If every human gesture is autobiographical, then autobiographical genres and modes are being enriched day by day by contemporary and emerging disciplines and fields which do not necessarily belong to life writing. When it comes to trauma and war studies, the autobiographical imposes itself in a variety of thematic and structural ways in order to express the subjectivity of the oppressed, not without difficulties. This international and inter-disciplinary cluster of articles proposes to explore autobiography through the filiation narrative, autofiction, the anecdote, the body, the rewriting of the Grand Historical narratives, namely World War Two and the Franco-Algerian conflict, and the deconstruction of such binary oppositions as War Vs Peace and Lived Trauma Vs Narrated Trauma. The present introduction to the cluster will first introduce the genre of life writing in general, and autobiography in particular, by tracing its evolution towards a postmodern, more metabiographical stance. It will then summarize and comment on each article in the cluster so as to highlight their shared thematic patterns and the various findings which are pertinent to the fields of autobiography, trauma and war studies. The final section of the introduction will provide a new perspective on Freudian studies through the lens of auto/biography and metabiography.
{"title":"Autobiography and the Autobiographical Mode as Narrative Resistances An Interdisciplinary Perspective","authors":"Souhir Zekri Masson","doi":"10.21827/ejlw.11.38655","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21827/ejlw.11.38655","url":null,"abstract":"If every human gesture is autobiographical, then autobiographical genres and modes are being enriched day by day by contemporary and emerging disciplines and fields which do not necessarily belong to life writing. When it comes to trauma and war studies, the autobiographical imposes itself in a variety of thematic and structural ways in order to express the subjectivity of the oppressed, not without difficulties. This international and inter-disciplinary cluster of articles proposes to explore autobiography through the filiation narrative, autofiction, the anecdote, the body, the rewriting of the Grand Historical narratives, namely World War Two and the Franco-Algerian conflict, and the deconstruction of such binary oppositions as War Vs Peace and Lived Trauma Vs Narrated Trauma. The present introduction to the cluster will first introduce the genre of life writing in general, and autobiography in particular, by tracing its evolution towards a postmodern, more metabiographical stance. It will then summarize and comment on each article in the cluster so as to highlight their shared thematic patterns and the various findings which are pertinent to the fields of autobiography, trauma and war studies. The final section of the introduction will provide a new perspective on Freudian studies through the lens of auto/biography and metabiography.","PeriodicalId":106040,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Life Writing","volume":"84 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123133168","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In their way of living obsessions and traumas, the protagonists of Autofiction and Wrecked embody the conscious or unconscious search for a solution: Writing serves as the medium to tell a story as well as a means of re-entry into life. The fragmented narratives presented by Kanehara and Roche disrupt any linear storytelling as they reveal the protagonists’ painful memories. Placing the body at the centre of the analysis, the argumentation focuses on the sexual and textual aspects of the body. Aiming to demonstrate how the use of storytelling in Autofiction and Wrecked symbolises a recalling to life, this article first thematises the function of sexuality and secondly looks to the narrative itself. The body thus helps a process of healing.
{"title":"Story Telling: Writing the Body to Recall Life in Kanehara Hitomi’s Autofiction and Charlotte Roche’s Wrecked","authors":"F. Roussel","doi":"10.21827/ejlw.11.38657","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21827/ejlw.11.38657","url":null,"abstract":"In their way of living obsessions and traumas, the protagonists of Autofiction and Wrecked embody the conscious or unconscious search for a solution: Writing serves as the medium to tell a story as well as a means of re-entry into life. The fragmented narratives presented by Kanehara and Roche disrupt any linear storytelling as they reveal the protagonists’ painful memories. Placing the body at the centre of the analysis, the argumentation focuses on the sexual and textual aspects of the body. Aiming to demonstrate how the use of storytelling in Autofiction and Wrecked symbolises a recalling to life, this article first thematises the function of sexuality and secondly looks to the narrative itself. The body thus helps a process of healing.","PeriodicalId":106040,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Life Writing","volume":"23 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129564456","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In recent years there have been an increasing number of biographies and autobiographies written by the leading figures of the British punk scene of the Seventies and Eighties. As we pass the 40th anniversary of 1977, it can be argued that the British punk scene has also ‘come of age’ in academia with a number of retrospectives that examine not only the contemporary impact of punk in the Seventies but also the legacy of the punk movement in shaping British culture. With a focus on John Lydon’s text Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs (1993) and Viv Albertine’s Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys (2014), this article will examine how these autobiographies draw attention to ways in which the British sub-cultural scene offered a platform through which British culture and identity could be reassessed as anti-American and anti-capitalist. This study will also highlight to what extent the self-reflexive framing of these personal narratives within the larger political, cultural and social landscape, can be read as a characteristic feature of the British punk memoir. Through these texts it is possible to uncover the pivotal role of the British punk scene in the development of a counter cultural identity that mirrored changes in the contemporary national identity. As such, punk memoirs, biographies and autobiographies not only give perspectives on a subversive youth cultural scene but, perhaps more importantly, can offer unique insights into the evolution of post-imperial British identity.
