Download or read book Autofiction and Cultural Memory written by Hywel Dix and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-12-22 with total page 111 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Autofiction and Cultural Memory breaks new ground in autofiction research by showing how it gives postcolonial writers a means of bearing witness to past cultural or political struggles, and hence of contributing to new forms of cultural memory. Most discussion of autofiction has treated it as an individualistic form, dealing with the personal growth of its authors. In doing so, it privileges narratives of private development over those of social commitment and accords with Western concepts of ownership and authorship. By contrast, Hywel Dix shows how a variety of writers outside the Western world have used the techniques of autofiction in a different way, placing themselves on the side lines of their own stories to show solidarity with struggles against imperialism and tyranny. Drawing on examples from Algeria, Ethiopia, the Caribbean, the Americas, India and Turkey, Dix presents autofiction as a form which combines the life stories of authors with the collective struggles of their societies to restore to view historical injustices that have been marginalised and forgotten. By contributing to new forms of cultural memory, autofiction raises important questions about what we choose to remember and what we value in the present. This book will be of interest to anyone working in postcolonial studies, world literature, trauma studies, autobiography, life writing or social justice.
Download or read book Autofiction and Cultural Memory written by Hywel Dix and published by . This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Autofiction and Cultural Memory breaks new ground in autofiction research by showing how it gives postcolonial writers a means of bearing witness to past cultural or political struggles, and hence of contributing to new forms of cultural memory. Most discussion of autofiction has treated it as an individualistic form, dealing with the personal growth of its authors. In doing so, it privileges narratives of private development over those of social commitment and accords with Western concepts of ownership and authorship. By contrast, Hywel Dix shows how a variety of writers outside the Western world have used the techniques of autofiction in a different way, placing themselves on the side lines of their own stories to show solidarity with struggles against imperialism and tyranny. Drawing on examples from Algeria, Ethiopia, the Caribbean, the Americas, India and Turkey, Dix presents autofiction as a form which combines the life stories of authors with the collective struggles of their societies to restore to view historical injustices that have been marginalised and forgotten. By contributing to new forms of cultural memory, autofiction raises important questions about what we choose to remember and what we value in the present. This book will be of interest to anyone working in postcolonial studies, world literature, trauma studies, autobiography, life writing or social justice.
Download or read book Playful Memories written by Jordana Blejmar and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-12-28 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume examines the blending of fact and fiction in a series of cultural artefacts by post-dictatorship writers and artists in Argentina, many of them children of disappeared or persecuted parents. Jordana Blejmar argues that these works, which emerged after the turn of the millennium, pay testament to a new cultural formation of memory characterised by the use of autofiction and playful aesthetics. She focuses on a range of practitioners, including Laura Alcoba, Lola Arias, Félix Bruzzone, Albertina Carri, María Giuffra, Victoria Grigera Dupuy, Mariana Eva Perez, Lucila Quieto, and Ernesto Semán, who look towards each other's works across boundaries of genre and register as part of the way they address the legacies of the 1976-1983 dictatorship. Approaching these works not as second-hand or adoptive memories but as memories in their own right, Blejmar invites us to recognise the subversive power of self-figuration, play and humour when dealing with trauma.
Download or read book The Autofictional written by Alexandra Effe and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-01-03 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This open access book offers innovative and wide-ranging responses to the continuously flourishing literary phenomenon of autofiction. The book shows the insights that are gained in the shift from the genre descriptor to the adjective, and from a broad application of “the autofictional” as a theoretical lens and aesthetic strategy. In three sections on “Approaches,” “Affordances,” and “Forms,” the volume proposes new theoretical approaches for the study of autofiction and the autofictional, offers fresh perspectives on many of the prominent authors in the discussion, draws them into a dialogue with autofictional practice from across the globe, and brings into view texts, forms, and media that have not traditionally been considered for their autofictional dimensions. The book, in sum, expands the parameters of research on autofiction to date to allow new voices and viewpoints to emerge.
Download or read book In Memory of Memory written by Maria Stepanova and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2021-02-09 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of life at the margins of history from one of Russia’s most exciting contemporary writers Shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize Winner of the MLA Lois Roth Translation Award With the death of her aunt, the narrator is left to sift through an apartment full of faded photographs, old postcards, letters, diaries, and heaps of souvenirs: a withered repository of a century of life in Russia. Carefully reassembled with calm, steady hands, these shards tell the story of how a seemingly ordinary Jewish family somehow managed to survive the myriad persecutions and repressions of the last century. In dialogue with writers like Roland Barthes, W. G. Sebald, Susan Sontag, and Osip Mandelstam, In Memory of Memory is imbued with rare intellectual curiosity and a wonderfully soft-spoken, poetic voice. Dipping into various forms—essay, fiction, memoir, travelogue, and historical documents—Stepanova assembles a vast panorama of ideas and personalities and offers an entirely new and bold exploration of cultural and personal memory.
