Lut Missinne, K. Sarkowsky, Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf
In the vein of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), the German writer Johann Gottfried Schnabel (1692–1748) wrote a four-volume Robinsonade novel, Die Insel Felsenburg [The Island Felsenburg], which was published between 1731 and 1743. Schnabel’s novel became extremely popular in Germany, as it tells the story of a group of shipwrecked settlers who, in the spirit of protestant piety, establish an ideal state on the beautiful island on which they are stranded. One day, they discover a hidden cave, where they find a well-preserved mummified man, sitting in a stone chair at a table. On a tin board, this man, Don Cyrillo de Valaro, had engraved important information for posterity: namely that he was born on 9 August 1475, came to the island on 14 November 1514, and recorded his recollection on 27 June 1606. His writing ends as follows: ‘I am still alive, however close to death, June 28. 29. and 30. and still July 1., 2. 3., 4. By recording every day that he was still alive, Don Cyrillo, the only inhabitant on the island at the time, managed to do what no autobiographer could ever complete: record his death. One could even go so far as to say that his method typifies a life-writing model – documenting the days of one’s life in the face of inevitable death. In the context of Schnabel’s novel, this episode is remarkable in so far as the most prominent entertainment of the island’s inhabitants is to tell one another about their lives. In the evening, when their work is done, they come together – and there is no TV or internet – and tell their stories. Remarkably enough, their stories are full of sex and crime – aspects of life that are banned from the virtuous island. The story of Don Cyrillo de Valaro and the settlers is fiction, of course. However, it triggers the question as to how ‘real’ autobiographers deal with or even describe their own deaths.
德国作家约翰·戈特弗里德·施纳贝尔(1692-1748)继承了丹尼尔·笛福的《鲁滨逊漂流记》(1719)的风格，创作了一部四卷本的鲁滨逊小说《费尔森堡岛》(Die Insel Felsenburg)，于1731年至1743年间出版。施纳贝尔的小说在德国非常受欢迎，因为它讲述了一群遭遇海难的移民，他们本着新教虔诚的精神，在他们被困的美丽岛屿上建立了一个理想的国家。有一天，他们发现了一个隐藏的洞穴，在那里他们发现了一个保存完好的木乃伊，坐在一张桌子旁的石椅上。在一块锡板上，这个名叫Don Cyrillo de Valaro的人为后代刻上了重要的信息:即他出生于1475年8月9日，1514年11月14日来到该岛，并于1606年6月27日记录了他的回忆。他的文章是这样结尾的:6月28日，我还活着，虽然离死亡很近。29. 和30。还是7月1日。2。3.4。唐·西里洛(Don Cyrillo)是当时岛上唯一的居民，他通过记录自己活着的每一天，完成了任何自传作家都无法完成的事情:记录自己的死亡。人们甚至可以说，他的方法是一种典型的生活写作模式——在面对不可避免的死亡时记录自己的生活。在施纳贝尔的小说背景下，这一集很引人注目，因为岛上居民最重要的娱乐活动是互相讲述他们的生活。晚上，当他们的工作完成后，他们聚在一起——没有电视或互联网——讲述他们的故事。值得注意的是，他们的故事充满了性和犯罪——生活的方方面面在这个善良的岛屿上是被禁止的。当然，Don Cyrillo de Valaro和移民的故事是虚构的。然而，这引发了一个问题，即“真正的”自传作者是如何处理甚至描述自己的死亡的。
{"title":"Introduction. Beyond Endings – Past Tenses and Future Imaginaries","authors":"Lut Missinne, K. Sarkowsky, Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf","doi":"10.21827/EJLW.9.37320","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21827/EJLW.9.37320","url":null,"abstract":"In the vein of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), the German writer Johann Gottfried Schnabel (1692–1748) wrote a four-volume Robinsonade novel, Die Insel Felsenburg [The Island Felsenburg], which was published between 1731 and 1743. Schnabel’s novel became extremely popular in Germany, as it tells the story of a group of shipwrecked settlers who, in the spirit of protestant piety, establish an ideal state on the beautiful island on which they are stranded. One day, they discover a hidden cave, where they find a well-preserved mummified man, sitting in a stone chair at a table. On a tin board, this man, Don Cyrillo de Valaro, had engraved important information for posterity: namely that he was born on 9 August 1475, came to the island on 14 November 1514, and recorded his recollection on 27 June 1606. His writing ends as follows: ‘I am still alive, however close to death, June 28. 29. and 30. and still July 1., 2. 