Autobiography and the Intellectual

2020 ◽  
pp. 105-150
Author(s):  
Alex Belsey ◽  
Alex Belsey

This chapter reveals how Keith Vaughan reconfigured his wartime journal-writing as a comprehensive autobiographical project that would record his memories and experiences and transform them into a creative product. Having declared a policy of full disclosure and a commitment to resist self-censorship, he embarked upon a programme of self-education, redolent of Bildung, that made his journal the record of a developing mind and that allowed him to fold influences from literature, philosophy, and modernism into his own writing. The first section of this chapter describes how Vaughan’s journal became a consciously literary autobiographical project concerned with time and memory, regarding the third volume as a distinct milestone wherein Vaughan first articulated his desire to write autobiography and began to fully recognize (and experiment with) the possibilities of life-writing. The second section focusses on Vaughan’s autodidacticism, which encompassed the reading of other life-writers and his discovery of seminal works (by such key figures as T. S. Eliot and Marcel Proust) that greatly influenced him and helped him to identify, albeit precariously, with Oxbridge intellectualism. The third section confirms the enduring importance of Vaughan’s journal as a continuous autobiographical document which he could refer back to and re-evaluate during periods of duress.

2020 ◽  
pp. 61-102
Author(s):  
Alex Belsey ◽  
Alex Belsey

This chapter analyses how, in his wartime journal-writing, Keith Vaughan articulated the social differences and exclusions that he believed were preventing him from fully participating in British society. In his accounts of failing to connect with those around him, he romanticized his failures and dramatized his distance from others, thereby justifying his exclusion and ultimately ascribing himself the powerful (if lonely) role of observer – a position from which he could assert superiority over his fellow C.O.s and men of lower social class whilst representing them in his sketches, paintings, and bathing pictures. The first section of this chapter considers how Vaughan used the early volumes of his journal to record his difficulties in making contact with his fellow man and reinforce them through self-dramatization. The second section explores the strategies employed by Vaughan to emphasize his difference from other individuals and groups, particularly around his homosexuality and artistic inclinations, and therefore justify and maintain his distance from them. The third section argues that Vaughan constructed an empowering role that made use of his remove from male society: that of the observer, enabling him to laud his own powers of perception whilst evading the problems of social involvement and possible surveillance.


2018 ◽  
Vol 36 (3 Noviembr) ◽  
pp. 397-416
Author(s):  
Felipe Nicolás Mujica Johnson

Las emociones históricamente no han sido reconocidas por su importancia en el sistema educativo chileno, sino más bien han sido ignoradas en los procesos de aprendizajes. Con el propósito de reivindicar esta situación, el propósito del estudio, es identificar la percepción y atribución emocional de los estudiantes de Pedagogía en Educación Física, en el taller integrado de formación en la práctica 1. El estudio responde al enfoque cualitativo y sus participantes son 19 estudiantes de la cohorte 2016. Los datos fueron recopilados por medio de la técnica del diario personal, grupos focales y entrevistas individuales no estandarizadas, que dieron paso al análisis de los datos, por medio de la teoría fundamentada. Los resultados indican que el alumnado percibe emociones positivas y negativas, las cuales son atribuidas a cuatro principales categorías. La primera de ellas está referida a las acciones del docente, la segunda a las acciones del estudiante, la tercera a los imaginarios del estudiante y la última a sucesos externos a la clase. Se concluye que una labor pedagógica con interacciones comprensivas, alegres y una metodología basada en el enfoque constructivista, en donde el alumnado cumple un rol activo en su aprendizaje, genera una percepción de emociones positivas. Historically the Chilean educational system has not recognized the importance of emotions; on the contrary they have been ignored in learning processes. In order to denounce this situation, the purpose of this study is to identify emotional perceptions and attributions in students of Pedagogy in Physical Education during their first Practicum placement. The study follows a qualitative approach and the participants are 19 students of year 2016. Data were collected through journal writing, focus groups and non-standardized individual interviews, which gave way to the analysis of the data, through grounded theory. The results indicate that students perceived positive and negative emotions which can be classified within four main categories. The first refers to teachers’ actions, the second to student's actions, the third to students’ imaginaries and the last category to events which are external to the class. It is concluded that pedagogical work which fosters comprehensive and cheerful interactions and a methodology based on constructivist approaches, where students play an active role in their learning, creates perceptions of positive emotions.


