‘Parler de soi’: Jean Rhys and the uses of life writing

Author(s):  
Simon Cooke
Keyword(s):  
Author(s):  
Kristin Czarnecki

My paper considers how Virginia Woolf and Jean Rhys conceived of their heritage in their memoirs along with the effect of their life-writing upon their literary legacies. Focusing on Woolf’s “A Sketch of the Past” and Rhys’s Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography, I consider the catalysts for their autobiographical impulses and how they shaped their lives on the page. What aspects of their heritage do Woolf and Rhys include, rework, veil, or perhaps suppress? Can their life-writing and concepts of heritage be classified in any particular way? Given the imbalance between the number of biographies and critical books and articles on Woolf as compared to Rhys, I then consider whether “Sketch” and Smile Please might be said to play a role in each woman’s legacy. To what degree does their life-writing determine their status within the academy? Does it influence the courses we teach and the articles we write—as well as those that get published? Does a certain kind of life-writing provide greater fodder than another for biography and literary criticism? In exploring such questions, I turn to autobiography theory: Smith, Watson, Benstock, Marcus, and Friedman, for example, along with work on Woolf, Rhys, and memoir by Dahl, Dalgarno, Johnson, Sellei, and Zwerdling. I also discuss David Plante’s most ungracious memoir of working with Rhys on her autobiography. In sum, I believe “A Sketch of the Past” and Smile Please can serve as fruitful gateways into both the heritage and legacy of Virginia Woolf and Jean Rhys.


Author(s):  
Andrew Thacker

This innovative book examines the development of modernism in four European cities: London, Paris, Berlin, and Vienna. Focusing upon how literary and cultural outsiders represented various spaces in these cities, it draws upon contemporary theories of affect, mood, and literary geography to offer an original account of the geographical emotions of modernism. It considers three broad features of urban modernism: the built environment of the particular cities, such as cafés or transport systems; the cultural institutions of publishing that underpinned the development of modernism in these locations; and the complex perceptions of writers and artists who were outsiders to the four cities. Particular attention is thus given to the transnational qualities of modernism by examining figures whose view of the cities considered is that of migrants, exiles, or strangers. The writers and artists discussed include Mulk Raj Anand, Gwendolyn Bennett, Bryher, Blaise Cendrars, Joseph Conrad, T. S. Eliot, Christopher Isherwood, Hope Mirlees, Noami Mitchison, Jean Rhys, Sam Selon, and Stephen Spender.


Author(s):  
Vike Martina Plock

It is 1956, the height of the Cold War. The year will end in the Suez Crisis and the Hungarian Uprising. Edith Wharton and Virginia Woolf have both been dead for a while, Jean Rhys is all but forgotten and Rosamond Lehmann’s career as a novelist is on the wane....


Author(s):  
Vike Martina Plock

By looking at Jean Rhys’s ‘Left Bank’ fiction (Quartet, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, Good Morning, Midnight, ‘Illusion’, ‘Mannequin’), this chapter investigates how new operational procedures such as Fordism and Taylorism, which were introduced into the French couture industry at the beginning of the twentieth century, affected constructions of modern femininity. Increasingly standardized images of feminine types were produced by Paris couturiers while the new look of the Flapper seemingly advertised women’s expanding social, political and professional mobility. Rhys, this chapter argues, noted fashion’s ability to provide resources for creative image construction but she simultaneously expressed criticism of its tendency to standardize female costumes and behaviour. Ultimately, Rhys demonstrates in her fiction that the radically modern couture of the early twentieth century was by no means the maker of social change and women’s political modernity. To offset the increased standardization of female images that she witnessed around her, Rhys created heroines and texts that relied on an overt display on difference.  


2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 297-332
Author(s):  
Kate Zebiri

This article aims to explore the Shaykh-mur?d (disciple) or teacher-pupil relationship as portrayed in Western Sufi life writing in recent decades, observing elements of continuity and discontinuity with classical Sufism. Additionally, it traces the influence on the texts of certain developments in religiosity in contemporary Western societies, especially New Age understandings of religious authority. Studying these works will provide an insight into the diversity of expressions of contemporary Sufism, while shedding light on a phenomenon which seems to fly in the face of contemporary social and religious trends which deemphasize external authority and promote the authority of the self or individual autonomy.


Mediaevistik ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 327-327
Author(s):  
Albrecht Classen

The papers combined in this volume were originally presented at a conference at the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities in Stockholm, June 11–12, 2015. The explicit purpose of this event and the subsequent volume was to expose the work of Swedish and other scholars on the genre of biographies to an international audience, reflecting on life-writing or ego-documents, emphasizing spiritual autobiographies. According to the brief bios at the end of the book, Robert Swanson, for instance, is Emeritus Professor at Binghamton University; Jean-Mark Ticchi teaches at the Centre d’Etudes en Sciences Sociales du Religieux in Paris; and Enock Bongani Zulu was lecturer at the Lutheran Theological Institute in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. The book cover is decorated with an image showing a page in Margery Kempe’s Book from ca. 1440, indicating that the focus might rest on the Middle Ages. This is only very partially the case.


1987 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-78
Author(s):  
K. HEMMERECHTS
Keyword(s):  

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