3., 4. By recording every day that he was still alive, Don Cyrillo, the only inhabitant on the island at the time, managed to do what no autobiographer could ever complete: record his death. One could even go so far as to say that his method typifies a life-writing model – documenting the days of one’s life in the face of inevitable death. In the context of Schnabel’s novel, this episode is remarkable in so far as the most prominent entertainment of the island’s inhabitants is to tell one another about their lives. In the evening, when their work is done, they come together – and there is no TV or internet – and tell their stories. Remarkably enough, their stories are full of sex and crime – aspects of life that are banned from the virtuous island. The story of Don Cyrillo de Valaro and the settlers is fiction, of course. However, it triggers the question as to how ‘real’ autobiographers deal with or even describe their own deaths.","PeriodicalId":106040,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Life Writing","volume":"28 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":"133835354","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 liminal space occupied by partially sighted people is little understood and much misrepresented in South African societies. Inter-personally and more broadly, visually impaired South Africans face stigma, discrimination and numerous structural barriers to educational, social and economic opportunities. These challenges remain largely invisible to those who never experience them. In this paper, I discuss my conversations with four South Africans who, like me, are visually impaired. These conversations form part of my research for Unseen, a project that brings together my interests in life writing and in exploring different aspects of the experience of visual impairment. I weave substantial extracts from our dialogues together with my own insights so as to give a sense of the texture of participants’ reported understanding, ideas, feelings, and sensorial adaptations, and also to investigate the multiple and overlapping influences of class, race, gender, age, community, sexual orientation and family on each individual’s subjective experience.
{"title":"Unseen: Exploring the Lived Experience of Visually Impaired South Africans","authors":"J. Bloch","doi":"10.21827/EJLW.9.37040","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21827/EJLW.9.37040","url":null,"abstract":"The liminal space occupied by partially sighted people is little understood and much misrepresented in South African societies. Inter-personally and more broadly, visually impaired South Africans face stigma, discrimination and numerous structural barriers to educational, social and economic opportunities. These challenges remain largely invisible to those who never experience them. \u0000In this paper, I discuss my conversations with four South Africans who, like me, are visually impaired. These conversations form part of my research for Unseen, a project that brings together my interests in life writing and in exploring different aspects of the experience of visual impairment. I weave substantial extracts from our dialogues together with my own insights so as to give a sense of the texture of participants’ reported understanding, ideas, feelings, and sensorial adaptations, and also to investigate the multiple and overlapping influences of class, race, gender, age, community, sexual orientation and family on each individual’s subjective experience.","PeriodicalId":106040,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Life Writing","volume":"12 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":"121383971","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 the autobiographical stories of Nobel Prize award-winning author Alice Munro, questions of ontology and mortality are inextricably connected to matters of space and place. Fundamental existential dilemmas expressed in Munro’s corpus – signaled by the title of her second short story collection Who Do You Think You Are? – are linked to basic questions concerning orientation. Although autobiographical fiction frequently interweaves concerns about identity and deceased parents with recollections of ancestral spaces, as the literary critic Northrop Frye famously stated, the question ‘Where is here?’ is characteristic of the Canadian imagination. It is now also fundamental to the epoch of the Anthropocene. Although critics frequently praise Munro for her skill in presenting haunting, epiphanic moments, she is less often credited for her far less conventional tendency to tell stories covering years, even decades. My paper explores Munro’s preoccupation with these vast temporal arcs and their impact on her recursive autobiographical fiction. I argue that Munro’s penchant for ‘return and revision’ in her non-fictional works affords an opportunity for her protagonists and, by extension, her readers to revisit and ponder ancestral connections and the non-human dimensions of existence, which include sublime geological features and deep time.
