Biographies in talk: A narrative-discursive research approach

This paper demonstrates the contribution a synthetic narrativediscursive approach can make to understanding biographical work within a research interview. Our focus is on biographical work as part of the ongoing, interactive process through which identities are taken up. This is of particular interest for people who, for example, are entering a new career and can be seen as “novices” in the sense that they are constructing and claiming a new identity. Following a discussion of the theoretical and methodological background in narrative, discourse analytic and discursive work in social psychology (e.g. Bruner, 1990; Edley, 2001; Potter and Wetherell, 1987; Wetherell, 1998), the paper presents an analysis of biographical talk from an interview study with postgraduate Art and Design students. Our interest is in their identity work, including biographical work, as novices in their fields. The analysis illustrates the approach and the key analytic concepts of, first, shared discursive resources, such as interpretative repertoires (e.g. Edley, 2001) and canonical narratives (e.g. Bruner, 1991), and, secondly, troubled identities (e.g. Wetherell and Edley, 1998; Taylor, 2005a) . It shows how speakers’ biographical accounts are shaped and constrained by the meanings which prevail within the larger society. For our participants, these include established understandings of the nature and origins of an artistic or creative identity, and the biographical trajectory associated with it. The particular focus of our approach is on how, in a speaker’s reflexive work to construct a biographical narrative, the versions produced in previous tellings become a constraint and a source of continuity.

Friends tell it like it is: Therapy culture, postfeminism and friendships between women

Feminist cultural studies researchers have produced a rich body of work showing how postfeminism and therapy cultures pervade a range of media. However, receiving less attention are questions of exactly how the neoliberal technologies of self implicated in these two cultural persuasions ‘land’, and are practised in everyday life. In this article, we forward an identity practice approach to understand the interrelated cultures of therapy and postfeminism using data from a qualitative investigation of women’s friendships in Aotearoa New Zealand. We are interested in how the cultural resources concerning postfeminism and the ‘psy complex’ are used flexibly within friendship interactions in concert with other identities, such as national identities and caring identities. Overall, aligning with previous feminist analyses of media artefacts, we find that as postfeminist and therapeutic subjectivity-making entwine with the moral orders of women’s friendships, women carry out their self-surveillance and self-transformation work collaboratively. Yet, remaining attentive to how women tailor cultural resources in their creative identity work leads us to a more hopeful reading. We suggest that the confidence gained by women through their therapised friendships should also be acknowledged for its nourishing qualities.

THE PORTRAIT OF A MODERN WOMAN IN THE POETRY OF WANDA MELCER

The article tackles the topie of womanhood as a typical motif in Wanda Melcer' s poetry, a topie which in historical-literary studies has so far been insufficiently discussed. Through the analysis of selected poems from her two published volumes as well as from other scattered poems, the portrait of a modern woman as presented in that poetry has been sketched out. This woman is a person who takes part in civilisational, social and manner-related changes. Her relations to culture, art and literature, her vitality and being active in life, all attest to her abandonment of roles imposed by the patriarchal system. It has been shown that the "new woman" breaks taboos and is educated. Above all she is independent and selfreliant, desires success and thirsts for new experiences, as demonstrated by how she frequently changes her surroundings and appropriates new spaces. She moulds her identity in confrontation with the outside world, she is open to otherness and changeability. At the same time she maintains personal consistency. Her creative identity is related to acting upon the principle of choice, and not obligation. Due to the multitude of biographical references present, the portrait of the female heroine contained in Wanda Melcer's poetry can be seen as a self-portrait of the author herself.

CLASSICISM AND NEO-CLASSICISMS IN THE HISTORY OF MUSIC

In one of his articles, Octavian Paler draws attention in a metaphorical-mythologizing manner upon one of the risks taken by those who chose tradition as their source of inspiration. The epigonic spirit, because this is what he refers to, cannot escape idolatrising tradition, phenomenon that happens within an alterity of the creative identity, within the pettiness of controlling the artistic means, within the infatuation of his own image which is placed under the protection of the great creative figures. The epigone masters in an embryonic form some techniques which, for various reasons, he cannot manipulate creatively. He is somehow suspended between two sensibilities, hence his failure. On the one hand, he is not aware of the risk of assuming past sensibilities, and on the other, he does not assume his contemporariness. Giving in to the temptation of looking too much into the past, the epigonic artist loses his identifying sensibility. “The mistake of neo-classicism, with its statues painted or sculpted based and antique models, is Orpheus’ mistake. As we no longer have the soul of the ancient Greeks, imitating their art is useless because in art too, looking back kills if there is no conscience of the irreversibility. From this point of view, there is no turning back unless in order to desolate everything” (Paler, 2016, pp. 189-190). This quote refers to neo-classicism perceived in its most rudimentary form, in which it would identify itself with the epigonic phenomenon. Of course, no relation of equality can be claimed between an epigone and a neo-classicist. If we are to give a brief definition in which to establish a relationship between these two terms, the epigone is a neo-classicist that lacks fantasy. Neo-classicism means to creatively take over technical means, past sensibilities in order to anchor them in the tumultuousness of contemporary times. Neo-classicism represents the happiest mixture between past and present, that form of artistic reverberation in which modernity still makes room for the seal of the past. Not servility, not obedience, not anachronism which denote the incapacity to assimilate new composing techniques or the lack of vigour of creative energies, but the power to adapt to new sensibilities through restorative interventions. Starting from here, we will trace a re-echeloning line of various types of neo-classic sensibilities specific to the end of the 19th century and to the entire 20th century

