Autofictions and memoirs about growing up in late socialism have proliferated in Czech as well as in other postsocialist Eastern European literatures. These retrospective texts are often tinged with nostalgia and infused with irony and humour. Two of the most popular texts of this genre in the Czech Republic are Irena Dousková’s autofictional books Hrdý Budžes [B. Proudew] and Oněgin byl Rusák [Onegin Was a Rusky]. The Czech author writes about growing-up in a non-conformist family dealing with everyday life in socialist Czechoslovakia. After discussing Dousková’s books as autofiction the article will take a closer look at the poetics of childhood autofictions and their contribution to cultures of remembering socialism in comparison to autobiographies. It will discuss the ways how writing about childhood creates a specific socialist identity through scarcity, ingenuity, and working with/against restraints and the way humour is used to transmit difficult memories.
关于在社会主义晚期成长的自传和回忆录在捷克以及其他后社会主义东欧文学中激增。这些回顾文本往往带有怀旧的色彩，并注入了讽刺和幽默。捷克共和国最受欢迎的两本自传体小说是Irena douskov的自传体小说Hrdý Budžes [B]。和onongin byl Rusák [Onegin Was a Rusky]。这位捷克作家讲述了在社会主义捷克斯洛伐克一个不墨守成规的家庭中成长的故事。在讨论了杜斯科夫的书作为自传体小说之后，本文将更深入地探讨童年自传体小说的诗学以及它们对记忆社会主义文化的贡献，与自传相比较。它将讨论关于童年的写作如何通过稀缺、独创性、与限制/对抗来创造一种特定的社会主义身份，以及幽默如何被用来传递艰难的记忆。
{"title":"‘How it all turned out alright’: Autofiction as Memory Form in Irena Dousková’s Novels about Childhood and Youth in Post-1968 Czechoslovakia","authors":"Anja Tippner","doi":"10.21827/EJLW.10.37604","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21827/EJLW.10.37604","url":null,"abstract":"Autofictions and memoirs about growing up in late socialism have proliferated in Czech as well as in other postsocialist Eastern European literatures. These retrospective texts are often tinged with nostalgia and infused with irony and humour. Two of the most popular texts of this genre in the Czech Republic are Irena Dousková’s autofictional books Hrdý Budžes [B. Proudew] and Oněgin byl Rusák [Onegin Was a Rusky]. The Czech author writes about growing-up in a non-conformist family dealing with everyday life in socialist Czechoslovakia. After discussing Dousková’s books as autofiction the article will take a closer look at the poetics of childhood autofictions and their contribution to cultures of remembering socialism in comparison to autobiographies. It will discuss the ways how writing about childhood creates a specific socialist identity through scarcity, ingenuity, and working with/against restraints and the way humour is used to transmit difficult memories.","PeriodicalId":106040,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Life Writing","volume":"35 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116312637","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 examines German poet Jan Wagner’s Die Eulenhasser in den Hallenhäusern [The Owl Haters in the Hall Houses] (2012) and the effects of fictional authorship with respect to autobiographical poetry. Wagner's fiction of three poets—their lives and their poems—proves to be an artfully ambivalent construction: on the one hand, the link between persona and poetic voice seems to be undeniably given, while on the other hand, the autobiographical impact of the poems appears to be an effect of the reader’s desire and his or her response to the work. Wagner’s text exploits, confirms and, at the same time, challenges the desire to read poetry as autobiographical expression.
