The Diary among Other Forms of Life Writing

The Diary ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 58-72
Author(s):  
Julie Rak
Keyword(s):  
Life Writing ◽  
Forms Of Life

“Sweet Home”: Audre Lorde's Zami and the legacies of American Writing

2009 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 297-317 ◽  
Author(s):  
MONICA B. PEARL
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Coming Out ◽  
Life Story ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Slave Narrative ◽  
Audre Lorde ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
American Life ◽  
Forms Of Life

Although Audre Lorde calls the narrative of her life Zami: A New Spelling of My Name a “biomythography,” suggesting that the life of an African American lesbian cannot be told in any previously available generic forms of life-writing or self-expression, Zami actually derives from two extant American literary traditions – the African American slave narrative and the lesbian coming out story – rendering it, after all, not a marginal text, but rather a text that falls obviously and firmly in a tradition of American literature. Both traditions turn siginificantly on the trope of “home,” of finding a home where one belongs. In finding the “home” that she is seeking not, ultimately, geographically, but, rather, generically – in the very text she is writing – Lorde's life story also ends up signifying the similarity of these two ostensibly disparate forms: the slave narrative and the coming out story, suggesting a common narrative trajectory of marginal American identities in the tradition of American life-writing.

Life Writing and Domestic Papers

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret J. M. Ezell
Keyword(s):  
Personal Narratives ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Margaret Cavendish ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
Forms Of Life ◽  
John Evelyn ◽  
Life Writings

Perhaps because of the turbulent and unsettled times, many men and women recorded their experiences in forms of life writing, including memoirs, diaries, autobiographies and biographies, meditations, and narratives of events. Among the most prolific publishers of life writings were the early Quakers, who published their accounts to offer comfort to others. Other texts such as those by John Evelyn, Margaret Cavendish, and Robert Boyle recorded events and impressions, as well as creating personal narratives.

scholarly journals The Selfie on Europe’s Shores: Ai Weiwei and the Selfie as a Means of Safe Passage

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Anna Poletti
Keyword(s):  
Life Writing ◽  
Digital Age ◽  
Forms Of Life

In the introduction to On Histories and Stories, A. S. Byatt argues that ‘those of us who write about modern writing have a duty to keep the discussion open’ in order ‘to create new paradigms, which will bring new books, new styles, new preoccupations to the attention of readers’. This paper considers how Byatt’s suggestion about the role of the critic writing about living authors can be adapted for scholarship and criticism that seeks to respond to new forms of life writing that have emerged in the digital age.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Marcus
Keyword(s):  
Life Writing ◽  
Self Identity ◽  
Autobiographical Writing ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Forms Of Life

Autobiography continues to be one of the most popular forms of writing, produced by authors from across the social and professional spectrum. It is also central to the work of literary critics, philosophers, historians, and psychologists, who have found in autobiographies not only an understanding of the ways in which lives have been lived, but the most fundamental accounts of what it means to be a self in the world. The Introduction describes what autobiography means and compares it to other forms of ‘life-writing’. Autobiographical writing is seen to act as a window on to concepts of self, identity, and subjectivity, and into the ways in which these are themselves determined by time and circumstance.

scholarly journals ‘And Yet, What Would We Be Without Memory?’ Visualizing Memory in Two Canadian Graphic Texts

2018 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-24
Author(s):  
Dagmara Drewniak
Keyword(s):  
Holocaust Survivors ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Visual Image ◽  
Anne Michaels ◽  
Autobiographical Texts ◽  
Writing Genres ◽  
Experimental Works ◽  
Forms Of Life

Abstract Since “we live in a culture of confession” (Gilmore 2001: 2; Rak 2005: 2) a rapidly growing popularity of various forms of life writing seems understandable. The question of memory is usually an important part of the majority of autobiographical texts. Taking into account both the popularity of life writing genres and their recent proliferation, it is interesting to see how the question “what would we be without memory?” (Sebald 1998 [1995]: 255) resonates within more experimental auto/biographical texts such as a graphic memoir/novel I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors (2006) by Bernice Eisenstein and a volume of illustrated poetry and a biographical elegy published together as Correspondences (2013) by Anne Michaels and Bernice Eisenstein. These two experimental works, though representing disparate forms of writing, offer new stances on visualization of memory and correspondences between text and visual image. The aim of this paper is to analyze the ways in which the two authors discuss memory as a fluid concept yet, at the same time, one having its strong, ghostly presence. The discussion will also focus on the interplay between memory and postmemory as well as correspondences between the texts and the equally important visual forms accompanying them such as drawings, portraits, sketches, and the bookbinding itself.

