Pub Date : 2023-01-04DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2022.2160935
Amber Moore
{"title":"‘To You, Who May Find Yourself in This Story’: What a Baker’s Memoir Taught an Emerging Education Scholar","authors":"Amber Moore","doi":"10.1080/14484528.2022.2160935","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14484528.2022.2160935","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43797,"journal":{"name":"Life Writing","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-01-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48471319","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-12-16DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2022.2154582
Max Saunders
{"title":"The Oxford History of Life Writing Vol VII: Postwar to Contemporary, 1945–2020","authors":"Max Saunders","doi":"10.1080/14484528.2022.2154582","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14484528.2022.2154582","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43797,"journal":{"name":"Life Writing","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-12-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43886851","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-12-15DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2022.2156261
Xuesheng Yuan
{"title":"Lives Beyond Borders: US Immigrant Women’s Life Writing, Nationality and Social Justice","authors":"Xuesheng Yuan","doi":"10.1080/14484528.2022.2156261","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14484528.2022.2156261","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43797,"journal":{"name":"Life Writing","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-12-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46857034","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-12-11DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2022.2148046
J. Palmer
ABSTRACT Great War memoirs by both soldiers and nurses emphasise the role of eye-witness in establishing the authority of the account. This authority is acknowledged in the public response to these texts, which crosses both national and gender boundaries. However, the response is asymmetric between genders: soldiers were often blamed for insisting on the primacy of personal experience in their accounts, on the grounds that this made the war seem senseless, undermining the sacrifices made. Nurses, to the contrary, were not the subject of such attacks, with one noteworthy exception which is explained by the untypical nature of the memoir in question. The asymmetry derives from the attribution of gender-specific forms of authenticity in the memoirs: the authenticity of soldiers’ accounts derived from their own experiences, the authenticity of nurses’ accounts derived from what they did for the soldiers.
{"title":"Authenticity and Gender: Public Responses to Great War Memoirs by Nurses and Frontline Soldiers in Britain, France and Germany","authors":"J. Palmer","doi":"10.1080/14484528.2022.2148046","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14484528.2022.2148046","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Great War memoirs by both soldiers and nurses emphasise the role of eye-witness in establishing the authority of the account. This authority is acknowledged in the public response to these texts, which crosses both national and gender boundaries. However, the response is asymmetric between genders: soldiers were often blamed for insisting on the primacy of personal experience in their accounts, on the grounds that this made the war seem senseless, undermining the sacrifices made. Nurses, to the contrary, were not the subject of such attacks, with one noteworthy exception which is explained by the untypical nature of the memoir in question. The asymmetry derives from the attribution of gender-specific forms of authenticity in the memoirs: the authenticity of soldiers’ accounts derived from their own experiences, the authenticity of nurses’ accounts derived from what they did for the soldiers.","PeriodicalId":43797,"journal":{"name":"Life Writing","volume":"20 1","pages":"583 - 597"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-12-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47519422","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-12-11DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2022.2143003
Yasmine Shamma
ABSTRACT Drawing on sibling literature and theory, this essay spotlights the aches of being a Lebanese expat, missing playing tennis with my sister in Beirut, and (literally) falling to a sports injury in England in the immediate aftermath of the August 4 2020 explosion. As the narrative unravels the ways in which such transnational aches overlap, I explore the phantom geographies of how Lebanese living outside Lebanon continue to live within Lebanon, enduring certain syncopated pains and processes. In doing so, I show how the repercussions of recent events—including the nuclear-level blast set within a pandemic—ripple through the lives expats live as exiles, missing loved ones. I also write about tennis, a sport that is not traditionally ‘owned’ by immigrants, yet is currently being negotiated by them on professional circuits; and about doing so in Beirut, in a country in which progress, personal growth and national development, are inherently foreign, frequently thwarted. In this manner, this is an article about both playing tennis in Beirut, and playing tennis with Beirut—engaging in a perpetual back and forth tension of loss and departure, but also, charge and pursuit.