{"title":"I’m So Bored with the USA: Reflecting America in British Punk Memoirs of the 1970s","authors":"A. Raghunath","doi":"10.21827/ejlw.11.38650","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21827/ejlw.11.38650","url":null,"abstract":"In recent years there have been an increasing number of biographies and autobiographies written by the leading figures of the British punk scene of the Seventies and Eighties. As we pass the 40th anniversary of 1977, it can be argued that the British punk scene has also ‘come of age’ in academia with a number of retrospectives that examine not only the contemporary impact of punk in the Seventies but also the legacy of the punk movement in shaping British culture. \u0000With a focus on John Lydon’s text Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs (1993) and Viv Albertine’s Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys (2014), this article will examine how these autobiographies draw attention to ways in which the British sub-cultural scene offered a platform through which British culture and identity could be reassessed as anti-American and anti-capitalist. This study will also highlight to what extent the self-reflexive framing of these personal narratives within the larger political, cultural and social landscape, can be read as a characteristic feature of the British punk memoir. Through these texts it is possible to uncover the pivotal role of the British punk scene in the development of a counter cultural identity that mirrored changes in the contemporary national identity. As such, punk memoirs, biographies and autobiographies not only give perspectives on a subversive youth cultural scene but, perhaps more importantly, can offer unique insights into the evolution of post-imperial British identity.","PeriodicalId":106040,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Life Writing","volume":"8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133135688","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
While numerous studies have attempted to define forms of communication for the experience of eye witnessing the atrocities of war, little has been written on the inverse experience: how can one bear witness to not seeing warfare? I propose that this question has a profound ethical and political importance in the present, as the elimination of war’s demolition from the European horizon is essential to understanding the political situation that contemporary authors are witnessing. Retracing recent adaptations of the constructions of peace and war in the field of international studies may serve as a point of departure for determining a literary genre of ‘neither peace nor war’ related to contemporary French life-writings of writers such as Jean Rouaud and Jean-Yves Jouannais. Without being physically present for the events of extreme violence their writing describes in a first-person narrative, this genre creates a space for a reappearance of the war through the reconstructed European horizon of the present and opens a window toward a mode of resistance to the adverse political situation of ‘neither peace nor war’.
{"title":"Toward a literary genre of ‘neither peace nor war’","authors":"Hadas Zahavi","doi":"10.21827/ejlw.11.38658","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21827/ejlw.11.38658","url":null,"abstract":"While numerous studies have attempted to define forms of communication for the experience of eye witnessing the atrocities of war, little has been written on the inverse experience: how can one bear witness to not seeing warfare? I propose that this question has a profound ethical and political importance in the present, as the elimination of war’s demolition from the European horizon is essential to understanding the political situation that contemporary authors are witnessing. Retracing recent adaptations of the constructions of peace and war in the field of international studies may serve as a point of departure for determining a literary genre of ‘neither peace nor war’ related to contemporary French life-writings of writers such as Jean Rouaud and Jean-Yves Jouannais. Without being physically present for the events of extreme violence their writing describes in a first-person narrative, this genre creates a space for a reappearance of the war through the reconstructed European horizon of the present and opens a window toward a mode of resistance to the adverse political situation of ‘neither peace nor war’.","PeriodicalId":106040,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Life Writing","volume":"10 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128407518","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article reads Dalila Kerchouche’s Mon père, ce harki (My Father, this Harki) as a postcolonial filiation narrative, which blends memoir and biography, the personal and collective, the past and present. Lack of knowledge and a desire to see for herself the camps her parents and older siblings experienced prompts Kerchouche to adopt an investigative posture characterized by in situ exploration in conjunction with interviews and the consultation of archives. This allows the author to achieve a polyphonic account of the past. At the same time, her family serves as the prism through which she confronts the stigma attached to Harkis (Algerian soldiers hired by the French Army) and examines their unjust treatment in France.
