7. The Anne Sexton Controversy: “There Is Nothing Like This in the History of Literary Biography!”

2020 ◽  
pp. 144-174
Keyword(s):  
Anne Sexton ◽  
Literary Biography ◽  
History Of

Biopics

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Brown ◽  
Belén Vidal
Keyword(s):  
Digital Culture ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Social Worlds ◽  
French Cinema ◽  
Literary Biography ◽  
National Narratives ◽  
Common Term ◽  
British Cinema ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One

“Biopic” (sometimes spelled “bio-pic”) is the most common term used to refer to films representing any aspect of the lives of famous people from the past or the present. Of unclear origins, the term seems to have originated in the trade papers and then penetrated the consciousness of producers and critics. Its widespread use has replaced the more formal “biographical picture.” Originally associated with the prestige pictures produced by the Hollywood studios during the classic era, the term has also become naturalized in the domain of British cinema (particularly with the consolidation of studies on heritage cinema). “Biopic” has also entered (not without certain resistance) the vocabulary of the study of other national cinemas, such as the French cinema. While George Custen’s 1992 study of the studio biopic established the foundations for its study as a Hollywood genre, the debates about the biopic have pursued several lines of inquiry from the start. On the one hand, the genre was perceived as a belated offspring of popular biographical formats at a time (the early 20th century) when literary biography was moving to new and experimental forms of life writing. On the other, the biopic began to be studied as a form of historical cinema, and as such it could become the target of historians’ concerns about fidelity and (mis-)representation, agency, and the ideological subtexts underpinning the retelling of history as well as the reconstruction of national narratives. The genre’s unabated popularity throughout the history of cinema has spawned attempts to classify and analyze its recurrent iconography in terms of types of biographical subjects and social worlds represented in the biopic. Likewise, the biopic’s showcase of film performance and its star-making capabilities have proved particularly fertile field of debate. So too has its biased fetishization of the great white man as the agent of history been much discussed from gender-informed perspectives. In our era of media convergence and the explosion of celebrity culture, the biopic is at the center of a new wave of scholarly interest in transmedia formats (such as the biopic/docudrama hybrids) and the possibilities opened up by a new digital culture obsessed with the self.

Chronicling Trauma

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Doug Underwood
Keyword(s):  
Charles Dickens ◽  
News Media ◽  
Ernest Hemingway ◽  
The United States ◽  
Traumatic Experience ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Literary Biography ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Journalism ◽  
The Impact

To attract readers, journalists have long trafficked in the causes of trauma—crime, violence, warfare—as well as psychological profiling of deviance and aberrational personalities. Novelists, in turn, have explored these same subjects in developing their characters and by borrowing from their own traumatic life stories to shape the themes and psychological terrain of their fiction. This book offers a conceptual and historical framework for comprehending the impact of trauma and violence in the careers and the writings of important journalist–literary figures in the United States and British Isles from the early 1700s to today. Grounded in the latest research in the fields of trauma studies, literary biography, and the history of journalism, the book draws upon the lively accounts of popular writers such as Charles Dickens, Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, Graham Greene, and Truman Capote, exploring the role that trauma has played in shaping their literary works. The book notes that the influence of traumatic experience upon journalistic literature is being reshaped by a number of factors, including news media trends, the advance of the Internet, the changing nature of the journalism profession, the proliferation of psychoactive drugs, and journalists' greater self-awareness of the impact of trauma in their work. The book discusses more than a hundred writers whose works have won them fame, even at the price of their health, their families, and their lives.

Addison and the Victorians

2021 ◽  
pp. 308-328
Author(s):  
Brian Young
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Feminist Criticism ◽  
Literary Biography ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
Valuable Study ◽  
History Of

The masculine world of Addison’s eighteenth-century ‘republic of letters’ was mirrored by that inhabited by Victorian ‘Men of Letters’, and hence much of the lively interest taken in him by nineteenth-century cultural commentators and makers of (and historians of) public opinion. The agnostic manliness of such men as Leslie Stephen and W. J. Courthope informed the way they wrote about Addison, whose Christianity they tended to slight and who was described by them as ‘delicate’. Macaulay had been more admiring of Addison as a Christian gentleman, while Thackeray praised him as an English humorist. Pope and Swift continued to enjoy an ascendancy in eighteenth-century English literary history, with Addison and Steele appreciated more for having been ‘characteristic’ of their age than as acting in any way as intellectually innovative figures. Matthew Arnold was notably critical of Addison, whom he found provincial and narrow. Both Addison and his Victorian critics were subjected to feminist criticism by Virginia Woolf, who happened to be Stephen’s daughter, but she in her turn slighted the most significant early Victorian study of Addison, the life written by the Unitarian Lucy Aikin. The ‘long nineteenth century’ in the English literary history of the eighteenth century is thus bookended by studies of Addison by women, and it is time that justice was paid to Aikin’s pioneering and still valuable study, submerged as it has been by readers of Macaulay’s essay on Addison, which was ostensibly a review of Aikin’s exercise in literary biography.