{"title":"Playing Tennis in Beirut: Sisterhood and Transnational Aches","authors":"Yasmine Shamma","doi":"10.1080/14484528.2022.2143003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14484528.2022.2143003","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Drawing on sibling literature and theory, this essay spotlights the aches of being a Lebanese expat, missing playing tennis with my sister in Beirut, and (literally) falling to a sports injury in England in the immediate aftermath of the August 4 2020 explosion. As the narrative unravels the ways in which such transnational aches overlap, I explore the phantom geographies of how Lebanese living outside Lebanon continue to live within Lebanon, enduring certain syncopated pains and processes. In doing so, I show how the repercussions of recent events—including the nuclear-level blast set within a pandemic—ripple through the lives expats live as exiles, missing loved ones. I also write about tennis, a sport that is not traditionally ‘owned’ by immigrants, yet is currently being negotiated by them on professional circuits; and about doing so in Beirut, in a country in which progress, personal growth and national development, are inherently foreign, frequently thwarted. In this manner, this is an article about both playing tennis in Beirut, and playing tennis with Beirut—engaging in a perpetual back and forth tension of loss and departure, but also, charge and pursuit.","PeriodicalId":43797,"journal":{"name":"Life Writing","volume":"20 1","pages":"747 - 758"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-12-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41581828","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-12-07DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2023.2130024
T. Evans, Marian Lorrison
This Special Issue of Life Writing emerged from a workshop initially co-organised by Jerome de Groot and Tanya Evans. They planned to hold this in collaboration with the Society of Australian Genealogists (SAG) in Kent Street, Sydney, Australia in April 2020. Evans had previously collaborated with SAG on several occasions since 2012 through different research projects on family history (Evans 2015, 2022). These collaborations included interactive talks, help with recruitment on family history research projects, the dissemination of research on the practice and meanings of family history and networking among family historians. At the time, de Groot and Evans were co-authoring an article on the value of collaborative public history projects in Australia and Britain, both focused on their international engagements with the family history community (Evans, de Groot, and Stallard Forthcoming). They held two successful, lively, interactive, participatory and well-attended workshops including international scholarly researchers on family history together with family historians at Manchester City Library in the UK in September 2017 (de Groot and Evans 2017) and at the State Library of New South Wales in Sydney in July 2018 (Evans and de Groot 2019). Covid 19 prevented Jerome’s travel to Australia in early 2020 and the whole world went into lockdown soon after. We hoped the workshop might encourage everyone to re-evaluate the research practices and interests of family historians which we knew to be often scathingly defined by others as unscientific, uncritical, emotional and of little value to the academy or anyone else bar individual researchers’ families. Nonetheless, family history has become phenomenally popular world-wide. It is through their families that millions of people, all over the world, first engage with the subject of history, listening to family stories over the years and being told about where they sit in their family trees. Psychologists have revealed that these family stories about the past are crucial to an individual’s sense of identity and well-being (Moore, Rosenthal, and Robinson 2020). Family history is understood by a range of sociologists and human geographers in Europe and Australia to have an important role in identity-formation (Bottero 2015; Kramer 2011). As Nash suggests, family history individualises the past (Nash 2002). National surveys across the globe have revealed the overwhelming centrality of family to people’s understanding of history everywhere (Ashton and Hamilton 2003, 135; Conrad et al. 2013). However, as Evans has demonstrated in her work, family historians are an enormous and still often neglected group of historical researchers. They have a strongly articulated sense of their practice, and a well-developed set of methodologies and research systems. They are a community who are mostly but not always situated outside the academy, often marginalised by the mainstream. They have been dismissed for their naiveté