The Comics of Alison Bechdel is the first full-length volume dedicated to the comics art of Alison Bechdel, beginning with her early work on the long-running serial comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For and including original scholarship on her acclaimed memoirs Fun Home and Are You My Mother?. The volume is organized into three sections. The first looks at Bechdel’s place in lesbian comics and considers her work in the context of gay and lesbian studies and queer theory. The second looks at kinship, affect, and trauma in Bechdel’s work, with a focus on interiority and the artist’s experiments with comics form. The third looks at place, space, and community, considering the significance of rural queer life, topography and mapping, and forms of LGBTQ community. Archival research and theories of the archive provide new insight into Bechdel’s art, including the composition of Fun Home and the development of the lesser-known Servants to the Cause, which appeared in The Advocate in the late 1980s. An introductory essay orients readers to Bechdel’s career—her childhood in Beech Creek, her involvement in LGBTQ activism and lesbian comix, her move inward towards life writing, and the mainstream cultural recognition prompted by the adaptation of Fun Home into a Tony Award-winning Broadway musical—as well as to current trends in Bechdel scholarship.


2015 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. VCi-VCiii
Author(s):  
Tobias Heinrich ◽  
Monica Soeting

Following two successful conferences in Amsterdam in 2009 and in Tallinn in 2011, the third IABA Europe biennial conference, held from 31 October to 3 November 2013 in Vienna and hosted by the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for the History and Theory of Biography, was entitled “Beyond the Subject. New Developments in Life Writing” and aimed at bridging the gap between historical forms of life writing and the most recent medial transformations in the genre of life writing, like personal websites, blogs and social networks as new spaces in the autobiographical public sphere. At the same time, the conference focused on auto/biographical practices that consciously undermine the traditional Western concept of the subject and develop alternative models of life writing.After the conference, participants were invited to submit articles based on their papers presented at the 2013 IABA Europe conference, to be published in the European Journal of Life Writing. In this section of the journal you will find more samples of the different topics that were addressed during the conference; the first six articles based on papers presented at the conference can be found in Volume III of the Journal. This article was submitted in December 2014 and published on 16 March 2015.


Author(s):  
Aleksi Peltonen

The chapter explores legal life-writing as a method of history within the context of international criminal law. It offers a biographical sketch of Theodor Meron and discusses some of his major works and especially his humanization thesis in light of the structural changes that occurred in the international legal order after the end of the Cold War. This account serves a triple function. The first is to draw a linkage between Meron’s scholarly works and certain developments in international criminal law. The second is to offer a critical perspective on the humanization thesis. The third is to ask questions about human agency, structural constraints, and historical causality in a self-reflective manner. Thus apart from being a work of legal life-writing in itself, the chapter simultaneously seeks to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of this form of history.


2014 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. VCi-VCiii
Author(s):  
Tobias Heinrich ◽  
Monica Soeting

Following two successful conferences in Amsterdam in 2009 and in Tallinn in 2011, the third IABA Europe biennial conference, held from 31 October to 3 November 2013 in Vienna and hosted by the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for the History and Theory of Biography, was entitled “Beyond the Subject. New Developments in Life Writing” and aimed at bridging the gap between historical forms of life writing and the most recent medial transformations in the genre of life writing, like personal websites, blogs and social networks as new spaces in the autobiographical public sphere. At the same time, the conference focused on auto/biographical practices that consciously undermine the traditional Western concept of the subject and develop alternative models of life writing. After the conference, participants were invited to submit articles based on their papers presented at the 2013 IA BA Europe conference, to be published in the European Journal of Life Writing. In this section of the journal you will find samples of the different topics that were addressed during the conference. This article was submitted on September 1st, 2014, and published on November 3rd, 2014.


Author(s):  
Alex Belsey

The post-war British artist Keith Vaughan (1912-77) painted male figures, whether alone or in groups, as a life-long enquiry into identity, sensuality, and the sanctity of the body. Yet Vaughan was not only a supremely accomplished painter; he was an impassioned, eloquent writer. Commenced in the summer of 1939 as war across Europe seemed inevitable, Vaughan’s journal was a space in which he could articulate ideas about politics, art, love and sex during a period of great political and personal upheaval. Image of a Man is the first book to provide a comprehensive critical reading of Vaughan’s extraordinary journal, which spans thirty-eight years and sixty-one volumes to form a major literary work and a fascinating document of changing times. From close textual analysis of the original manuscripts, this book uncovers the attitudes and arguments that shaped and reshaped Vaughan’s identity as a man and as an artist. It reveals a continual process of self-construction through journal-writing, undertaken to navigate the difficulties of conscientious objection, the complications of desire as a gay man, and the challenges of making meaningful art. By focussing on Vaughan’s journal-writing in the context of its many influences and its centrality to his art practice, Image of a Man offers not only a compelling new critical biography of a significant yet underappreciated artist, but also a sustained argument on the constructed nature of the ‘artist’ persona in early and mid-twentieth-century culture – and the opportunities afforded by life-writing, specifically journal and diary forms, to make such constructions possible.


