scholarly journals ‘The Cruelty Towards Others Like Ourselves… is Difficult to Imagine Here as You Turn to Swim Your Twentieth Length.’ Swimming and Dreaming of Elsewhere with John Berger

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. C129-C147
Author(s):  
Jo Croft
Keyword(s):  
Life Writing ◽  
Form Of Life ◽  
John Berger ◽  
Ebb And Flow

Swimming, like reading, is an immersive activity: words wash away, and words arise. Engaging with writings by critics who are also swimmers, principally John Berger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, this article explores their writings about swimming in relation to how being in water can ‘conjure stories from the water’, and open up particular kinds of reflection and reverie. The fluidity of water spaces creates an imaginary that enables intellectually sensuous dreaming, while the ebb and flow of movements and identifications establish a poetics of swimming as a form of life writing.   

Diogenes Laertius and Philosophical Lives

2020 ◽  
pp. 250-266
Author(s):  
Stephen White
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Cultural Practice ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Greek Philosophy ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Form Of Life ◽  
Comprehensive Account ◽  
Ancient Greek Philosophy ◽  
Modern Perspective

This chapter addresses Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of Eminent Philosophers, which recounts the doings, sayings, and writings of the leading figures of ancient Greek philosophy from its origins down to its rapid efflorescence and institutionalization in the fourth and third centuries bc, with occasional glimpses of its continuing vitality in the centuries beyond. Diogenes’ Lives is an exceptional work on many counts. For one, it is the single largest collection of Lives to survive from classical Antiquity, handily surpassing Plutarch in number and scope if not in depth or length, and so too Philostratus and Suetonius. It is also a key witness to the early stages of biographical literature in the fourth and third centuries bc. At the same time, it presents the single most comprehensive account of the origins and development of an entire discipline, and a distinctive form of intellectual history from a biographical perspective. It also, accordingly, represents a distinctive form of life-writing, framed by basic biographical data but lean, often very lean on the standard biographical fare—from a modern perspective at least—of incident and narrative, and governed instead by its disciplinary orientation, and its sustained focus on philosophy as a distinctive cultural practice and way to live.

scholarly journals Prison Letters: Spain Confronts Its Past

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. LWFB80-LWFB87
Author(s):  
Martyn Lyons
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Human Dignity ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Critical Discussion ◽  
Form Of Life ◽  
The Face

In post-Franco Spain, the families of the regime’s victims, as well as other republican supporters, have not only struggled to recover the bodies of victims of the repression, but also have tried to recover a lost historical memory after years of imposed silence. Véronica Sierra Blas’s new study of Franco’s prisoners (there were approximately 280,000 of them) aims to give recognition and some human dignity to their obscure fate. This article offers a critical discussion of her study of a corpus of about 1500 letters written by prisoners during the Spanish Civil War and the subsequent Francoist repression. They include petitions to the authorities, messages secretly smuggled out of jail, and the ‘chapel letters’ written by condemned prisoners on the eve of their execution. Many of the latter were designed to be made public for propaganda purposes. This article suggests that as those condemned to execution reviewed their lives, their final farewells constituted a form of life writing in the face of certain death.

scholarly journals ‘Undoubtedly Love Letters’? Olive Schreiner’s Letters to Karl Pearson

2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-44
Author(s):  
Helen Dampier
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
The South ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Form Of Life ◽  
Unrequited Love ◽  
Love Letters ◽  
African Writer

Letters have sometimes been assumed to be a private form of life writing, and certainly many of the South African writer Olive Schreiner’s (1855–1920) letters have been read in this way. However, her letters trouble any simple, binary notions of public and private. This article offers a re-reading of Schreiner’s letters to the statistician and founder of the Men and Women’s Club, Karl Pearson (1857–1936). It argues that the dominant reading that has been made of these letters as ‘unrequited love letters’ needs rethinking, for when these letters are considered in their entirety and contextualised as part of Schreiner’s wider extant letters, and when the intertwining of their public and private aspects is recognised, it becomes clear that a considerably more complex interpretation of her letters is required, and that this has implications for reading letters more generally.

scholarly journals Youth Life Writing, Networked Media, Climate Change: The Challenge of Testimony to the Future