本期《生活写作特刊》源自杰罗姆·德·格鲁特和塔尼娅·埃文斯最初共同组织的研讨会。他们计划于2020年4月在澳大利亚悉尼肯特街与澳大利亚家谱学家协会(SAG)合作举办这次活动。自2012年以来，Evans曾多次与SAG合作，通过不同的家族史研究项目(Evans 2015,2022)。这些合作包括互动式会谈、帮助招募家族史研究项目人员、传播关于家族史的实践和意义的研究以及在家族史学家之间建立联系。当时，德格鲁特和埃文斯共同撰写了一篇关于澳大利亚和英国合作公共历史项目价值的文章，他们都专注于与家族史社区的国际合作(埃文斯，德格鲁特和斯托拉德即将出版)。他们于2017年9月在英国曼彻斯特城市图书馆(de Groot and Evans 2017)和2018年7月在悉尼新南威尔士州国家图书馆(Evans and de Groot 2019)举办了两次成功的、生动的、互动的、参与性的、参加人数众多的研讨会，包括国际学术研究人员和家庭历史学家。2020年初，新冠肺炎阻止了杰罗姆前往澳大利亚，不久之后，全世界都进入了封锁状态。我们希望研讨会能鼓励每个人重新评估家庭历史学家的研究实践和兴趣，我们知道，这些研究经常被其他人严厉地定义为不科学、不批判、情绪化，对学院或除了个别研究人员的家庭之外的任何人都没有什么价值。尽管如此，家族史已经在世界范围内变得非常流行。正是通过他们的家庭，世界各地数以百万计的人第一次接触到历史这个主题，多年来听着家庭故事，被告知他们在家谱中所处的位置。心理学家透露，这些关于过去的家庭故事对一个人的认同感和幸福感至关重要(Moore, Rosenthal, and Robinson, 2020)。欧洲和澳大利亚的一系列社会学家和人文地理学家认为家族史在身份形成中起着重要作用(Bottero 2015;克莱默2011)。正如纳什所说，家族史使过去个人化(纳什2002)。全球范围内的全国性调查显示，家庭在世界各地人们对历史的理解中具有压倒性的中心地位(Ashton and Hamilton 2003, 135;Conrad et al. 2013)。然而，正如埃文斯在她的作品中所展示的那样，家族历史学家是一个庞大的，但仍然经常被忽视的历史研究群体。他们对自己的实践有强烈的清晰的认识，有一套完善的方法和研究体系。他们是一个大多数(但并非总是)处于学术界之外的群体，经常被主流边缘化。他们因天真和业余而被解雇，并因寻求与祖先前世的情感联系而受到嘲笑(Evans 2022)。在本期特刊中，我们将继续质疑这些假设，并展示学者们是如何参与家族史研究的，以及家族史是如何让很多人进行历史思考并产生独特的历史理解形式的
{"title":"Family History and Life Writing","authors":"T. Evans, Marian Lorrison","doi":"10.1080/14484528.2023.2130024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14484528.2023.2130024","url":null,"abstract":"This Special Issue of Life Writing emerged from a workshop initially co-organised by Jerome de Groot and Tanya Evans. They planned to hold this in collaboration with the Society of Australian Genealogists (SAG) in Kent Street, Sydney, Australia in April 2020. Evans had previously collaborated with SAG on several occasions since 2012 through different research projects on family history (Evans 2015, 2022). These collaborations included interactive talks, help with recruitment on family history research projects, the dissemination of research on the practice and meanings of family history and networking among family historians. At the time, de Groot and Evans were co-authoring an article on the value of collaborative public history projects in Australia and Britain, both focused on their international engagements with the family history community (Evans, de Groot, and Stallard Forthcoming). They held two successful, lively, interactive, participatory and well-attended workshops including international scholarly researchers on family history together with family historians at Manchester City Library in the UK in September 2017 (de Groot and Evans 2017) and at the State Library of New South Wales in Sydney in July 2018 (Evans and de Groot 2019). Covid 19 prevented Jerome’s travel to Australia in early 2020 and the whole world went into lockdown soon after. We hoped the workshop might encourage everyone to re-evaluate the research practices and interests of family historians which we knew to be often scathingly defined by others as unscientific, uncritical, emotional and of little value to the academy or anyone else bar individual researchers’ families. Nonetheless, family history has become phenomenally popular world-wide. It is through their families that millions of people, all over the world, first engage with the subject of history, listening to family stories over the years and being told about where they sit in their family trees. Psychologists have revealed that these family stories about the past are crucial to an individual’s sense of identity and well-being (Moore, Rosenthal, and Robinson 2020). Family history is understood by a range of sociologists and human geographers in Europe and Australia to have an important role in identity-formation (Bottero 2015; Kramer 2011). As Nash suggests, family history