{"title":"Autobiography in the Anthropocene. A Geological Reading of Alice Munro","authors":"M. Goldman","doi":"10.21827/EJLW.9.37326","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21827/EJLW.9.37326","url":null,"abstract":"In the autobiographical stories of Nobel Prize award-winning author Alice Munro, questions of ontology and mortality are inextricably connected to matters of space and place. Fundamental existential dilemmas expressed in Munro’s corpus – signaled by the title of her second short story collection Who Do You Think You Are? – are linked to basic questions concerning orientation. Although autobiographical fiction frequently interweaves concerns about identity and deceased parents with recollections of ancestral spaces, as the literary critic Northrop Frye famously stated, the question ‘Where is here?’ is characteristic of the Canadian imagination. It is now also fundamental to the epoch of the Anthropocene. Although critics frequently praise Munro for her skill in presenting haunting, epiphanic moments, she is less often credited for her far less conventional tendency to tell stories covering years, even decades. My paper explores Munro’s preoccupation with these vast temporal arcs and their impact on her recursive autobiographical fiction. I argue that Munro’s penchant for ‘return and revision’ in her non-fictional works affords an opportunity for her protagonists and, by extension, her readers to revisit and ponder ancestral connections and the non-human dimensions of existence, which include sublime geological features and deep time.","PeriodicalId":106040,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Life Writing","volume":"4 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":"130241267","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}
Developing consciousness of epoch as a category of autobiographical time, the article approaches the autobiographies of Benjamin Franklin and Konrad Adenauer as acts of political communication in historico-biographical transition periods. The temporal semantics of Franklin’s and Adenauer’s autobiographical texts anchor in a consciousness of epoch, which suggests that (a) the foundations for an anticipated ideal future have been laid through the political decisionmaking of the autobiographer, and that (b) it is uncertain whether the succeeding generations of political decision-makers will continue to pursue the political course that, in the eyes of the autobiographer, will eventually realize the anticipated utopia of an ideal world. The article thus moves away from an understanding of political autobiography as justification of political decisions taken and not taken in the past. Instead, it investigates autobiography as acts of political communication legitimating the past with a future anticipated at the moment of writing the autobiography. This angle sheds light on political autobiography as a future-oriented continuation of politics by autobiographical means. The temporal semantics of the autobiographical text anchoring in a given consciousness of epoch and the communicative functions of the autobiographical act thus extend well beyond the endings of the text and the autobiographer’s life.
{"title":"Autobiography as Political Legacy in Transition Periods. Benjamin Franklin and Konrad Adenauer Compared","authors":"V. Depkat","doi":"10.21827/EJLW.9.37325","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21827/EJLW.9.37325","url":null,"abstract":"Developing consciousness of epoch as a category of autobiographical time, the article approaches the autobiographies of Benjamin Franklin and Konrad Adenauer as acts of political communication in historico-biographical transition periods. The temporal semantics of Franklin’s and Adenauer’s autobiographical texts anchor in a consciousness of epoch, which suggests that (a) the foundations for an anticipated ideal future have been laid through the political decisionmaking of the autobiographer, and that (b) it is uncertain whether the succeeding generations of political decision-makers will continue to pursue the political course that, in the eyes of the autobiographer, will eventually realize the anticipated utopia of an ideal world. The article thus moves away from an understanding of political autobiography as justification of political decisions taken and not taken in the past. Instead, it investigates autobiography as acts of political communication legitimating the past with a future anticipated at the moment of writing the autobiography. This angle sheds light on political autobiography as a future-oriented continuation of politics by autobiographical means. The temporal semantics of the autobiographical text anchoring in a given consciousness of epoch and the communicative functions of the autobiographical act thus extend well beyond the endings of the text and the autobiographer’s life.","PeriodicalId":106040,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Life Writing","volume":"183 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":"133772890","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}
Both in the Scandinavian countries and in Germany, the status of biographical writing has changed to a far greater extent in the last fifty years than in the Anglo-Saxon world. In the latter context, biography has been more popular than in Germany and, for example, Denmark and Sweden. It has continuously been regarded as both a genre worthy from a scholarly career point of view and as a means for scholars, such as historians, to reach a wider audience outside the academic ivory tower. Explanations for this difference may lie in diverse scholarly traditions where American and British scholars have consciously strived for a larger readership than the purely specialized and interdisciplinary one. An Anglo-Saxon narrative tradition in which language, style and composition have been key words has supported biography writing.