scholarly journals Narrating Resistance: Ludmilla Alexeyeva and Paul Goldberg’s „The Thaw Generation” 1990

2017 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 55-66
Author(s):  
Christina Jüttner ◽  
Mirja Lecke
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Forms Of Life

The production and circulation of literary, documentary, and political texts were among the main activities of dissenters in the Soviet Union. Many of them also kept diaries or notebooks, wrote memoirs or engaged in other forms of life writing. While these texts more or less explicitly claim to authentically represent reality, they nonetheless arise as a construction based on literary strategies. The analysis of the latter in Ludmilla Alexeyeva and Paul Goldberg’s The Thaw Generation is the subject of this article. We discuss the rhetoric of these memoirs focusing particularly on stylistic features and argumentative structures that are meant to grant the text credibility among American and Russian readers.

scholarly journals Agency and Self Expression: Fan Writing as Life Writing

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Renu Elizabeth Abraham ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Broad Sense ◽  
Sense Of Agency ◽  
Community Based ◽  
Freudian Psychoanalysis ◽  
Technical Sense ◽  
Forms Of Life ◽  
And Function

Fans, fandoms and fan activities have been part of every culture from time immemorial. Homer’s epics, Plato’s work all could be considered in a broad sense as belonging to the larger domain of fan activity or fan ‘art’ as they are termed in modern-day parlance. This paper examines India Forums a digital fan community based in India for audiences and fans of Indian television soaps/serials and attempts to understand how fanfiction and fan activities within this forum act as means of self-expression and enable its fans to develop a sense of agency that is indigenous to the space in itself. This community is predominantly populated by women or ‘gender anonymous’ and function as a space that allows fans to construct their own voices, identities and thereby agency, which is most often restricted to that space alone. The fans though not subaltern, in the technical sense of the term, as they belong to the urban space, have access to a computer and can read, write and speak English although not fluently, are still urban middle-class women who have been spoken for and never spoken themselves; and India Forums enable these unheard voices to be heard. This reading analyses the dynamics of this agential space, the politics of this agency and argues that all fan writing within this space functions as life writing within a hypertextual metaconversational paradigm which is not necessarily reflective of traditional forms of life writing using notions of revisionist Freudian psychoanalysis and paradigms of life writing.

scholarly journals 'Subjecive Cameras': Authorship, Form, and Interpretation of Mass Observation Life Writings

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. MO16-MO44
Author(s):  
T.G. Ashplant
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Self Perceptions ◽  
The Social ◽  
Forms Of Life ◽  
Rich Material ◽  
Life Writings

The Mass Observation Archive contains a wealth of different forms of life writing created between 1937 and the mid-1950s, and again from 1981 to the present. This life writing, by contributors with differing intentions and levels of commitment, is fragmentary, dispersed across the archive, and takes varied forms. To make full use of the richness of this writing, it is necessary to know who the authors were, how their texts were generated, what forms of life writing resulted, and how they may be interpreted. This contextualising overview first outlines the specific and distinctive forms of life writing which MO initiated and encouraged; the social profile of their authors, and their self-perceptions of their identities; the writers' motivations; and their relationship to the Archive. It then explores some of the ways in which scholars have used and interpreted this rich material, both as a resource for investigating specific topics, and as a collection of life writings open to comparative analysis as narratives of self-construction and records of biographical trajectories.

scholarly journals Mass Observation (1937-2017) and Life Writing: an Introduction

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. MO1-MO15
Author(s):  
T.G. Ashplant
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Policy Formation ◽  
Research Project ◽  
New Methods ◽  
Innovative Research ◽  
Forms Of Life ◽  
The University ◽  
Life Writings

Mass Observation (MO) was formed in Britain in 1937 as an innovative research project, to develop new methods for accurately gauging public opinion, thereby contributing to a more democratic form of politics and public policy formation. The archive of its first phase (1937-49) was transferred to the University of Sussex in 1970. In 1981 it was revived as the Mass Observation Project (MOP), which continues to the present. The documentation which MO and MOP together generated includes a significant body of life writings. The purpose of this cluster of articles is to introduce the ways in which the interaction between the aims and approaches of MO's founders and its later MOP refounders, and the responses of its contributors, produced specific forms of life writing; and to explore aspects of the 'afterlife' of these texts – their contextualisation, publication, and interpretation. This introduction situates the original, multifaceted and idiosyncratic, MO project within wider political and cultural trends of the 1930s, and then examines MO's methods, which aimed at 'the observation by everyone of everyone, including themselves'.

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