本文考察了德国诗人扬·瓦格纳的《大厅里讨厌猫头鹰的人》(Die Eulenhasser in den Hallenhäusern)(2012)，以及虚构作者身份对自传体诗歌的影响。瓦格纳关于三位诗人的小说——他们的生活和他们的诗歌——被证明是一种巧妙的矛盾结构:一方面，人物形象和诗歌声音之间的联系似乎是不可否认的，而另一方面，诗歌的自传式影响似乎是读者的欲望和他或她对作品的反应的影响。瓦格纳的文本利用，证实，同时，挑战的愿望，阅读诗歌作为自传体的表达。
{"title":"The Mask in Verse. Imaginary Poets and Their Autobiographical Poetry (Jan Wagner, Die Eulenhasser in den Hallenhäusern)","authors":"Jutta Müller-Tamm","doi":"10.21827/EJLW.10.37637","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21827/EJLW.10.37637","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines German poet Jan Wagner’s Die Eulenhasser in den Hallenhäusern [The Owl Haters in the Hall Houses] (2012) and the effects of fictional authorship with respect to autobiographical poetry. Wagner's fiction of three poets—their lives and their poems—proves to be an artfully ambivalent construction: on the one hand, the link between persona and poetic voice seems to be undeniably given, while on the other hand, the autobiographical impact of the poems appears to be an effect of the reader’s desire and his or her response to the work. Wagner’s text exploits, confirms and, at the same time, challenges the desire to read poetry as autobiographical expression.","PeriodicalId":106040,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Life Writing","volume":"96 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124667107","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}
Since the fall of communism in 1989 and 1990/91 literature has dealt with this epochal societal change, trying to come to terms with the past and assessing its influence on the present. In the last years the focus has turned towards the era of late socialism, that is the 1970s and 1980s. Many writers who attempt to present and reevaluate these decades and their ongoing influence on biographies and societies today grew up or came of age in this era. Our main contention is that different forms of life-writing, especially autofictions and autobiographical novels, have become the dominant narrative device for addressing and narrating the socialist past. Accordingly, the contributions to this cluster explore the era of late socialism, examining its different and often contested meanings not only from the perspective of the past but also from the perspective of today. Thus, we explore the role of autobiographical writing in commemorating the past as well as in demonstrating the demise of socialism, as represented in contemporary literatures in Czech, Polish, Romanian, and Russian.
{"title":"Remembering Late Socialism in Autobiographical Novels and Autofictions from Central and Eastern Europe: Introduction","authors":"A. Mrozik, Anja Tippner","doi":"10.21827/EJLW.10.37602","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21827/EJLW.10.37602","url":null,"abstract":"Since the fall of communism in 1989 and 1990/91 literature has dealt with this epochal societal change, trying to come to terms with the past and assessing its influence on the present. In the last years the focus has turned towards the era of late socialism, that is the 1970s and 1980s. Many writers who attempt to present and reevaluate these decades and their ongoing influence on biographies and societies today grew up or came of age in this era. Our main contention is that different forms of life-writing, especially autofictions and autobiographical novels, have become the dominant narrative device for addressing and narrating the socialist past. Accordingly, the contributions to this cluster explore the era of late socialism, examining its different and often contested meanings not only from the perspective of the past but also from the perspective of today. Thus, we explore the role of autobiographical writing in commemorating the past as well as in demonstrating the demise of socialism, as represented in contemporary literatures in Czech, Polish, Romanian, and Russian.","PeriodicalId":106040,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Life Writing","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130839729","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}
The article examines how representations of late socialism, seen through the eyes of adolescent girls, function in ‘quasi-autobiographical novels’ by Izabela Filipiak (Absolutna amnezja [Absolutne Amnesia], 1995) and Joanna Bator (Piaskowa Góra [The Sandy Hill], 2008). The authors, born in the 1960s and self-identified feminists, became voices of the women’s movement in post-1989 Poland. From their novels, the picture of late socialism emerges as either nightmarish (Filipiak) or grotesque (Bator). Examining family relations, but also intimate relations (understood as political), the author argues that the novels’ focus on gender/sexual differences is consistent with the dominant message of the women’s movement in Poland, which after 1989 lost sight of class differences, contributing to their naturalization and taming. Through the aforementioned examples, the author demonstrates that late socialism is an essential component of the founding story of contemporary feminism in Poland, and that the topos of the conflict between mothers and daughters is a useful tool of its anti-communist identity politics. Discussing the issue of the literary genre, the article proves that the choice of a quasi-autobiographical novel, based on the Bildungsroman scheme, harmonizes with the biographical, artistic and political settlements of the ‘breakthrough generation’ with late socialism and transformation.
