scholarly journals ‘And Yet, What Would We Be Without Memory?’ Visualizing Memory in Two Canadian Graphic Texts

2018 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-24
Author(s):  
Dagmara Drewniak
Keyword(s):  
Holocaust Survivors ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Visual Image ◽  
Anne Michaels ◽  
Autobiographical Texts ◽  
Writing Genres ◽  
Experimental Works ◽  
Forms Of Life

Abstract Since “we live in a culture of confession” (Gilmore 2001: 2; Rak 2005: 2) a rapidly growing popularity of various forms of life writing seems understandable. The question of memory is usually an important part of the majority of autobiographical texts. Taking into account both the popularity of life writing genres and their recent proliferation, it is interesting to see how the question “what would we be without memory?” (Sebald 1998 [1995]: 255) resonates within more experimental auto/biographical texts such as a graphic memoir/novel I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors (2006) by Bernice Eisenstein and a volume of illustrated poetry and a biographical elegy published together as Correspondences (2013) by Anne Michaels and Bernice Eisenstein. These two experimental works, though representing disparate forms of writing, offer new stances on visualization of memory and correspondences between text and visual image. The aim of this paper is to analyze the ways in which the two authors discuss memory as a fluid concept yet, at the same time, one having its strong, ghostly presence. The discussion will also focus on the interplay between memory and postmemory as well as correspondences between the texts and the equally important visual forms accompanying them such as drawings, portraits, sketches, and the bookbinding itself.

scholarly journals Exhaustion and possibility. The wor(l)dlyness of social work in (G)local environment worlds during a pandemic

2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 54-62 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mona B Livholts
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Social Work ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
Social Problems ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Work Practice ◽  
Local Environment ◽  
Social Work Practice ◽  
Writing Genres

Exhaustion is not about being tired. It is an intense feeling of restlessness, of insomnia, and awakening when I ask myself: have I exhausted all that is possible? Such a state of restlessness and wakefulness represents a turning point for having enough, and opens for new possibilities to act for social change. This reflexive essay departs from the notion that the language of exhaustion offers a wor(l)dly possibility for social work(ers) to engage in critical analytical reflexivity about our locations of power from the outset of our (g)local environment worlds. The aim is to trace the transformative possibilities of social change in social work practice through the literature of exhaustion (eg. Frichot, 2019 ; Spooner, 2011 ). The methodology is based on uses of narrative life writing genres such as poetry, written and photographic diary entrances between the 4th of April and 4th of June. The essay shows how tracing exhaustion during the pandemic, visualises a multiplicity of forms of oppression and privilege, an increasing attention and relationship to things, and border movements and languages. I suggest that social work replace the often-used terminology of social problems with exhaustive lists to address structural forms of racism, sexism, ableism, ageism, which has been further visualized through death, illness, violence, and poverty during the pandemic. I argue that the language of exhaustion is useful for reflexivity and action in social work practice through the way it contributes to intensified awareness, attention, engagement, listening, and agency to create social justice.

scholarly journals A Revival of Life Writing Genres in Language Pedagogy Settings: The Case of Diary Writing

2007 ◽  
Vol 3 (2 (4)) ◽  
pp. 78-92
Author(s):  
Elena Xeni
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Written Language ◽  
The Self ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Language Pedagogy ◽  
Diary Writing ◽  
Writing Genres

The article discusses a number of issues contributing to the efficient teaching of a foreign language. Studying Diary Writing as a unique literary genre (a text disclosing the self of the author) the author of the article believes it is very important that students should have diaries since such an assignment highly contributes to the improvement of a written language.

Mary Wollstonecraft, Hester Ann Rogers, and the Textual/Sexual Enthusiasms of Women’s Life-Writing

2019 ◽  
pp. 110-141
Author(s):  
Andrew O. Winckles
Keyword(s):  
Life Writing ◽  
Mary Wollstonecraft ◽  
Male Gaze ◽  
Female Desire ◽  
Print Publication ◽  
Writing Genres ◽  
Scribal Publication ◽  
Print Publications

Chapter Four examines women’s life-writing and the formation of an “erotic imagination” within life-writing as a genre. It begins by examining the Account of the Experience of Hester Ann Rogers (1793), one of the most influential works of Methodist life-writing, and reads it as against her earlier manuscript versions of the work. This reading reveals some of the ways and reasons Methodist women navigated different publication platforms and life-writing genres (private diary, semi-public scribal publication, print publication) in order to reach different audiences. Specifically, it examines Rogers’ status as a Methodist “mystic” who, in her diaries and manuscript works, represents a deeply erotic female mysticism that is edited out of her print publications. The chapter then turns to Rogers’ contemporary, Mary Wollstonecraft, to consider how both women use the life-writing genre to re-write the terms and conditions of female desire while textually re-orienting this desire away from the male gaze.

