Atlantis, an Autoanthropology

Over the course of his long career, Nathaniel Tarn has been a poet, anthropologist, and book editor, while his travels have taken him into every continent. Born in France, raised in England, and earning a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, he knew André Breton, Salvador Dalí, Marcel Duchamp, Margot Fonteyn, Charles Olson, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and many more of the twentieth century’s major artists and intellectuals. In Atlantis, an Autoanthropology he writes that he has "never (yet) been able to experience the sensation of being only one person.” Throughout this literary memoir and autoethnography, Tarn captures this multiplicity and reaches for the uncertainties of a life lived in a dizzying array of times, cultures, and environments. Drawing on his practice as an anthropologist, he takes himself as a subject of study, examining the shape of a life devoted to the study of the whole of human culture. Atlantis, an Autoanthropology prompts us to consider our own multiple selves and the mysteries contained within.

Atlantis, an Autoanthropology

Over the course of his long career, Nathaniel Tarn has been a poet, anthropologist, and book editor, while his travels have taken him into every continent. Born in France, raised in England, and earning a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, he knew André Breton, Salvador Dalí, Marcel Duchamp, Margot Fonteyn, Charles Olson, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and many more of the twentieth century’s major artists and intellectuals. In Atlantis, an Autoanthropology he writes that he has "never (yet) been able to experience the sensation of being only one person.” Throughout this literary memoir and autoethnography, Tarn captures this multiplicity and reaches for the uncertainties of a life lived in a dizzying array of times, cultures, and environments. Drawing on his practice as an anthropologist, he takes himself as a subject of study, examining the shape of a life devoted to the study of the whole of human culture. Atlantis, an Autoanthropology prompts us to consider our own multiple selves and the mysteries contained within.

Ageism, Existential and Ontological: Reviewing Approaches toward the Abject with the Help of Millett, Hodgman, Lessing, and Roth

In an important and provocative recent article, Paul Higgs and Chris Gilleard have linked ageism not only to structural and institutional practices but to deep-seated existential and ontological fears and horrors regarding deep old age, as crystallized in the social imaginary of the fourth age. This concept suggests the need to combat not just the more modifiable structures of ageism but also the murkier and therefore more obdurate cultural aspects, especially the association of deep old age with the abject. In this article, I suggest the writings of George Bataille may help reimagine the frailties, “uglinesses,” and filth associated with deep old age. Exploring literary memoir and fiction by a range of writers through the prism of Bataille’s work, I consider how this new approach to abjection can undermine ageism and also serve as a gateway to a more meaningful vision of both old age and the life course itself.

The Memoirist against History: Nabokov’s Speak, Memory as the (re)negotiation of a literary form at the intersection of personal experience and historical narrative

Nabokov’s Speak, Memory is a literary memoir that negotiates the relationship between history and personal experience by illuminating one end of a spectrum of authoritative effects that range from artifice to spontaneity. In using play to leverage and highlight the tension between the artifice of a work of literature and the spontaneity of personal expression (or sense making on an individual level,) and by implicating both reader and writer within that tension, it demonstrates how literary memoir can negotiate its relationship to its genre. There are thus two forms of negotiation at work in Speak, Memory, the one between artifice and spontaneity, the other between individual experience and historical narrative. In this way, by using play to invite the reader into the interpretative act, Nabokov emphasises the role of artifice in the autobiographical project, and, by doing so, stakes out a claim for the literary autobiographical writer in the face of historical narrative.

A Life of the ‘Other’ and a Story of the ‘Self’: Shivarani Devi in "Premcand ghar me͂"

This paper will deal with Shivarani Devi’s (1890–1976) Premcand ghar mẽ, a literary memoir-cum-biography of her husband Premchand, a pioneer of Hindi literature. The book has already been extensively discussed in previous studies as a mirror held up to Premchand, revealing all his dynamism as a writer, intellectual and householder. Against this backdrop, this article attempts to delve more deeply into Shivarani Devi’s own intimate space within the household. It will discuss the ‘self’ that Shivarani Devi necessarily lays bare while portraying her husband, the ‘other’. It will analyse the narrated self of Shivarani Devi within the domesticity that she defines as ghar.

Militarized Freedoms

This chapter explores stories of Vietnamese Americans who came of age after the Vietnam War and currently serve in the U.S. armed forces during the War on Terror in countries like Afghanistan and Iraq. These soldiers not only wanted to give back to their adopted country for their free lives as refugees fleeing the war but also to make up for America’s loss of Vietnam as well as the defeat of South Vietnam. From the oral histories, the chapter moves on to a major published literary memoir from U.S. Marine Quang X. Pham. Pham, a well-known public figure, talks about his confused life through losing his father, a South Vietnamese former pilot. From these oral and written texts, the chapter analyzes the thoughts of these “children of war” on wide-ranging issues such as migration, nation, family, and citizenship through the concept of “militarized freedom”—defined for these professionals as the sense of freedom (both political and personal) as shaped through their experiences and trauma with militarism. The Vietnamese American soldier encounters a moral dilemma that moves beyond a “Vietnam Syndrome,” an “American Syndrome,” where their professional obligations to American nation-building projects pulsate through their personal status as the living embodiment and physical reminders of America’s loss in South Vietnam.

Los gauchos judíos

This chapter examines the preproduction, shooting and reception of a gauchesque film that is populated by Jewish characters and is also an adaptation of a traditional Argentine literary memoir by Alberto Gerchunoff.