{"title":"Growing Up as a Girl in Late Socialist Poland: The Personal, the Political and Class in Feminist Quasi-Autobiographical Novels by Izabela Filipiak and Joanna Bator","authors":"A. Mrozik","doi":"10.21827/EJLW.10.37603","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21827/EJLW.10.37603","url":null,"abstract":"The article examines how representations of late socialism, seen through the eyes of adolescent girls, function in ‘quasi-autobiographical novels’ by Izabela Filipiak (Absolutna amnezja [Absolutne Amnesia], 1995) and Joanna Bator (Piaskowa Góra [The Sandy Hill], 2008). The authors, born in the 1960s and self-identified feminists, became voices of the women’s movement in post-1989 Poland. From their novels, the picture of late socialism emerges as either nightmarish (Filipiak) or grotesque (Bator). Examining family relations, but also intimate relations (understood as political), the author argues that the novels’ focus on gender/sexual differences is consistent with the dominant message of the women’s movement in Poland, which after 1989 lost sight of class differences, contributing to their naturalization and taming. Through the aforementioned examples, the author demonstrates that late socialism is an essential component of the founding story of contemporary feminism in Poland, and that the topos of the conflict between mothers and daughters is a useful tool of its anti-communist identity politics. Discussing the issue of the literary genre, the article proves that the choice of a quasi-autobiographical novel, based on the Bildungsroman scheme, harmonizes with the biographical, artistic and political settlements of the ‘breakthrough generation’ with late socialism and transformation.","PeriodicalId":106040,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Life Writing","volume":"666 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116183733","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 editorial introduces the four articles of the section “The Self in Verse. Exploring Autobiographical Poetry” and connects their specific findings to a variety of more general aspects in the study of life-writing. It sketches out preliminary considerations concerning the definition of autobiographical poetry and the relevance of paratexts and autofictionality for the genre. Furthermore, it outlines some of the most common recurring themes in poems dealing with autobiographical issues, such as writing (through) the body and exploring life’s crises, watersheds, and crossroads lyrically. We advocate for a more comprehensive study of autobiographical poetry as a form of life-writing that, in our view, has not yet been investigated systematically, neither by historical nor by theoretical approaches in literary and cultural studies.
{"title":"The Self in Verse. Exploring Autobiographical Poetry. Editorial","authors":"Johannes Görbert, Marie Lindskov Hansen, J. Wolf","doi":"10.21827/EJLW.10.37636","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21827/EJLW.10.37636","url":null,"abstract":"This editorial introduces the four articles of the section “The Self in Verse. Exploring Autobiographical Poetry” and connects their specific findings to a variety of more general aspects in the study of life-writing. It sketches out preliminary considerations concerning the definition of autobiographical poetry and the relevance of paratexts and autofictionality for the genre. Furthermore, it outlines some of the most common recurring themes in poems dealing with autobiographical issues, such as writing (through) the body and exploring life’s crises, watersheds, and crossroads lyrically. We advocate for a more comprehensive study of autobiographical poetry as a form of life-writing that, in our view, has not yet been investigated systematically, neither by historical nor by theoretical approaches in literary and cultural studies.","PeriodicalId":106040,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Life Writing","volume":"22 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132535294","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}
Edmund de Waal‘s widely acclaimed family memoir The Hare with Amber Eyes (2010) is a hybrid text that fuses biography, autobiography and the biography of objects and interlaces these with critical reflections on art, transnationality, cross-cultural communication and the development of cosmopolitan identities. This article examines the central role of the collection of netsuke synecdochally evoked in the book’s title that not only provides the pivotal structural element but also the major conceptual focus of the text. I argue that this idiosyncratic gravitational centre effects the permeability of generic boundaries by establishing an intricate relationality between the narrative’s different protagonists, who continuously decentre and reconfigure each other. Moreover, the art objects’ own history of migration and multiple belonging becomes a blueprint for de Waal’s construction of his Jewish ancestors’ highly mobile and cosmopolitan selves, which sidesteps the narrowly circumscribed vision of national or religious identities. The full extent of these connections is revealed through an examination of the author’s artistic vision, his ceramic art and art criticism. Finally, I will read The Hare with Amber Eyes as an act of restitution in a two-fold sense: as an attempt to undo the politically motivated erasure of some of his ancestors’ traces and as a historical reminder of lived forms of cosmopolitanism that can speak to contemporary debates around globalisation and migration.