individualises the past (Nash 2002). National surveys across the globe have revealed the overwhelming centrality of family to people’s understanding of history everywhere (Ashton and Hamilton 2003, 135; Conrad et al. 2013). However, as Evans has demonstrated in her work, family historians are an enormous and still often neglected group of historical researchers. They have a strongly articulated sense of their practice, and a well-developed set of methodologies and research systems. They are a community who are mostly but not always situated outside the academy, often marginalised by the mainstream. They have been dismissed for their naiveté ","PeriodicalId":43797,"journal":{"name":"Life Writing","volume":"20 1","pages":"1 - 8"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-12-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47106990","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-11-30DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2022.2151847
Yusiyu Wang, Q. Cao, C. Nitschke
ABSTRACT This work examines Han Suyin’s representation of her Eurasian identity in relation to her maternal inheritance, focusing on her autobiography The Crippled Tree, the first volume in the series China: Autobiography, History. Drawing on Paul John Eakin’s concept of relationality in life writing, we consider that Han’s Eurasian identity was formed through her interactions and negotiations with significant others such as her mother. We argue that Han reveals her maternal inheritance in three ways: reconstructing her mother’s subjectivity, recalling her mother’s story, and speaking for her mother: actions that contribute to Han’s self-representation as Eurasian. By intertwining her story with that of her mother, Han shows that her self-identity is relational, and presents the boundaries of the autobiographical ‘I’ as shifting and flexible.
{"title":"The Relational Self: Maternal Inheritance and Eurasian Identity in Han Suyin’s The Crippled Tree","authors":"Yusiyu Wang, Q. Cao, C. Nitschke","doi":"10.1080/14484528.2022.2151847","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14484528.2022.2151847","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This work examines Han Suyin’s representation of her Eurasian identity in relation to her maternal inheritance, focusing on her autobiography The Crippled Tree, the first volume in the series China: Autobiography, History. Drawing on Paul John Eakin’s concept of relationality in life writing, we consider that Han’s Eurasian identity was formed through her interactions and negotiations with significant others such as her mother. We argue that Han reveals her maternal inheritance in three ways: reconstructing her mother’s subjectivity, recalling her mother’s story, and speaking for her mother: actions that contribute to Han’s self-representation as Eurasian. By intertwining her story with that of her mother, Han shows that her self-identity is relational, and presents the boundaries of the autobiographical ‘I’ as shifting and flexible.","PeriodicalId":43797,"journal":{"name":"Life Writing","volume":"20 1","pages":"563 - 581"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-11-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48482443","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-11-27DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2022.2146446
D. LeMahieu
ABSTRACT This essay argues for the relevance of Theodor Adorno to life writing in the Anthropocene. His view of instrumental reason predicted the despoliation of the earth. His own memoir, Minima Moralia, radically decentred the individual voice by proclaiming its hopeless entanglement in exchange values. His negative dialectics reconceived Cartesian Dualism and destabilised relational models of life narration. Adorno’s view of memory contested its objectification, and his memoir includes few incidents from his life. Instead, Adorno creates dense ‘thought images’ that ponder the predicaments of living in a disastrous time. He never hid his elitism but carefully explored its limitations and hypocrisies. His pessimism alienates more hopeful sensibilities, but he never demanded allegiance to his philosophy, only a consideration of its accusations.