Anne Sexton Listening to Anne Sexton

PMLA ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 135 (2) ◽  
pp. 387-392
Author(s):  
Tanya E. Clement
Keyword(s):  
Suicide Attempt ◽  
Anne Sexton ◽  
University Of Texas ◽  
Advanced Study ◽  
Audio Recordings ◽  
History Of ◽  
The University ◽  
Therapy Sessions ◽  
Journal Entries ◽  
Weekly Therapy

Anne Sexton Met Her Psychiatrist, Martin Orne, in 1956, After Her Second Suicide Attempt. They Started Recording Their twice- (sometimes thrice-)weekly therapy sessions in early 1961, continuing until 1964, and Orne advised Sexton to listen to these recordings and write down her responses while listening and later relistening to them. Several hundred recordings of these therapy sessions have survived and reside in the Sexton collection at the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and Sexton's responses have been preserved in four handwritten and typed journals, dating from January 1961 to August 1964, held at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin. Arguably, playing the sessions back to herself shaped Sexton's memories, her evolving understanding of her past, and her sense of identity. The extant ensemble of texts, comprising the audio recordings, typed and handwritten journal entries, and poetry, illustrate how playback influenced this evolution.

The Literariness of Philosophers’ Lives in Twentieth-Century Polish Prose

Tekstualia ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (56) ◽  
pp. 115-126
Author(s):  
Patrycjusz Kisła
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Biography ◽  
Literature And Philosophy ◽  
History Of

The article offers an outline of the history of literary biography, in particular the lives of philosophers, to identify a corresponding tradition in twentieth-century Polish prose. The most important category of analysis is the literariness of texts that border on literature and philosophy. This accounts for the key signifi cance of the problem of genre.

scholarly journals Two letters by the Amfiteatrovs to Petr Krasnov: Finishing the project

Literary Fact ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 360-370
Author(s):  
George Cheron
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Literary History ◽  
The Political ◽  
World War ◽  
Literary Biography ◽  
Large Complex ◽  
Literary Heritage ◽  
History Of ◽  
Emigre Writers

Journalist, prose writer, playwright Alexander Amfiteatrov and Ataman of the Great Don Army General Petr Krasnov, the author of numerous novels and short stories, belonged to the older generation of Russian émigré writers. Amfiteatrov lived in Italy, and Krasnov in Paris, and they communicated by mail. Their correspondence that began in 1927 lasted more than 10 years, until Amfiteatrov’s death. The previously published large complex of their letters contains not only significant additions to the literary biography of correspondents, but also an important information on the political, social, and literary history of the Russian Abroad in the 1920s and 1930s. Moreover, Krasnov’s letters are only a small part of the huge Amfiteatrov émigré collection, researched by the author of this publication in collaboration with Oleg Korostelev with plans to devote several books of the Amfiteatrov volume in the academic series “Literary Heritage” to these materials. This publication presents two recently discovered letters to Krasnov, written by Amfiteatrov himself and by his widow, reporting on her efforts to collect a book in her husband's memory during the outbreak of World War II.

Lives and Letters. A History of Literary Biography in England and America

Books Abroad ◽  
1966 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 332
Author(s):  
Stanley Weintraub ◽  
Richard D. Altick
Keyword(s):  
Literary Biography ◽  
History Of

The Breath of the Poem: Confessional Print/Performance circa 1959

PMLA ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 127 (2) ◽  
pp. 215-230
Author(s):  
Christopher Grobe
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
American Poetry ◽  
Confessional Poetry ◽  
Anne Sexton ◽  
Performance Style ◽  
Print Form ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Recorded Performances

This essay offers an early chapter in the conjoined history of poetry and performance art, literary criticism and performance studies. Beginning in the mid-1950s and with increasing fervor through the 1960s, American poetry lived simultaneously in print, on vinyl, and in embodied performance. Amid this environment of multimedia publicity, an oddly private poetry emerged. The essay locates confessional poetry in the performance-rich context of its birth and interrogates not only its textual voice but also its embodied, performed breath. Focusing on early confessional work by Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton, this essay conducts side-by-side “readings” of printed poems and recorded performances and suggests that confessional refers to an intermedial, print-performance style—a particular logic for capturing personal performances in print form and for breathing performances back out of the printed page.

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