{"title":"Birgitte Possing. Understanding Biographies; Caitríona Ní Dhúill. Metabiography","authors":"Henrik Rosengren","doi":"10.21827/EJLW.9.37311","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21827/EJLW.9.37311","url":null,"abstract":"Both in the Scandinavian countries and in Germany, the status of biographical writing has changed to a far greater extent in the last fifty years than in the Anglo-Saxon world. In the latter context, biography has been more popular than in Germany and, for example, Denmark and Sweden. It has continuously been regarded as both a genre worthy from a scholarly career point of view and as a means for scholars, such as historians, to reach a wider audience outside the academic ivory tower. Explanations for this difference may lie in diverse scholarly traditions where American and British scholars have consciously strived for a larger readership than the purely specialized and interdisciplinary one. An Anglo-Saxon narrative tradition in which language, style and composition have been key words has supported biography writing.","PeriodicalId":106040,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Life Writing","volume":"14 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":"120848837","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 is a personal essay that attempts (essays) to understand my repeated contemplation of two landscape paintings in the wake of a bereavement. I have gathered together into a fragmented narrative thoughts and impressions provoked by the paintings and by readings of poetry (Czeslaw Milosz), fiction (Samuel Beckett) and psychoanalysis (Marion Milner and D.W. Winnicott). There is no closure or conclusion to the essay since grief is open and perennial.
{"title":"A View to Distant Hills: Essaying a Grievous Self","authors":"Myna Trustram","doi":"10.21827/EJLW.9.36946","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21827/EJLW.9.36946","url":null,"abstract":"This is a personal essay that attempts (essays) to understand my repeated contemplation of two landscape paintings in the wake of a bereavement. I have gathered together into a fragmented narrative thoughts and impressions provoked by the paintings and by readings of poetry (Czeslaw Milosz), fiction (Samuel Beckett) and psychoanalysis (Marion Milner and D.W. Winnicott). There is no closure or conclusion to the essay since grief is open and perennial.","PeriodicalId":106040,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Life Writing","volume":"103 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":"134382972","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}
Some of the most interesting narrative literature recently produced in Spain is distinguished by the incorporation of auto- or bio-fictional elements (for instance, Miguel Ángel Hernández, El dolor de los demás [2018]; Pablo Martín Sánchez, Diario de un viejo cabezota [2020]). Not surprisingly, this ‘trend’ has already led to many academic studies on different aspects of autobiographical fiction. The new book by Patricia López-Gay is an extremely valuable contribution to this field, since it charts in a convincing and sophisticated manner the specifically Spanish genealogy and phenomenology of this literary tendency, covers the work of representative writers in a synthetic fashion, and develops an original argument about the intersection of auto-fictional prose and the narrative configuration of the archive.
最近在西班牙产生的一些最有趣的叙事文学以融入自动或生物虚构元素而闻名(例如，Miguel Ángel Hernández, El dolor de los demás [2018];Pablo Martín Sánchez, Diario de un viejo cabezota[2020])。毫不奇怪，这种“趋势”已经导致了许多关于自传体小说不同方面的学术研究。帕特丽夏López-Gay的新书对这一领域做出了极有价值的贡献，因为它以令人信服和复杂的方式描绘了这种文学倾向的具体西班牙谱系和现象学，以综合的方式涵盖了代表性作家的作品，并就自动虚构散文和档案的叙事配置的交集提出了原创论点。
{"title":"Patricia López-Gay. Ficciones de verdad. Archivo e narrativas de vida","authors":"Jobst Welge","doi":"10.21827/EJLW.9.37342","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21827/EJLW.9.37342","url":null,"abstract":"Some of the most interesting narrative literature recently produced in Spain is distinguished by the incorporation of auto- or bio-fictional elements (for instance, Miguel Ángel Hernández, El dolor de los demás [2018]; Pablo Martín Sánchez, Diario de un viejo cabezota [2020]). Not surprisingly, this ‘trend’ has already led to many academic studies on different aspects of autobiographical fiction. The new book by Patricia López-Gay is an extremely valuable contribution to this field, since it charts in a convincing and sophisticated manner the specifically Spanish genealogy and phenomenology of this literary tendency, covers the work of representative writers in a synthetic fashion, and develops an original argument about the intersection of auto-fictional prose and the narrative configuration of the archive.","PeriodicalId":106040,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Life Writing","volume":"1 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":"129265061","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}