{"title":"A Harki History Lesson: Dalila Kerchouche’s Filiation Narrative Mon père, ce harki","authors":"Rebecca Raitses","doi":"10.21827/ejlw.11.38656","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21827/ejlw.11.38656","url":null,"abstract":"This article reads Dalila Kerchouche’s Mon père, ce harki (My Father, this Harki) as a postcolonial filiation narrative, which blends memoir and biography, the personal and collective, the past and present. Lack of knowledge and a desire to see for herself the camps her parents and older siblings experienced prompts Kerchouche to adopt an investigative posture characterized by in situ exploration in conjunction with interviews and the consultation of archives. This allows the author to achieve a polyphonic account of the past. At the same time, her family serves as the prism through which she confronts the stigma attached to Harkis (Algerian soldiers hired by the French Army) and examines their unjust treatment in France.","PeriodicalId":106040,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Life Writing","volume":"20 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131055038","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Life as the touchpoint between language and silence, the said and the unsaid. Take a famous writer who offers his readers to take part in an exercise in lifewriting? Based on life’s ability to be condensed into an atom of experience, Paul Auster’s collection of stories tackles the problem of preserving reality for readers outside this experience. For Wittgenstein the linguistic cradle shapes each person’s life, for themselves and for others. The stories show that people spontaneously turn their lives into narratives, often relying on unspoken data. Here lies the life / experience distinction : experience becomes a metaphor making life understandable. Secondly, whatever is alive is humanized; conversely, time structures and the social context are constant props of reality. Surprisingly, acausal connections (e.g. coincidences) are a recurring feature in lifewriting — a way of transcending space and time. Wittgenstein’s concept of lebensform (what is said about life initially and eventually forms your life itself) explains why the stories make sense. Lifewriting means discovering one’s freedom, which ultimately raises the issue of the subject : the one who is free ? the one who has found oneself?
{"title":"Auster in? Auster out: Lifewriting as a Game? A novelist turns into an editor for the purposes of a unique experiment in lifewriting …","authors":"Michel-Guy Gouverneur","doi":"10.21827/ejlw.11.38660","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21827/ejlw.11.38660","url":null,"abstract":"Life as the touchpoint between language and silence, the said and the unsaid. Take a famous writer who offers his readers to take part in an exercise in lifewriting? Based on life’s ability to be condensed into an atom of experience, Paul Auster’s collection of stories tackles the problem of preserving reality for readers outside this experience. For Wittgenstein the linguistic cradle shapes each person’s life, for themselves and for others. The stories show that people spontaneously turn their lives into narratives, often relying on unspoken data. Here lies the life / experience distinction : experience becomes a metaphor making life understandable. Secondly, whatever is alive is humanized; conversely, time structures and the social context are constant props of reality. Surprisingly, acausal connections (e.g. coincidences) are a recurring feature in lifewriting — a way of transcending space and time. Wittgenstein’s concept of lebensform (what is said about life initially and eventually forms your life itself) explains why the stories make sense. Lifewriting means discovering one’s freedom, which ultimately raises the issue of the subject : the one who is free ? the one who has found oneself?","PeriodicalId":106040,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Life Writing","volume":"47 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115962954","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Mid-sixties British rock musicians have rationalized their firsthand experience and profitable interactions with American racial segregation by adopting a stance of racial innocence, or a belief that youth and virtue make one immune to charges of complicity with organized structures of racism. This almost childlike subject-positioning disingenuously separates musicians’ expertise on African American blues from a more mature acknowledgement of the oppressive racial conditions that shaped the music, implicitly excluding them from culpability in the continued imbalance of power between black and white musicians.
{"title":"The Burden of Racial Innocence: British-Invasion Rock Memoirs and the U.S. South","authors":"M. Sutton","doi":"10.21827/ejlw.11.38627","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21827/ejlw.11.38627","url":null,"abstract":"Mid-sixties British rock musicians have rationalized their firsthand experience and profitable interactions with American racial segregation by adopting a stance of racial innocence, or a belief that youth and virtue make one immune to charges of complicity with organized structures of racism. This almost childlike subject-positioning disingenuously separates musicians’ expertise on African American blues from a more mature acknowledgement of the oppressive racial conditions that shaped the music, implicitly excluding them from culpability in the continued imbalance of power between black and white musicians.","PeriodicalId":106040,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Life Writing","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115199239","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Over recent decades, scholars from a range of disciplines have used life writings from below to explore the lives of people outside elites and the secure middle class. Such texts offer information otherwise unavailable about the decisions people made, and the terms in which they understood or presented their experiences. Three recent monographs about life writings from below in Britain, although dealing with very different genres – pauper letters, working women's autobiographies, military memoirs – across two hundred and fifty years, demonstrate what can be gained from the comparative reading of a corpus of texts.
