Unsentimental Testimony: The Critical Potential of Working-Class Student Life Writing

2006 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 65-78
Author(s):  
Wendy Ryden
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Student Life ◽  
Critical Potential

Lydia Sigourney in the Land of Steady Habits

2021 ◽  
pp. 88-118
Author(s):  
Gretchen Murphy
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
New England ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
War Of 1812 ◽  
Early Writing ◽  
Religious Tolerance ◽  
Mass Market ◽  
New Era ◽  
Old Order ◽  
Lydia Sigourney

This chapter examines Lydia Huntley Sigourney’s early writing (Moral Pieces in Prose and Verse and Sketch of Connecticut) and her life writing to understand her projects of affiliating with Connecticut Federalism and narrating continuity between Connecticut Federalism its political successors after the War of 1812. It examines her historical portrayal of conflicts over social class, religion, and government, including the Hartford Convention and the state watershed election of 1818, Congregationalism and religious toleration, and Mohegan evangelism and Samson Occum, as well as Sigourney’s autobiographical portrayal of her own shifting position in these conflicts. This analysis complicates two scholarly tendencies: to portray Sigourney as a democratic, working-class poet and to oppose mass market sentimental piety with the old order of New England Puritanism and established religion. It shows instead that Sigourney represented herself as a Federalist daughter harkening back to and adapting the vision of a classically republican organic society. Her treatment of religious tolerance is shown to be central to this project insofar as it was both a means to deflect criticism of the Federalists and to adapt arguments for state religion to a new era of religious privatization.

scholarly journals “Things I Can Remember about My Life”: Autobiography and Fatherhood in Victorian Britain

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Emma Griffin
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Reading Strategies ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Annotated Bibliography ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
Alternative Strategy ◽  
Extensive Reading ◽  
Domestic Life ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
Women And Children

Abstract It is now nearly forty years since John Burnett, David Vincent, and David Mayall compiled their invaluable and much-used three-volume finding aid, The Autobiography of the Working Class: An Annotated, Critical Bibliography (1984–1989), and established working-class autobiography as an important documentary source for exploring the lives of the working poor. Life writing now forms the basis of historical research into areas such as the emotions and domestic life that had hardly been imagined at the time that the annotated bibliography was produced. Yet as research into working-class autobiography has extended into new domains of enquiry, there has been less innovation in methodology. Historians typically use autobiographical material to pursue deep-reading strategies and unpack the meaning, experience, and identity of individual writers rather than generalize about working-class life more broadly. In this article I offer an alternative strategy: to take the autobiographical corpus and read it at scale in order to better understand fatherhood in Victorian Britain. Through a combination of intensive and extensive reading, I demonstrate that many working-class men failed to live up to expectations as breadwinners, and I explore the ramifications of that failure for the women and children with whom they lived.

Una lettera inedita ad Antonio de Viti de Marco

1983 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-71
Author(s):  
Maffeo Pantaleoni
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Student Life

Abstract In 1879 Maffeo Pantaleoni, who was at that time a student at the faculty of law of the Rome University, wrote a letter to Antonio de Viti de Marco, who was a colleague of his in the same faculty.This letter is written in English, since Maffeo Pantaleoni in his early youth had a better command of English than of Italian. In it, Pantaleoni presents a vivid picture of his student life, and also expresses many interesting views about the situation of the working class in Italy at that time.

“Everything Being Tangled Up in Every Other Thing”: Class, Desire, and Shame in Michelle Tea'sThe Passionate Mistakes and Intricate Corruption of One Girl in America

Hypatia ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 469-484
Author(s):  
Emma McKenna
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Sex Work ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Reading Strategy ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Private Individual

This article explores the relationship of shame to class and to desire in Michelle Tea's memoirThe Passionate Mistakes and Intricate Corruption of One Girl in America. Through applying a class analytic to the framework of shame recently advanced by feminist, queer, postcolonial, and affect theorists, I foreground shame as central to the experience of being poor and queer, and examine shame as not only negative and positive, but as productive. I operationalize an “oppositional reading strategy” to insist on attention to the materiality of embodied desire and labor, in particular queer desire and sex work, that is made available in poor and working‐class women's life‐writing. Tea's memoir demonstrates how writing about an ambivalent relation to shame is an act of resistance, an opportunity to transform private, individual experiences into public, and therefore collective, articulations.

Experiments in cinematic biography: Ken Gampu’s early life in the cinema

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 119-135
Author(s):  
Litheko Modisane
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
South African ◽  
Early Life ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Experimental Methodology ◽  
Film Production ◽  
Critical Potential ◽  
African Film ◽  
Form Part ◽  
Black Actors

Contemporary scholarship on South African film is yet to address the participation of Black actors in film production, exhibition and publicity. The actors’ interpretive roles in the films, their memories and experiences, and the contradictions of their participation in colonial films and beyond, form part of an unexplored and hidden archive in South African film scholarship. This article focuses on Ken Gampu’s early life in the cinema by reflecting on his participation in two films: a western The Hellions and the drama Dingaka. Gampu was a well-known South African actor and also the first Black actor from that country to succeed in Hollywood. This article proposes an experimental methodology of life-writing called ‘cinematic biography’. It shows that the cinematic lives of the marginalized and colonized actors harbour critical potential in enriching the critical perspectives on the cinema and cinematic cultures in South Africa and beyond.

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