{"title":"Migrating Objects and Wanderers between Worlds: Cosmopolitan Selves in Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes","authors":"Eveline Kilian","doi":"10.21827/EJLW.10.37707","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21827/EJLW.10.37707","url":null,"abstract":"Edmund de Waal‘s widely acclaimed family memoir The Hare with Amber Eyes (2010) is a hybrid text that fuses biography, autobiography and the biography of objects and interlaces these with critical reflections on art, transnationality, cross-cultural communication and the development of cosmopolitan identities. This article examines the central role of the collection of netsuke synecdochally evoked in the book’s title that not only provides the pivotal structural element but also the major conceptual focus of the text. I argue that this idiosyncratic gravitational centre effects the permeability of generic boundaries by establishing an intricate relationality between the narrative’s different protagonists, who continuously decentre and reconfigure each other. Moreover, the art objects’ own history of migration and multiple belonging becomes a blueprint for de Waal’s construction of his Jewish ancestors’ highly mobile and cosmopolitan selves, which sidesteps the narrowly circumscribed vision of national or religious identities. The full extent of these connections is revealed through an examination of the author’s artistic vision, his ceramic art and art criticism. Finally, I will read The Hare with Amber Eyes as an act of restitution in a two-fold sense: as an attempt to undo the politically motivated erasure of some of his ancestors’ traces and as a historical reminder of lived forms of cosmopolitanism that can speak to contemporary debates around globalisation and migration.","PeriodicalId":106040,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Life Writing","volume":"10 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122703205","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}
Remembering late socialism through child perspectives in (auto)fictional writing has been a prominent practice in contemporary Russian literature. In particular, the early 1980s focalized by young protagonists have become the subject of three recent novels, by Alexei Ivanov, Shamil’ Idiatullin and Alexander Arkhangelsky. This article closely examines one of these novels, Alexei Ivanov’s Pischeblok [The Food Unit] published in 2016, asking how it articulates the generation that was coming of age during the 1980s and considering the ethical implications of this articulation. The reading approaches this question by examining the genre characteristics of the novel which involve a tension between ‘generatiography’ and fantasy, and between the realist and post-post-modernist modes. It argues that this hybridity of genre and a metamodernist oscillation allow for creating a multilayered representation of the late Soviet as a space of improvisational possibilities involving play with petty monsters as well as of genuine monstrosity embodying the darker side of the Soviet. The article outlines the novel’s generational self-reflection which involves re-familiarizing the readers with the ideals that existed within socialism but were not realized by the generation which internalized state socialism’s monstrous side. At the same time, the return to the moment of struggling with this monstrosity creates an alternative turning point and the possibility of responsibility-taking.