The Female Künstlerroman in the Writing of Virginia Woolf

<p>The defining features of the female Künstlerroman in Virginia Woolf’s writing suggest a revision of the narrative form to accommodate, navigate, and interrogate the artist’s gender and origins of her creativity. This thesis plots the birth of the female artist and the conditions of her artistic development within Woolf’s writing by first examining the construction of Rachel Vinrace, the rudimentary artist of the equally embryonic text, Melymbrosia (1912-1982). Rachel’s failure to privately self-identify as an artist is contrasted with her reluctance to accept her future potential as a wife and mother, suggesting that “woman” and “artist” are two mutually exclusive identities. For this reason, Woolf’s use of the female Künstlerroman examines the complexities of the female artist’s ability and, indeed, inability to acknowledge and inhabit her creative identity. But how, exactly, the narrative form develops in Woolf’s writing relies upon a reading of the relationship between the figure of the artist and the novel she occupies: Rachel Vinrace in Melymbrosia; Lily Briscoe and Mrs. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse (1927); Orlando in Orlando: A Biography (1928); Miss La Trobe and Isa Oliver in Between the Acts (1941). Each of these works present a modification of the female Künstlerroman, and, in doing so, a markedly different artist-as-heroine. Moreover, in Woolf’s later writing, the narrative development of the female artist incorporates aspects of historical non-fiction, the biographical and autobiographical, and epistolary and essayistic fictions. An analysis of the intertextual relationship between A Room of One’s Own (1929) and Orlando: A Biography, and Three Guineas (1938) and Between the Acts, is therefore critical to the argument of this thesis. The following is an exploration of how a variety of female artist-figures are constructed within Woolf’s writing: a musician, a painter, a social artist, a poet, and a pageant-writer-director. Through Woolf’s diverse expositions on the creative process, her heroines embody the personal difficulties women encounter as they attempt to realise their artistic potential. In this way, the female Künstlerroman is used by Woolf to examine, often simultaneously, the aesthetics of failure, as well as the conditions of success. But that a multitude of creative mediums appear in Woolf’s writing suggests there are universal obstacles when the artist in question is a woman, an implication in the narrative of the female Künstlerroman that the gender of a protagonist is the primary source of complication. Therefore, the degree to which each heroine achieves a sense of creative fulfilment is dependent on her ability to recalibrate her identity as a woman with her self-authorisation as an artist.</p>

The Female Künstlerroman in the Writing of Virginia Woolf

<p>The defining features of the female Künstlerroman in Virginia Woolf’s writing suggest a revision of the narrative form to accommodate, navigate, and interrogate the artist’s gender and origins of her creativity. This thesis plots the birth of the female artist and the conditions of her artistic development within Woolf’s writing by first examining the construction of Rachel Vinrace, the rudimentary artist of the equally embryonic text, Melymbrosia (1912-1982). Rachel’s failure to privately self-identify as an artist is contrasted with her reluctance to accept her future potential as a wife and mother, suggesting that “woman” and “artist” are two mutually exclusive identities. For this reason, Woolf’s use of the female Künstlerroman examines the complexities of the female artist’s ability and, indeed, inability to acknowledge and inhabit her creative identity. But how, exactly, the narrative form develops in Woolf’s writing relies upon a reading of the relationship between the figure of the artist and the novel she occupies: Rachel Vinrace in Melymbrosia; Lily Briscoe and Mrs. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse (1927); Orlando in Orlando: A Biography (1928); Miss La Trobe and Isa Oliver in Between the Acts (1941). Each of these works present a modification of the female Künstlerroman, and, in doing so, a markedly different artist-as-heroine. Moreover, in Woolf’s later writing, the narrative development of the female artist incorporates aspects of historical non-fiction, the biographical and autobiographical, and epistolary and essayistic fictions. An analysis of the intertextual relationship between A Room of One’s Own (1929) and Orlando: A Biography, and Three Guineas (1938) and Between the Acts, is therefore critical to the argument of this thesis. The following is an exploration of how a variety of female artist-figures are constructed within Woolf’s writing: a musician, a painter, a social artist, a poet, and a pageant-writer-director. Through Woolf’s diverse expositions on the creative process, her heroines embody the personal difficulties women encounter as they attempt to realise their artistic potential. In this way, the female Künstlerroman is used by Woolf to examine, often simultaneously, the aesthetics of failure, as well as the conditions of success. But that a multitude of creative mediums appear in Woolf’s writing suggests there are universal obstacles when the artist in question is a woman, an implication in the narrative of the female Künstlerroman that the gender of a protagonist is the primary source of complication. Therefore, the degree to which each heroine achieves a sense of creative fulfilment is dependent on her ability to recalibrate her identity as a woman with her self-authorisation as an artist.</p>