Download or read book Memory and Autobiography written by Leonor Arfuch and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2020-08-04 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book by one of Latin America’s leading cultural theorists examines the place of the subject and the role of biographical and autobiographical genres in contemporary culture. Arfuch argues that the on-going proliferation of private and intimate stories – what she calls the ‘biographical space’ – can be seen as symptomatic of the impersonalizing dynamics of contemporary times. Autobiographical genres, however, harbour an intersubjective dimension. The ‘I’ who speaks wants to be heard by another, and the other who listens discovers in autobiography possible points of identification. Autobiographical genres, including those that border on fiction, therefore become spaces in which the singularity of experience opens onto the collective and its historicity in ways that allow us to reflect on the ethical, political, and aesthetic dimensions not only of self-representation but also of life itself. Opening up debate through juxtaposition and dialogue, Arfuch’s own poetic writing moves freely from the Holocaust to Argentina’s last dictatorship and its traumatic memories, and then to the troubled borderlands between Mexico and the United States to show how artists rescue shards of memory that would otherwise be relegated to the dustbin of history. In so doing, she makes us see not only how challenging it is to represent past traumas and violence but also how vitally necessary it is to do so as a political strategy for combating the tides of forgetting and for finding ways of being in common.
Download or read book Handbook of Autobiography Autofiction written by Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2019-01-29 with total page 2220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Autobiographical writings have been a major cultural genre from antiquity to the present time. General questions of the literary as, e.g., the relation between literature and reality, truth and fiction, the dependency of author, narrator, and figure, or issues of individual and cultural styles etc., can be studied preeminently in the autobiographical genre. Yet, the tradition of life-writing has, in the course of literary history, developed manifold types and forms. Especially in the globalized age, where the media and other technological / cultural factors contribute to a rapid transformation of lifestyles, autobiographical writing has maintained, even enhanced, its popularity and importance. By conceiving autobiography in a wide sense that includes memoirs, diaries, self-portraits and autofiction as well as media transformations of the genre, this three-volume handbook offers a comprehensive survey of theoretical approaches, systematic aspects, and historical developments in an international and interdisciplinary perspective. While autobiography is usually considered to be a European tradition, special emphasis is placed on the modes of self-representation in non-Western cultures and on inter- and transcultural perspectives of the genre. The individual contributions are closely interconnected by a system of cross-references. The handbook addresses scholars of cultural and literary studies, students as well as non-academic readers.
Download or read book Autofiction in English written by Hywel Dix and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-06-04 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This innovative volume establishes autofiction as a new and dynamic area of theoretical research in English. Since the term was coined by Serge Doubrovsky, autofiction has become established as a recognizable genre within the French literary pantheon. Yet unlike other areas of French theory, English-language discussion of autofiction has been relatively limited - until now. Starting out by exploring the characteristic features and definitions of autofiction from a conceptual standpoint, the collection identifies a number of cultural, historical and theoretical contexts in which the emergence of autofiction in English can be understood. In the process, it identifies what is new and distinctive about Anglophone forms of autofiction when compared to its French equivalents. These include a preoccupation with the conditions of authorship; writing after trauma; and a heightened degree of authorial self-reflexivity beyond that typically associated with postmodernism. By concluding that there is such a field as autofiction in English, it provides for the first time detailed analysis of the major works in that field and a concise historical overview of its emergence. It thus opens up new avenues in life writing and authorship research.
Download or read book Autofiction Emotions and Humour written by Alexandra Effe and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-12-26 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Autofiction is often associated with humour, irony, and play. Moreover, authors of autofictional texts are frequently criticised for a lack of seriousness or for failing to straightforwardly and in their own voice engage with a given topic. Yet very few autofictional texts are exclusively, or even primarily, playful. Many employ humour and irony to address very serious subject matter. This volume explores how these seemingly opposed characteristics of autofictional texts in fact work together. The contributions in this volume show that autofictional texts often make use of humour and play in a productive and meaningful way, tackling issues such as human rights violations, historical and collective as well as personal trauma, and struggle with psychological or physical illness and abuse. On the basis of geographically wide-ranging case studies, including texts from South America, South Africa, the United States, and Europe, this book explores how, in which contexts, and to which effects autofictional texts reveal their authors’ complex and often painful psychological experiences and engage the emotions of their readers. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Life Writing.