{"title":"Reviews of publications by Steven King, Florence Boos, and Rachel Woodward and K. Neil Jenkings","authors":"T. Ashplant","doi":"10.21827/ejlw.11.38649","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21827/ejlw.11.38649","url":null,"abstract":"Over recent decades, scholars from a range of disciplines have used life writings from below to explore the lives of people outside elites and the secure middle class. Such texts offer information otherwise unavailable about the decisions people made, and the terms in which they understood or presented their experiences. Three recent monographs about life writings from below in Britain, although dealing with very different genres – pauper letters, working women's autobiographies, military memoirs – across two hundred and fifty years, demonstrate what can be gained from the comparative reading of a corpus of texts.","PeriodicalId":106040,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Life Writing","volume":"92 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129876303","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This paper argues that by structuring potentially traumatising memories through narration, autobiographical storytelling reduces the experience of contingency, supports narrators in regaining feelings of autonomy and thus enables traumatised individuals to complete their otherwise potentially incomplete autobiography. Post-trauma writing carries the chance to re-articulate highly emotional experiences with formerly 'random or isolated events' into a meaningful storyline. The effects of highly emotionally experienced trauma decrease and enable the individual to continue narration about their present and potential future. A case study of a veteran autobiography is used to emphasise the meaning of autobiographical writing when individuals suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). This paper is particularly relevant in times where war and terror are frequently not just communicated through the media but are experienced by millions of people worldwide. At the same time, it is a contribution to the rapidly developing field of Cognitive Narratology and Restorative Narratives.
{"title":"Narrative, Memory and PTSD. A Case Study of Autobiographical Narration After Trauma","authors":"Deborah De Muijnck","doi":"10.21827/ejlw.11.38659","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21827/ejlw.11.38659","url":null,"abstract":"This paper argues that by structuring potentially traumatising memories through narration, autobiographical storytelling reduces the experience of contingency, supports narrators in regaining feelings of autonomy and thus enables traumatised individuals to complete their otherwise potentially incomplete autobiography. Post-trauma writing carries the chance to re-articulate highly emotional experiences with formerly 'random or isolated events' into a meaningful storyline. The effects of highly emotionally experienced trauma decrease and enable the individual to continue narration about their present and potential future. A case study of a veteran autobiography is used to emphasise the meaning of autobiographical writing when individuals suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). This paper is particularly relevant in times where war and terror are frequently not just communicated through the media but are experienced by millions of people worldwide. At the same time, it is a contribution to the rapidly developing field of Cognitive Narratology and Restorative Narratives.","PeriodicalId":106040,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Life Writing","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131286845","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
When the novel coronavirus began to spread around the world in early 2020, much was said about the ways the pandemic highlighted global interconnectedness. Given this context, Babs Boter, Marleen Rensen and Giles Scott-Smith’s collection Unhinging the National Framework: Perspectives on Transnational Life Writing was perhaps auspiciously timed: published in December of 2020, the collection discusses life narratives that cut across national boundaries, emphasising the interconnectedness of global life in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries.
{"title":"Babs Boter, Marleen Rensen, and Giles Scott-Smith (eds.), Unhinging the National Framework: Perspectives on Transnational Life Writing","authors":"Catherine Brist","doi":"10.21827/ejlw.11.38039","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21827/ejlw.11.38039","url":null,"abstract":"When the novel coronavirus began to spread around the world in early 2020, much was said about the ways the pandemic highlighted global interconnectedness. Given this context, Babs Boter, Marleen Rensen and Giles Scott-Smith’s collection Unhinging the National Framework: Perspectives on Transnational Life Writing was perhaps auspiciously timed: published in December of 2020, the collection discusses life narratives that cut across national boundaries, emphasising the interconnectedness of global life in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries.","PeriodicalId":106040,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Life Writing","volume":"3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130039464","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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