{"title":"Theodor Adorno and Life Writing in the Anthropocene","authors":"D. LeMahieu","doi":"10.1080/14484528.2022.2146446","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14484528.2022.2146446","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This essay argues for the relevance of Theodor Adorno to life writing in the Anthropocene. His view of instrumental reason predicted the despoliation of the earth. His own memoir, Minima Moralia, radically decentred the individual voice by proclaiming its hopeless entanglement in exchange values. His negative dialectics reconceived Cartesian Dualism and destabilised relational models of life narration. Adorno’s view of memory contested its objectification, and his memoir includes few incidents from his life. Instead, Adorno creates dense ‘thought images’ that ponder the predicaments of living in a disastrous time. He never hid his elitism but carefully explored its limitations and hypocrisies. His pessimism alienates more hopeful sensibilities, but he never demanded allegiance to his philosophy, only a consideration of its accusations.","PeriodicalId":43797,"journal":{"name":"Life Writing","volume":"20 1","pages":"545 - 561"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-11-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49574277","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-11-16DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2022.2139629
Linus Hagström
ABSTRACT This essay takes literature laureate Kenzaburo Oe’s Nobel lecture from 1994, Japan, the Ambiguous, and Myself, as a point of departure for thinking about Japan, the ambiguous and how the already fragile and complex narrator that is I has evolved ambiguously over time in relation to a similarly ambiguous and changing imagination of Japan. Based on aikido practice—the narrator’s gateway to Japan—the essay ends up proposing a different understanding of and approach to ambiguity to Oe’s.
{"title":"Japan, the Ambiguous, and My Fragile, Complex and Evolving Self","authors":"Linus Hagström","doi":"10.1080/14484528.2022.2139629","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14484528.2022.2139629","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This essay takes literature laureate Kenzaburo Oe’s Nobel lecture from 1994, Japan, the Ambiguous, and Myself, as a point of departure for thinking about Japan, the ambiguous and how the already fragile and complex narrator that is I has evolved ambiguously over time in relation to a similarly ambiguous and changing imagination of Japan. Based on aikido practice—the narrator’s gateway to Japan—the essay ends up proposing a different understanding of and approach to ambiguity to Oe’s.","PeriodicalId":43797,"journal":{"name":"Life Writing","volume":"20 1","pages":"443 - 452"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-11-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45397676","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-11-16DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2022.2141817
Xu Mao, Daniel M. Vuillermin
ABSTRACT The group biography Doctor Zhang and Doctor Wang (2021) portrays the life narratives of two doctors and their families from the Northeast (dongbei) of China. This article analyses the spatial and social anxieties in contemporary Chinese society as represented by doctors. As Northeasters(dongbei ren), the doctors regard this region as ‘lagging behind’, thus they aspire to migrate to Southern China or Western countries. However, they are unable to relocate geographically and instead choose another type of movement, to that of ‘society’(shehui), which can be translated as well-connected or sophisticated in social relationships. Both movements—geographical and social—signify a desire for social mobility within a system of intense competition. Whereas many studies have focused on low-skilled Chinese migrants, Doctor Zhang and Doctor Wang is at the forefront of texts on an overlooked demographic: educated and skilled professionals. This article will argue that by depicting competition within ‘society’ through a topic-driven biographical format, the text reinforces socio-economic justifications that diminish the individuality of the figures, thereby constructing the opposite result of what the biography aims to achieve, that is, to criticise the material success-centred values that impede autonomy.
{"title":"Place and Social Anxiety in Xianfeng Yi and Ying Yang's Doctor Zhang and Doctor Wang","authors":"Xu Mao, Daniel M. Vuillermin","doi":"10.1080/14484528.2022.2141817","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14484528.2022.2141817","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The group biography Doctor Zhang and Doctor Wang (2021) portrays the life narratives of two doctors and their families from the Northeast (dongbei) of China. This article analyses the spatial and social anxieties in contemporary Chinese society as represented by doctors. As Northeasters(dongbei ren), the doctors regard this region as ‘lagging behind’, thus they aspire to migrate to Southern China or Western countries. However, they are unable to relocate geographically and instead choose another type of movement, to that of ‘society’(shehui), which can be translated as well-connected or sophisticated in social relationships. Both movements—geographical and social—signify a desire for social mobility within a system of intense competition. Whereas many studies have focused on low-skilled Chinese migrants, Doctor Zhang and Doctor Wang is at the forefront of texts on an overlooked demographic: educated and skilled professionals. This article will argue that by depicting competition within ‘society’ through a topic-driven biographical format, the text reinforces socio-economic justifications that diminish the individuality of the figures, thereby constructing the opposite result of what the biography aims to achieve, that is, to criticise the material success-centred values that impede autonomy.","PeriodicalId":43797,"journal":{"name":"Life Writing","volume":"20 1","pages":"527 - 544"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-11-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42354347","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：