the subject of a recent article by Mr and Mrs A. Cameron (JHS lxxxvi [1966] 6 ff.), who argue cogently that it was published in the early years of Justin II, and not the later years of Justinian, as has hitherto been supposed. Ca. also suggest identifications for many of the poets and imperial officials who figure in the Cycle. They do not, however, exhaust all the identifications that can be made, and some of those suggested by them require amplification or correction. Furthermore, Ca.'s view of the dating of the Cycle leads them, it seems to me, to underestimate its Justinianic character. The following observations are offered without prejudice to the merit of Ca.'s article as a whole.Among the Cyclic poets, only Julian the ex-Prefect of the East stands in close relationship to the political life of the age. His involvement in the Nika insurrection of 532 is attested by historical sources and, as Ca. claim (13), by two epigrams of the Anthology. The latter, however, contain difficulties passed over by Ca. In the first place, of the two epigrams on the cenotaph of Hypatius, only AP vii 591 is certainly from Julian's pen; vii 592 is unattributed in the Palatine MS., a fact which Ca. omit to mention. (It is absent from the Planudean MS.) The state of affairs in P is no accident, vii 591, though eulogising the dead man and alluding openly to the casting of his corpse into the sea, is moderate in tone, and would have caused no more offence to Justinian than Procopius's published account of the affair.


1892 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-55
Author(s):  
Blackie

I will commence by stating that three reasons have moved me to bring this subject before the Society—(1) Because I found everywhere loose and even altogether false ideas possessing the public mind on the subject; (2) because I much fear that we, the academical teachers of the Greek language, are chiefly to blame for the currency of these false ideas; and (3) because, if Greek is a living and uncorrupted language, and dominating large districts of Europe and the Mediterranean, as influentially as French on the banks of the Seine and German on the Rhine, it follows that a radical reform must take place in our received methods of teaching this noble and most useful language. Now that the current language of the Greeks in Athens and elsewhere is not, in any sense, a new or a corrupt language, as Italian is a melodious and French a glittering corruption of Latin, may be gathered even a priori; for languages are slow to die, and the time that elapsed from the taking of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453 and the establishment of the Venetian power in the Morea in 1204, to the resurrection of Greek political life in 1822, was not long enough to cause such a fusion of contrary elements as produced the English language from the permanent occupation of the British Isles by the Normans.


2020 ◽  
Vol 76 (4) ◽  
pp. 149-155
Author(s):  
SVETLANA S. UZHAKINA ◽  

The classification of Russian culture-bound terms used in the novel “Quiet Flows the Don” by M. A. Sholokhov and in its translation into the English language. The novel “Quiet Flows the Don” by M.A. Sholokhov and its translation into English done by Robert Daglish have served as the source for the research of culture-bound terms. These terms have been classified on the basis of the subject division offered by S. Vlakhov and S. Florin. It is proved that the interest to the study of culture-bound terms is still important. The relevance of the research is determined by the fact that despite numerous research papers in this field the origin, classification and translation of these terms still need some investigation. The aim of the present study is to classify the culture-bound terms taken from the novel “Quiet Flows the Don” by M.A. Sholokhon and its translation into the English language. As a result, there have bben taken 407 samples of the lexical units with a cultural component which were classified according to the subject principal offered by S. Vlakhon and S. Florin. The culture-bound terms have a great influence on a foreign reader as they are cultural units that transmit the information of the daily routine and the historical epoch described in the novel. The culture-bound terms taken from the novel “Quiet Flows the Don” by M.A. Sholokhov and its translation are analyzed and classified. The division of the culture-bound terms according to the subject principal allowed to reveal that most terms refer to the daily routine, social and political life and military terms.


Author(s):  
Steven M. Ortiz

Male professional athletes captivate fans and profoundly influence today’s society as part of the $1.3 trillion global sport industry. Although these athletes’ lives and careers are widely reported, scholarly knowledge about the women who support them—their wives—is extremely limited. Because these women’s voices have historically been stifled, their marriages are shockingly misunderstood. Based on findings from the first and only longitudinal study on the sport marriage, this book corrects the abundance of misinformation reported by all forms of media, dispels undeserved stereotypes, and addresses inaccurate assumptions about the heteronormative sport marriage. It demonstrates how, despite major changes in society and sport since the end of the last century, the fundamental nature of the heteronormative sport marriage has not changed. Sport wives remain isolated and subordinate, even while they make significant contributions to their husbands’ careers. Identifying the sport marriage as a career-dominated marriage, the book allows us into these women’s public and private lives, including their need to conform to unwritten rules and codes, adapt to abundant power and control issues, cope with groupies from all walks of life, and find ways to deal with their oft-justified fears about their husbands’ infidelity. The book shares intimate stories about, and provides rare and unflinching insight into, what it is like to be married to these highly visible men, what it means to be a woman in the male-dominated world of professional sports, and why women remain in a sport marriage at great cost to themselves.


PMLA ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 124 (5) ◽  
pp. 1800-1805
Author(s):  
Diamela Eltit

Violence as a public and private practice is a constant. Furthermore, it belongs in the political axis since political institutions measure, plan, and distribute it, inscribing and administering it according to their productive and programmatic interests.Violence is adaptable and acquires different forms and formats, which range from the most concrete corporeal reality to the infliction of punishment on the symbolic and emotional registers of the subject. It is mobile but enduring, adjusting to the emergence of new social subjects. The enduring struggle against violence resituates and changes it, bringing about the penalization of practices considered abusive, such as long workdays, certain school regulations, or the beating of women.


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