2020 ◽  
pp. 151-206
Author(s):  
Alex Belsey ◽  
Alex Belsey

This chapter explores how Keith Vaughan overcame his disillusionment in the early 1940s and revived his hopes of being a painter through engagements with art theory that enabled him to construct through journal-writing an ideal type of the artist that he could emulate. Embracing this conceptualisation, Vaughan enjoyed a post-war period of success, but by the early 1960s was consumed by feelings of self-loathing which he explored in his resurgent journal-writing, resulting in a tumultuous period of unprecedented productivity and restless sexual experimentation. The first section of this chapter reveals how Vaughan constructed his ideal type of the artist during a crucial period in 1943, drawing inspiration from art history, art criticism, and appreciation of Paul Cézanne to laud the necessity of search and struggle to the artist’s mission. The second section describes how Vaughan neglected his journal whilst he enjoyed success in the British art world. The third section re-joins Vaughan in 1962, finding him profoundly dissatisfied with his life and work and attempting to re-assert control over both by drawing on sexology and psychoanalysis to make his journal an account of experiments in autoeroticism, subjectivity and sensation that once again reconfigured his conception of art and the artist.


2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (6) ◽  
pp. 1895-1898
Author(s):  
Ana Stišović Milovanović

Literature and literary theory at the end of the Second and the beginning of the Third millennium were challenging many issues. The dichotomy of modern and postmodern poetics has led to certain wanderings. Postmodern literature dealt with the question of the relation between the author and the text, but on the logic of inner opposites. The relationship of reality and text has been transformed into the construction of the world, and the text is often only a modified architect. The construction of a story becomes more important than the story itself. The author's intentions lead to radical discontinuity with earlier known ways and narrative models. The postmodern code minimizes the possibility of the distinction between structural elements of the work. Wittgenstein therefore spoke about the impossibility of improving theoretical thoughts on literature. It is interesting that Umberto Eco was trying to reintegrate the characteristics that determined value systems in the entire literary history and gave safe grounds for theoretical considerations of the literary text. Eco starts from the idea that the code is the basic unit of meaning, which carries the system of rules, "whether it is essential, generally valid, conclusive or historical, transient or superficial." Calvino also thinks in this discourse. Italo Calvino is a postmodern writer, but in his work there is a peculiarity, which makes it a true code keeper. This is first seen in the construction of a work as a system, which can be independent of reality, but does not deviate from solid, almost geometric forms, symmetry, combinatorics, proportions. In the essays of Italo Calvino, the author of "innovative imagination", there is a corpus of texts about authors who are interested in the problem of language, themes and forms in literature. Calvino writes about Gustave Flaubert, Raymond Queneau, Robert Musil, Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, Jorge Luis Borges. This selection of writers is paradigmatic, since Calvino recognizes them as the authors of the encyclopedic type. The encyclopaedic openness of the work is, for Calvino, in fact a multitude of codes and levels, which are translated from one time to another, from one poetics to the next. Selected authors are the guards of the heritage of literary history and the entire discourse of written words, but are also the foothold for all future authors. Calvino believes that these writers are the foundation of the "library of the third millenium" because they combine imaginatively and intellectually. For Italo Calvino, "in the infinite universe of literature, the paths of research are always open, whether old or new," because literature is a "search for self-consciousness". In this search, the most important issues of language, theme and form. In the language code, Calvino returns simplicity to myths and fairy tales, in order to avoid linguistic arbitrariness and loss of language expressiveness. Borges also insisting on the importance of language and myth as the fundamental phenomenon of total literary creation. In preserving the code, Calvino believes that literature must fight the authenticity, the recognition of individual and collective heritage, by multiplying internal consent. These are the ways in which anonymous and abstract pictures of the world can be overcome, offered by literature from the postmodern wanderings. Calvino says it is necessary to preserve, in the "library of the third millennium", a rich legacy of imaginative knowledge, in which literature will be the activity of an intellectual order. This library is proof of the necessity of continuity in literature, which ensures the quality of literary work, but also theoretical thoughts about it.


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