Songlines

Jeremy Bernstein’s book A Song for Molly is a fantasy in the form of fictional autobiography from which Bernstein declines to “pick out the real parts.” Sheldon Lee Glashow, in reviewing the book, finds it to be a delightful example of episodic storytelling, as Bernstein weaves around many seminal intellectual achievements, and drops many names: Robert Axelrod, Émile Borel, Richard Dawkins…

Narrative Structure of Memories in Texts of F. Werfel and A. Okopenko

The specificity of the narrative structure of the story, which connects the memory as an element of a fictional autobiography with the forms of a diary and a “story in a story”, which is one of the most productive in the second half of the twentieth century in German literature, is considered. Based on a fragment of the unfinished novel by F. Werfel “Sella, or the Conqueror” and the novel by A. Okopenko “Kindernatsi”, built as memories of the Anschluss and the arrival of the Nazis in Austria, the principles of organizing a multilevel system author — focalizer — actant, the purpose of which is interweaving of historical, moral and religious, moral and ethical meanings are shown. It is studied how a specific historical plot (which has a real prototypical model for the story of Werfel and an autobiographical one for Okopenko) is filled with religious and existential meanings in Werfel, becomes a reflection of the crisis of identity — a key characteristic of the Austrian mentality — in Okopenko. Particular attention is paid to artistic techniques that complicate and destroy linear narrative: duplicity, with the help of which Werfel shows different ways of solving the same moral issues, and literary editing techniques, which gives Okopenko a fragmented character to the process of recollection and allows to reveal the integrity of the author’s moral and ethical positions at the deep-semantic level.

“A Handful of Loose Beads”

Amy Coté, “‘A Handful of Loose Beads’: Catholicism and the Fictional Autobiography in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette” (pp. 473–494) This essay considers the influence of confession as a Catholic liturgical sacrament and as a literary genre informing the fictional autobiography in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853). In her earlier novel Jane Eyre (1847), Brontë used the tradition of Protestant spiritual autobiography as a literary genre focused on the individual’s spiritual development. Villette, written as it was at the height of a wave of anti-Catholic sentiment in England in the 1840s and 1850s, has understandably been read as a nationalistic rebuke of Catholicism. This essay complicates this narrative, and shows how Brontë looks to Catholic liturgical traditions, most notably the sacrament of confession, to trouble the generic conventions of the Protestant spiritual autobiography and, by extension, of fictional autobiography.

Historiography and Life Writing

This chapter opens by situating Lawrence’s engagement with historiography in relation to early twentieth-century debates about the status of history as an art or a science. It examines Lawrence’s school textbook Movements in European History, showing how he incorporated the contemporary graphic and scientific approaches in his narrative to articulate a distinctive epochal approach to history. It then explores Lawrence’s innovative engagement with life writing as an historiographical form, demonstrating Lawrence’s contribution to the issues raised by the modernist ‘New Biography’. It traces his reflections on, and experiments in, fictional autobiography, autobiography (taking account of his late essays and the poem ‘A Life History in Harmonies and Discords’), biography (the ‘Memoir of Maurice Magnus’) and auto/biografiction.

Helen Southworth. Fresca. A Life in the Making. A Biographer’s Quest for a Forgotten Bloomsbury Polymath

The subject of Southworth’s book is Francesca (Fresca) Allinson (1902–1945), a puppeteer, choral conductor, writer and creator of folksongs, whose life was cut short by drowning. She grew up in a gifted and thoroughly non-conformist family. Her brother Adrian, a painter, studied at the Slade school. Her father worked as a doctor at his practice in London, obtaining and practising his own unorthodox convictions about hygiene and diet. As a radical pacifist Fresca helped provide alternative communities for conscientious objectors (COs). Her fictional autobiography A Childhood was published in 1937, by the Hogarth Press, the publishing house of Leonard and Virginia Woolf.

AUTHORSHIP AS "THE ACHIEVEMENT OF THE WORKING MAN" IN THE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL BOOKS OF URAL WORKERS OF THE 1930s

The article analyzes the phenomenon of the so called author-worker, who turned to literary creativity and created a fictional autobiography, in which the living conditions of the proletarian before and after the revolution of 1917 were opposed. In the historical and literary context, the author considers, in particular, the role of the UralAPP, which predetermined the creation of the novels "I Love" (1933) by Aleksandr Avdeenko and "My Life" (1936) by Agrippina Korevanova, the story "My School" (1934) by Aleksei Bondin, and memoirs of workers of the Vysokogorsky iron mine “True stories of the mount Vysokaya” (1935). The role of Maksim Gorky in the final editing and publication of these works is noted. In the 1930s, he repeatedly attempted to find the sources for “human rebirth” under the influence of new living conditions. Institutionally, these efforts resulted in the creation of a number of autobiographical books – "historical documents", by Gorky’s definition, the authors of which – the proletarians, exotic for the written culture, demonstrated the emergence of a new Soviet subject. They created texts from which the editors removed most of the traces of the author's lack of culture, lack of mastery of the word, leaving the hero's story about overcoming lack of culture. The autobiographical hero, endowed with the will to culture, emerges from the "darkness", an important part of which is the very proletarian existence. Reading and then writing are portrayed as the main result of the "shock work" of the author and the state, which provided the subject with the opportunity to master a complex form of self-presentation – a detailed fictional autobiography, become a writer and change radically his social status, taking the highest place in the symbolic hierarchy of professions in the same field as the well-known "masters" of written culture.