{"title":"Reanimating/Resisting Late Soviet Monstrosity: Generational Self-Reflection and Lessons of Responsibility in Alexei Ivanov’s Pischeblok [The Food Unit]","authors":"Ksenia Robbe","doi":"10.21827/EJLW.10.37606","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21827/EJLW.10.37606","url":null,"abstract":"Remembering late socialism through child perspectives in (auto)fictional writing has been a prominent practice in contemporary Russian literature. In particular, the early 1980s focalized by young protagonists have become the subject of three recent novels, by Alexei Ivanov, Shamil’ Idiatullin and Alexander Arkhangelsky. This article closely examines one of these novels, Alexei Ivanov’s Pischeblok [The Food Unit] published in 2016, asking how it articulates the generation that was coming of age during the 1980s and considering the ethical implications of this articulation. The reading approaches this question by examining the genre characteristics of the novel which involve a tension between ‘generatiography’ and fantasy, and between the realist and post-post-modernist modes. It argues that this hybridity of genre and a metamodernist oscillation allow for creating a multilayered representation of the late Soviet as a space of improvisational possibilities involving play with petty monsters as well as of genuine monstrosity embodying the darker side of the Soviet. The article outlines the novel’s generational self-reflection which involves re-familiarizing the readers with the ideals that existed within socialism but were not realized by the generation which internalized state socialism’s monstrous side. At the same time, the return to the moment of struggling with this monstrosity creates an alternative turning point and the possibility of responsibility-taking.","PeriodicalId":106040,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Life Writing","volume":"3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130770300","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}
At the end of the nineteenth and in the early years of the twentieth century, encouraging violent criminals to write their life stories became an accepted tool of forensic medicine. The autobiographical texts which emerged became vital building blocks in the psychological diagnosis of the subject. One of the leading international exponents of this method was the Lyon-based professor Alexandre Lacassagne, who developed a science of criminal anthropology guided by the principles of heredity and phrenology (the idea that mental functions could be precisely located in specific parts of the brain). Lacassagne was fascinated by abnormal behaviour and urged the inmates of Lyon prisons to write their autobiographies. He took a paternal interest in them, studied their tattoos, and used their life writing as a key to understanding the criminal personality. Philippe Artières has been working on Lacassagne’s papers for over 25 years, and they formed the basis of his previous work Le livre des vies coupables: autobiographies de criminels, 1896-1909 (The book of guilty lives) (Paris, 2000 and 2014). In this new book, he revisits one particularly disturbing case – the Bladier affair of 1905.
在19世纪末和20世纪初，鼓励暴力罪犯写下他们的生活故事成为法医学公认的工具。出现的自传体文本成为主体心理诊断的重要基石。这种方法的国际主要倡导者之一是里昂的亚历山大·拉卡萨尼教授，他在遗传和颅相学原理的指导下发展了一门犯罪人类学(精神功能可以精确定位于大脑的特定部位)。拉卡萨尼对不正常的行为非常着迷，并敦促里昂监狱的囚犯写自传。他对他们产生了父亲般的兴趣，研究了他们的纹身，并把他们的生活写作作为理解罪犯性格的关键。菲利普·阿蒂勒斯研究拉卡萨涅的论文已经超过25年了，这些论文构成了他之前的作品《Le livre des vies couples: the autobiographical de criminels, 1896-1909》(巴黎，2000年和2014年)的基础。在这本新书中，他重新审视了一个特别令人不安的案例——1905年的布莱尔事件。
{"title":"Philippe Artières, Un Séminariste assassin: L’affaire Bladier, 1905","authors":"M. Lyons","doi":"10.21827/EJLW.10.37584","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21827/EJLW.10.37584","url":null,"abstract":"At the end of the nineteenth and in the early years of the twentieth century, encouraging violent criminals to write their life stories became an accepted tool of forensic medicine. The autobiographical texts which emerged became vital building blocks in the psychological diagnosis of the subject. One of the leading international exponents of this method was the Lyon-based professor Alexandre Lacassagne, who developed a science of criminal anthropology guided by the principles of heredity and phrenology (the idea that mental functions could be precisely located in specific parts of the brain). Lacassagne was fascinated by abnormal behaviour and urged the inmates of Lyon prisons to write their autobiographies. He took a paternal interest in them, studied their tattoos, and used their life writing as a key to understanding the criminal personality. Philippe Artières has been working on Lacassagne’s papers for over 25 years, and they formed the basis of his previous work Le livre des vies coupables: autobiographies de criminels, 1896-1909 (The book of guilty lives) (Paris, 2000 and 2014). In this new book, he revisits one particularly disturbing case – the Bladier affair of 1905.","PeriodicalId":106040,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Life Writing","volume":"36 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121158295","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 Summertime, a fictional biographer, Mr Vincent, conducts interviews with contemporaries of the novelist J.M. Coetzee for a biography of the late author. However, every claim made about the late Coetzee by the characters in Summertime is composed by the author himself, so the hidden, yet obvious presence of the novelist gives the book’s supposedly biographical outlook an autobiographical twist. Summertime’s Coetzee is distinctly both alive and dead. I propose to analyse works such as Summertime as literary autobiographies that employ narrative strategies otherwise found in fiction in order to creatively explore lateness, belatedness, and a sense of ending with regard to their writing life. Performative contradiction, as a deliberate stylistic manifestation of paradoxical contradictions, is a result of such narrative strategies. This enables a portrayal of memory and sincerity in autobiography that acknowledges the fraught nature of these notions. Drawing on autobiographical writing by novelists, such as Coetzee, Philip Roth, and Günter Grass, this article analyses the use of tense and fictionality to create performative contradiction. It shows how the novelist’s memory and imagination engage with the ever-present possibility of death to subvert traditional ideas of lateness as well as perceived limitations to the temporality of autobiographical writing.