Ippolito Nievo’s long autobiographical novel, Confessions of an Italian (Confessioni di un italiano), also known as ‘Confessions of an Octogenarian’ (Confessioni di un ottuagenario), in reference to its 80-year-old narrator, was actually written when the writer was…twenty-nine. The narrator takes on the role of an old man reflecting on his own life – from childhood, through youth until middle and old age – making the reader believe that he is dealing with the memories of a life already lived. Indeed, Nievo must have taken inspiration from his grandfather’s life at the turn of the nineteenth century to which he added his own experience. The irony of fate is well-known: The author died at the age of 29 and the unfinished novel was published in 1867, six years after his death. Since then, it has remained an outstanding literary specimen in both Italian and European literature. In this paper, we will dwell in particular on the clever outline of the narrator. The distance between the real and the fake narrator certainly belongs to the purest autobiographical tradition, and yet it offers here a further challenge to the writer, constantly trying to share his lifelong experience with the reader and the character himself. All things considered, Nievo foresaw both his own life and how he would have written it, as if he had already lived it and was about to die.
伊波利托·涅沃的长篇自传体小说《一个意大利人的忏悔录》(Confessioni di un italiano)，也被称为“八十岁老人的忏悔录”(Confessioni di un ottuagenario)，指的是80岁的叙述者，实际上是在作者29岁时写的。叙述者扮演了一个老人的角色，反思他自己的一生——从童年，到青年，直到中年和老年——让读者相信他是在处理一个已经生活过的生活的记忆。的确，涅沃一定是从他祖父在十九世纪之交的生活中得到灵感的，他把自己的经历也加了进去。命运的讽刺是众所周知的:作者在29岁时去世，这部未完成的小说在他去世六年后的1867年出版。从那时起，它一直是意大利和欧洲文学中杰出的文学样本。在本文中，我们将重点讨论叙述者的巧妙提纲。真实的叙述者和虚假的叙述者之间的距离当然属于最纯粹的自传体传统，但它在这里对作者提出了进一步的挑战，不断地试图与读者和角色本人分享他的一生经历。考虑到这一切，涅沃既预见到他自己的生活，又预见到他将如何写他的生活，仿佛他已经经历过这种生活，即将死去。
{"title":"Ippolito Nievo. Portrait of the Writer as an Old Man","authors":"C. Nannicini","doi":"10.21827/EJLW.9.37327","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21827/EJLW.9.37327","url":null,"abstract":"Ippolito Nievo’s long autobiographical novel, Confessions of an Italian (Confessioni di un italiano), also known as ‘Confessions of an Octogenarian’ (Confessioni di un ottuagenario), in reference to its 80-year-old narrator, was actually written when the writer was…twenty-nine. The narrator takes on the role of an old man reflecting on his own life – from childhood, through youth until middle and old age – making the reader believe that he is dealing with the memories of a life already lived. Indeed, Nievo must have taken inspiration from his grandfather’s life at the turn of the nineteenth century to which he added his own experience. The irony of fate is well-known: The author died at the age of 29 and the unfinished novel was published in 1867, six years after his death. Since then, it has remained an outstanding literary specimen in both Italian and European literature. In this paper, we will dwell in particular on the clever outline of the narrator. The distance between the real and the fake narrator certainly belongs to the purest autobiographical tradition, and yet it offers here a further challenge to the writer, constantly trying to share his lifelong experience with the reader and the character himself. All things considered, Nievo foresaw both his own life and how he would have written it, as if he had already lived it and was about to die.","PeriodicalId":106040,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Life Writing","volume":"6 1 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":"124446556","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 reflective essay seeks to question, through my creative practice, methods of writing the history of post-1945 events for a young adult reader. Using creative techniques to add depth to the research, I explore the scope of the future project through a palimpsest diagram as well as poetry, word association and vignettes of my lived experiences. I compare how other creative writers have treated historical narrative in fiction, memoir and drama. Building on schoalrly debate on the role of life writing in historical processes, both source materials and historiography, the essay analyses the scholarship on postmodern representations of the recent past in literature, including personalised life writing and autobiography as well as novels. Problems jostle for attention: blank spaces of the historical records, unreliable memories, competing definitions of truth, Western class-bound identity and twenty-first century retrospection. My conclusions suggest that novelistic and lyrical techniques and voices may be an effective medium for shining a spotlight on the themes of the late twentieth century. The resulting work of auto/history will be written and read through a personal lens which that is at the same time a memoir, history and historiography, which juxtaposes a microscopic life against the constellation of world events.