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. BB119-BB134
Author(s):  
Anna Poletti
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
New Media ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Political Responsibility ◽  
Form Of Life ◽  
Effective Form ◽  
The Future ◽  
Personal Testimony ◽  
Identity Category

This article examines some of Greta Thunberg’s life writing as an example of the creativity and ingenuity with which some young people engage with the identity category of ‘youth’ in their life writing. It argues that Thunberg’s activism uses personal testimony in order to amplify expertise testimony as an epistemic source that demands action on climate change. This strategic use of life writing produces a paradoxical, but seemingly effective, form of life writing in which Thunberg provides personal testimony to the future. The article analyses how this paradoxical form of testimony is produced by situating Thunberg’s life writing in the context of the social and political investment in youth as an identity genre central to understanding of the human life course, and to how political responsibility is figured in contemporary western democracies. Drawing on theories of new media as an affective site in which life unfolds, rather than being represented, the paper concludes by reflecting on how Wendy Chun’s argument that networks involve the twinning of habituation and crisis mirrors Thunberg’s argument that action on climate change demands that habitual ways of living and acting must be rethought in response to the climate crisis.

scholarly journals The Self in Verse. Exploring Autobiographical Poetry. Editorial

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. SV1-SV12
Author(s):  
Johannes Görbert ◽  
Marie Lindskov Hansen ◽  
Jeffrey Charles Wolf
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Form Of Life ◽  
Theoretical Approaches ◽  
Autobiographical Poetry ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
General Aspects ◽  
Comprehensive Study

This editorial introduces the four articles of the section “The Self in Verse. Exploring Autobiographical Poetry” and connects their specific findings to a variety of more general aspects in the study of life-writing. It sketches out preliminary considerations concerning the definition of autobiographical poetry and the relevance of paratexts and autofictionality for the genre. Furthermore, it outlines some of the most common recurring themes in poems dealing with autobiographical issues, such as writing (through) the body and exploring life’s crises, watersheds, and crossroads lyrically. We advocate for a more comprehensive study of autobiographical poetry as a form of life-writing that, in our view, has not yet been investigated systematically, neither by historical nor by theoretical approaches in literary and cultural studies.

scholarly journals Sam Ferguson's Diaries Real and Fictional in Twentieth-century French Writing

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. R6-R11
Author(s):  
Arnaud Schmitt
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Recent Book ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Form Of Life ◽  
Diary Writing ◽  
Set Up

Over the last two decades, Philippe Lejeune’s research has established diary-writing as maybe the only form of life-writing immune from panfictionalism. In an oft-quoted article (Lejeune 2007), the French theorist famously expressed his fiction and autofiction fatigue (‘[…] j’ai créé “antifiction” par agacement devant “autofiction”, le mot et la chose’, 3) and set up an insurmountable ontological barrier between autobiographies and diaries: ‘autobiography has fallen under the spell of fiction, diaries are enamored with truth’ (‘[…] l’autobiographie vit sous le charme de la fiction, le journal a le béguin pour la verité’, 3).1 In his more recent book, Aux Origines du Journal Personnel: France, 1750–1815 (2016), Lejeune not only reasserted this privileged connection between diaries and truth/reality—not unlike Barthes’s claim in La Chambre claire that photography cannot be distinguished from its referent— but went as far as removing diaries from the field of literary studies as, according to him, they do not constitute a literary genre (or only as an epiphenomenon). In Diaries Real and Fictional in Twentieth-Century French Writing, Sam Ferguson opts for an altogether different approach.

scholarly journals A Threefold Hybridity. Picturebook art fantasies as life writing

2014 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 63-81
Author(s):  
Ingrid Van der Heyden ◽  
Helma Van Lierop
Keyword(s):  
Life Writing ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Visual Artists ◽  
Adult Readers ◽  
Wassily Kandinsky ◽  
Form Of Life ◽  
Children's Book ◽  
Adults And Children ◽  
Words And Images ◽  
The Many

Picturebook art fantasies about the life and work of famous artists are usually studied from an art education perspective, but they are also interesting from the point of view of life writing, because of their hybridity on three levels: the combination of fact and fiction, the synergy between text and images and their attractiveness for both child and adult readers. In this article two picturebooks are examined on this threefold hybridity, one about Wassily Kandinsky and one about Piet Mondrian. Both books are part of a series of picturebooks, initiated by the Municipal Museum in The Hague and Dutch children’s book publisher Leopold. It is argued that the postmodern experimentation with the form which is characteristic of life narratives for adults, can also be observed in children’s literature. The biographies of Kandinsky and Mondrian make use of novelistic techniques and the interplay between words and images to tell about the life and work of these two visual artists. The many allusions in text and images to the art and the poetics of the two painters show that these picturebooks are a challenging form of life writing for both adults and children.  