{"title":"‘Which I Presume is Permitted, Since We Are Talking About A Writer.’ Lateness, Memory, and Imagination in Literary Autobiography","authors":"Melissa Schuh","doi":"10.21827/EJLW.9.37328","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21827/EJLW.9.37328","url":null,"abstract":"In Summertime, a fictional biographer, Mr Vincent, conducts interviews with contemporaries of the novelist J.M. Coetzee for a biography of the late author. However, every claim made about the late Coetzee by the characters in Summertime is composed by the author himself, so the hidden, yet obvious presence of the novelist gives the book’s supposedly biographical outlook an autobiographical twist. Summertime’s Coetzee is distinctly both alive and dead. I propose to analyse works such as Summertime as literary autobiographies that employ narrative strategies otherwise found in fiction in order to creatively explore lateness, belatedness, and a sense of ending with regard to their writing life. Performative contradiction, as a deliberate stylistic manifestation of paradoxical contradictions, is a result of such narrative strategies. This enables a portrayal of memory and sincerity in autobiography that acknowledges the fraught nature of these notions. Drawing on autobiographical writing by novelists, such as Coetzee, Philip Roth, and Günter Grass, this article analyses the use of tense and fictionality to create performative contradiction. It shows how the novelist’s memory and imagination engage with the ever-present possibility of death to subvert traditional ideas of lateness as well as perceived limitations to the temporality of autobiographical writing.","PeriodicalId":106040,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Life Writing","volume":"106 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115286304","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}
The practice of life writing seems to exclude the incorporation of the writer’s death. How can autobiography come to terms with this blind spot? Are there any strategies that enable the horizon or end of the writer’s life (‘bios’) to be integrated into his or her reflections thereof? How can the impulses that are given within the scope of the writer’s contemplation of her/his transience be characterized – and how are they important for ‘life writing’? This contribution examines the autobiographical works by Saint Augustine, Petrarch, and Fontane to illustrate three different models of how life writing sets out to address the different roles that death – or rather, the awareness of human finitude – plays for the genre.
{"title":"The Limits of Autobiographical Logic. On the Impossibility of Narrating One’s Death","authors":"M. Mayer","doi":"10.21827/EJLW.9.37324","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21827/EJLW.9.37324","url":null,"abstract":"The practice of life writing seems to exclude the incorporation of the writer’s death. How can autobiography come to terms with this blind spot? Are there any strategies that enable the horizon or end of the writer’s life (‘bios’) to be integrated into his or her reflections thereof? How can the impulses that are given within the scope of the writer’s contemplation of her/his transience be characterized – and how are they important for ‘life writing’? This contribution examines the autobiographical works by Saint Augustine, Petrarch, and Fontane to illustrate three different models of how life writing sets out to address the different roles that death – or rather, the awareness of human finitude – plays for the genre.","PeriodicalId":106040,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Life Writing","volume":"517 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123105122","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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