{"title":"Juxtaposing and Jostling: The Art of Writing History?","authors":"J. Somerset","doi":"10.21827/EJLW.9.35933","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21827/EJLW.9.35933","url":null,"abstract":"This reflective essay seeks to question, through my creative practice, methods of writing the history of post-1945 events for a young adult reader. Using creative techniques to add depth to the research, I explore the scope of the future project through a palimpsest diagram as well as poetry, word association and vignettes of my lived experiences. I compare how other creative writers have treated historical narrative in fiction, memoir and drama. Building on schoalrly debate on the role of life writing in historical processes, both source materials and historiography, the essay analyses the scholarship on postmodern representations of the recent past in literature, including personalised life writing and autobiography as well as novels. Problems jostle for attention: blank spaces of the historical records, unreliable memories, competing definitions of truth, Western class-bound identity and twenty-first century retrospection. My conclusions suggest that novelistic and lyrical techniques and voices may be an effective medium for shining a spotlight on the themes of the late twentieth century. The resulting work of auto/history will be written and read through a personal lens which that is at the same time a memoir, history and historiography, which juxtaposes a microscopic life against the constellation of world events.","PeriodicalId":106040,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Life Writing","volume":"70 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":"128136965","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 past decade has seen an intense mobilization of grief and remembrance on social media linked to the injunction to inscribe, share, and curate life and death in the here-and-now. This article navigates the heterogeneity of these practices, using the term hyper-mourning to point both to the conditioning of mourning by the affordances of hyper-connectivity and to debates around these emerging forms of mourning as being emotionally hyperbolic and ‘inauthentic’ reactions to death events. Based on the discussion of select examples, I sketch out a typology of hyper-mourning, depending on the different story positions of teller, co-teller, or witness from which such performances are produced. As I argue, these different performances become typically associated with particular modes of affective positioning made available to the recipients of these shared stories—namely positions of proximity or distance to the death event and the dead, the networked recipient(s), and the emotional self. This typology proposes a small stories approach to hyper-mourning practices, which are organized around the mobilization of grief and remembrance for connecting networked audiences around identities, affect, and moral values dis/alignments. The article contributes to the interdisciplinary study of digital cultures of memory, affect, and identities.
{"title":"Mobilizing Grief and Remembrance with and for Networked Publics: towards a Typology of Hyper-Mourning","authors":"K. Giaxoglou","doi":"10.21827/ejlw.9.36910","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21827/ejlw.9.36910","url":null,"abstract":"The past decade has seen an intense mobilization of grief and remembrance on social media linked to the injunction to inscribe, share, and curate life and death in the here-and-now. This article navigates the heterogeneity of these practices, using the term hyper-mourning to point both to the conditioning of mourning by the affordances of hyper-connectivity and to debates around these emerging forms of mourning as being emotionally hyperbolic and ‘inauthentic’ reactions to death events. Based on the discussion of select examples, I sketch out a typology of hyper-mourning, depending on the different story positions of teller, co-teller, or witness from which such performances are produced. As I argue, these different performances become typically associated with particular modes of affective positioning made available to the recipients of these shared stories—namely positions of proximity or distance to the death event and the dead, the networked recipient(s), and the emotional self. This typology proposes a small stories approach to hyper-mourning practices, which are organized around the mobilization of grief and remembrance for connecting networked audiences around identities, affect, and moral values dis/alignments. The article contributes to the interdisciplinary study of digital cultures of memory, affect, and identities.","PeriodicalId":106040,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Life Writing","volume":"91 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-07-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134190382","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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