Writing Radically as Women With Virginia Woolf: Why?

In a short essay titled “Why,” Virginia Woolf daringly questioned the ways in which knowledge is produced, performed, and proclaimed as particular kinds of truths in institutions of power and authority, including academic writing. She subversively suggested, “The little twisted sign that comes at the end of the question has a way of making the rich writhe” and advised that such questions choose their “asking place with care”. In this article, we suggest that the “post” scholarship moment is the moment to ask new questions about the ways Woolfian inspired life-writing as a performance of self and social worlds might be engaged to trouble and open up what the “product” and performance of academic work, words, and worlds might come to be.

Spotlight on the traveller: Individual experiences of routine journeys

All travel generates a range of feelings, responses and emotions that can be stimulated by many factors but recovering such responses to everyday travel in the past is difficult. Few conventional sources provide information on the travellers’ experiences of movement and, not surprisingly, most transport histories focus mainly on matters of infrastructure, usage, and technological change. In contrast, contemporary mobilities studies that can talk directly to those who travel do explore the lived experiences of mobility in some detail. This paper shows how, by using a range of life writing drawn from the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain, it is possible to begin to recover at least some of the feelings and responses that past travellers experienced. I argue that such an approach provides an important additional perspective to research in transport history.

Disability Life Writing

This dual autothnographic research study examined the knowledge and experience gained by two women through the course of narrative exchange. Using the theoretical lens of Disability Studies and Critical Race Theory, DisCrit, and the methodology of disability life writing, the authors explored themes of deficit thinking, cultural essentialism, intersectionality, ability profiling, and liberation. The authors made recommendations for educating preservice teachers using disability life writing and personal reflection. Other implications for teacher preparation coursework included teaching disability as a cultural model, exploring counter narratives for social change, and unpacking deficit mindset. Finally, the authors suggest further research for finding best practices for instruction and implementation of recommended practices.

The Autofictional in Serial, Literary Works

This chapter approaches serial literary autofictions as a distinct variant of autofictional writing. While discussions of life writing often focus on male authors, the chapter redresses this imbalance by considering women writers, specifically the works of Dorothy Richardson, Doris Lessing, and Rachel Cusk. The approach is new in exploring the autofictional in serial, literary works, and tracing connections across an author’s oeuvre. Such a focus leads to an extended understanding of autofiction and the autofictional as challenging autobiographical unity and coherence. The chapter distinguishes between different forms of seriality (including series, serial, and serialized life narratives), and argues that serial publications and structures enhance literary and autofictional tendencies in that they draw attention to the complexities of autobiographical representation.

Autofiction and Self-Portraiture: Jenny Diski and Claude Cahun

This chapter argues that the contemporary British writer Jenny Diski and the Modernist French photographer and writer Claude Cahun are both literary self-portraitists, as this term is defined by Michel Beaujour. This is evident in their similar approaches to the themes of masquerade, narcissism, and naming. By reading Diski’s The Dream Mistress and Cahun’s Disavowals in the light of Julia Kristeva’s account of narcissism, as well as theories of autofiction and self-portraiture, the chapter further contends that self-portraiture arises from a distinct conception of the self, and of the psychological origins of artistic creativity. On this basis, it can be contrasted with autofiction, and autofiction and self-portraiture can then be seen to be related to each other as the two poles of contemporary life-writing.

Autofiction and Photography: “The Split of the Mirror”

This chapter explores the relationships between life writing, memory, and photography and suggests that the incidence of photographs (actual or described) in life-writing texts is most prominent in autofictional works which possess generic hybridity and often represent identity itself in hybrid terms. The chapter explores images of seeing and mirroring in autobiographical texts, focusing first on transsexual life-writings (including works by Virginia Woolf, Jan Morris, Jay Prosser, and Susan Faludi), in which photographs play a complex role in negotiating continuity and change within the life-course, old and new identities. The second part of the essay turns to recent life-writing texts, including the work of Annie Ernaux (who, like many other French writers, makes substantial use of photographs) and the film and cultural theorist Annette Kuhn.