An Immanent Criticism of Urban Design in Montevideo

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Washington MORALES
Keyword(s):  
Urban Design ◽  
Applied Ethics ◽  
Form Of Life ◽  
Political Reality ◽  
Applied Philosophy ◽  
Points Of View ◽  
Philosophical Frameworks

The debate about the so called “excluding design” has been a focus for applied philosophy for several years. The structure of this debate is constituted by deontological and consequentialist’s applied ethics and as well as agonistic democratic approaches. This paper asks for the applicability of these points of view to the particular socio-political reality of Montevideo. Examining this reality closer, I hold that we cannot comprehend the recent aestheticization of the excluding design there through these contemporary philosophical frameworks. As an alternative philosophical procedure, I analyze the aestheticization of excluding design in Montevideo from Rahel Jaeggi’s immanent criticism. I hold that this process of aestheticization implies an ideological regressive “form of life”. And I also argue that the Uruguayan democracy is affected by this ideological regression. Nevertheless, because this aestheticization is not an exclusive Uruguayan phenomenon, this paper intends to open one direction in applied philosophy of urban design.

ДОСВІД У ДИСКУСІЙНОМУ ПОЛІ ПОЗИЦІЮВАННЯ КАТЕГОРІЇ "ТВОРЧИЙ ПОТЕНЦІАЛ"

1970 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 62-71
Author(s):  
Лариса Міщиха
Keyword(s):  
Coming Out ◽  
Motion Vector ◽  
Integral Form ◽  
Phenomenological Approach ◽  
Humanistic Psychology ◽  
Creative Potential ◽  
Form Of Life ◽  
Conceptual Background ◽  
Creative Experience ◽  
The One

У статті зроблено спробу проаналізувати феномен "досвід" у форматі дослідження творчого потенціалу особистості. Теоретико-методологічними засадами заявленої вище проблеми стали концептуальні засади гуманістичної психології, феноменологічного підходу. Досвід, як вагома складова творчого потенціалу особистості, розглядається у співвідношенні таких провідних тенденцій, як стереотипність та оригінальність. Наголошується, що досвід, з одного боку, може сприяти все більшій алгоритмізації та стереотипізації, консерватизму у розв’язанні нових задач, що безумовно перешкоджає творчості. З іншого боку, в осіб з високим творчим потенціалом він стає інтегрованою формою життєтворчості, де в структурі старих знань завжди знайдеться місце новим знанням як привнесених "ззовні", так і знанням, що їх отримує автор через власні ініціації, пошук, накреслюючи власноруч вектор руху. Звідси він отримує "побічний продукт" творчої діяльності – саморозвиток. Відтак творчий досвід трактується як такий, що містить у собі акумуляцію та інтеграцію усіх прижиттєвих творчих напрацювань особистості, готовність її до творчої діяльності та безперервної освіти. Суб’єкт творчої діяльності залишається відкритим новому досвіду, сповнений готовності до нового пізнання, творчих пошуків. In the article there was an attempt to analyze the phenomenon "experience" in the form of investigating a person’s creative potential. The theoretic methodological background of the performed above problem is conceptual background of humanistic psychology and phenomenological approach. Experience as an essential part of a person’s creative potential is regarded in relation to such leading trends as stereotype and originality. On the one hand, the experience is emphasized to be able to promote the model of algorithm and stereotype, conservatism in solving new tasks that is certain to inhibit creativity. On the other hand, personalities with high creative potential have an experience that is becoming an integral form of life work where in the structure of old knowledge you can always find a place for both new ones coming out "from inside" and the ones the author takes due to his own initiation and search. In this way he sketches motion vector and gets the "by-product" of his creativity, it means self-development. Hence, creative experience is interpreted as the one to absorb accumulation and integration of all creative experience in a person’s life; also his/her readiness to creativity and continuing education. The subject of creativity remains opened to a new experience that is fully ready for a new cognition and creativity.

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