“Sweet Home”: Audre Lorde's Zami and the legacies of American Writing

2009 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 297-317 ◽  
Author(s):  
MONICA B. PEARL
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Coming Out ◽  
Life Story ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Slave Narrative ◽  
Audre Lorde ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
American Life ◽  
Forms Of Life

Although Audre Lorde calls the narrative of her life Zami: A New Spelling of My Name a “biomythography,” suggesting that the life of an African American lesbian cannot be told in any previously available generic forms of life-writing or self-expression, Zami actually derives from two extant American literary traditions – the African American slave narrative and the lesbian coming out story – rendering it, after all, not a marginal text, but rather a text that falls obviously and firmly in a tradition of American literature. Both traditions turn siginificantly on the trope of “home,” of finding a home where one belongs. In finding the “home” that she is seeking not, ultimately, geographically, but, rather, generically – in the very text she is writing – Lorde's life story also ends up signifying the similarity of these two ostensibly disparate forms: the slave narrative and the coming out story, suggesting a common narrative trajectory of marginal American identities in the tradition of American life-writing.

scholarly journals BREAKING THE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL PACT: TRUTH AND LIFE-WRITING IN ALISON BECHDEL’S FUN HOME.

2020 ◽  
pp. 23-46
Author(s):  
María Elena Carpintero Torres-Quevedo
Keyword(s):  
Life Writing ◽  
Marginalized Groups ◽  
Autobiographical Texts ◽  
Critical Responses ◽  
Autobiographical Work ◽  
The Relationship

Much of the focus on truth in critical responses to Fun Home has surrounded the use of archival evidence and the access to truth provided by the graphic medium. This article will explore these issues as well as the relationship to truth established by the text’s metafictional devices and interactions with genre, particularly the genre of the Bildungsroman. This article will analyze the commentary the text provides not just on its own relationship to truth, but the role of truth in autobiographical texts in general, and in women’s and other marginalized groups’ autobiographical texts in particular. In the context of a critical landscape in which the veracity of autobiographical work by women is often subject to skeptical criticism, this article will argue that Fun Home acts, not as an exception to the genre of autobiography, but as a commentary on the gap between the presumed autobiographical pact and the historical, political, and aesthetic reality of autobiographical works.

scholarly journals Ecce Homo—Behold the Human! Reading Life-Narratives in Times of Colonial Modernity

Religions ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (6) ◽  
pp. 300
Author(s):  
Nandini Bhattacharya
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Dense Matrix ◽  
Life Narratives ◽  
Victorian England ◽  
Writing Project ◽  
Colonial Modernity ◽  
Culturally Informed ◽  
Writing Genres ◽  
Ecce Homo

The essay explores Bankimchandra Chatterjee’s Krishnacaritra—published in 1886—the life of a humanised god, as engaged in cross cultural dialogues with John Robert Seeley’s Ecce Homo, Natural Religion, and The Expansion of England in particular, and the broader European tendency of naturalising religions in general. It contends that the rise of historicised life writing genres in Europe was organically related to the demythologised, verifiable god-lives writing project. Bankimchandra’s Krishnacarita is embedded within a dense matrix of nineteenth century Indian secular life writing projects and its projection of Krishna as a cultural icon within an incipient nationalist imagining. The essay while exploring such fraught writing projects in Victorian England and nineteenth century colonial Bengal, concludes that ‘secularism’ arrives as not as religion’s Other but as its camouflaging in ethico-cultural guise. Secularism rides on the backs of such demystified god life narratives to rationalise ethico-culturally informed global empires.

Life Writing and Domestic Papers

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret J. M. Ezell
Keyword(s):  
Personal Narratives ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Margaret Cavendish ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
Forms Of Life ◽  
John Evelyn ◽  
Life Writings

Perhaps because of the turbulent and unsettled times, many men and women recorded their experiences in forms of life writing, including memoirs, diaries, autobiographies and biographies, meditations, and narratives of events. Among the most prolific publishers of life writings were the early Quakers, who published their accounts to offer comfort to others. Other texts such as those by John Evelyn, Margaret Cavendish, and Robert Boyle recorded events and impressions, as well as creating personal narratives.

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