Download or read book Structures of Feeling written by Devika Sharma and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2015-03-05 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Raymond Williams coined the notion "structure of feeling" in the 1970s to facilitate a historical understanding of "affective elements of consciousness and relationships." Since then, the need to understand emotions, moods and atmospheres as historical and social phenomena has only become more acute in an era of social networking, ubiquitous media and a public sphere permeated by commodities and advertisement culture. Concomitantly, affect studies have become one of the most thriving branches of contemporary humanities and social sciences. This volume explores the significance of the study of affectivity for already thriving fields of cultural analysis such as media studies, memory studies, gender studies and cultural studies at large. The volume is divided into four sections. The first part, Producing Affect, brings together contributions which explore some of the ways in which new media works to produce and intensify affectivity. The essays making up the second part, Affective Pasts, explore the significance of affect to the ways we remember, commemorate and in other ways get hold of things in our recent and not so recent past – or fail to do so. The essays engage the affective production of presence in contexts such as 9/11, the emotional culture of the eighteenth century, and literary auto-fiction. The third part, Affective Thinking, examines various concepts, theories, and forms of thinking not so much to show how the thinking in question may inform the field of affect studies but rather in order to draw attention to the way in which these modes of thinking are themselves already attuned to matters of affect. New social relations and ways of being in a networked world are the common themes of the essays in the final part of the volume, Circulating Affect.
Download or read book My Dark Vanessa written by Kate Elizabeth Russell and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2020-03-10 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “[An] exceedingly complex, inventive, resourceful examination of harm and power.” —The New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice “A lightning rod . . . brilliantly crafted.”—The Washington Post A most anticipated book by The New York Times • USA Today • Entertainment Weekly • Marie Claire • Elle • Harper's Bazaar • Bustle • Newsweek • New York Post • Esquire • Real Simple • The Sunday Times • The Guardian Exploring the psychological dynamics of the relationship between a precocious yet naïve teenage girl and her magnetic and manipulative teacher, a brilliant, all-consuming read that marks the explosive debut of an extraordinary new writer. 2000. Bright, ambitious, and yearning for adulthood, fifteen-year-old Vanessa Wye becomes entangled in an affair with Jacob Strane, her magnetic and guileful forty-two-year-old English teacher. 2017. Amid the rising wave of allegations against powerful men, a reckoning is coming due. Strane has been accused of sexual abuse by a former student, who reaches out to Vanessa, and now Vanessa suddenly finds herself facing an impossible choice: remain silent, firm in the belief that her teenage self willingly engaged in this relationship, or redefine herself and the events of her past. But how can Vanessa reject her first love, the man who fundamentally transformed her and has been a persistent presence in her life? Is it possible that the man she loved as a teenager—and who professed to worship only her—may be far different from what she has always believed? Alternating between Vanessa’s present and her past, My Dark Vanessa juxtaposes memory and trauma with the breathless excitement of a teenage girl discovering the power her own body can wield. Thought-provoking and impossible to put down, this is a masterful portrayal of troubled adolescence and its repercussions that raises vital questions about agency, consent, complicity, and victimhood. Written with the haunting intimacy of The Girls and the creeping intensity of Room, My Dark Vanessa is an era-defining novel that brilliantly captures and reflects the shifting cultural mores transforming our relationships and society itself.
Download or read book Research Methodologies for Auto biography Studies written by Kate Douglas and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2019-06-03 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of short essays provides a rigorous, rich, collaborative space in which scholars and practitioners debate the value of different methodological approaches to the study of life narratives and explore a diverse range of interdisciplinary methods. Auto/biography studies has been one of the most vibrant sub-disciplines to emerge in the humanities and social sciences in the past decade, providing significant links between disciplines including literary studies, languages, linguistics, digital humanities, medical humanities, creative writing, history, gender studies, education, sociology, and anthropology. The essays in this collection position auto/biography as a key discipline for modelling interdisciplinary approaches to methodology and ask: what original and important thinking can auto/biography studies bring to discussions of methodology for literary studies and beyond? And how does the diversity of methodological interventions in auto/biography studies build a strong and diverse research discipline? In including some of auto/biography’s leading international scholars alongside emerging scholars, and exploring key subgenres and practices, this collection showcases knowledge about what we do when engaging in auto/biographical research. Research Methodologies for Auto/biography Studies offers a series of case studies that explore the research practices, reflective behaviours, and ethical considerations that inform auto/biographical research.
Download or read book Cultural Memory Studies written by Astrid Erll and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2008-08-27 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This handbook represents the interdisciplinary and international field of “cultural memory studies” for the first time in one volume. Articles by renowned international scholars offer readers a unique overview of the key concepts of cultural memory studies. The handbook not only documents current research in an unprecedented way; it also serves as a forum for bringing together approaches from areas as varied as sociology, political sciences, history, theology, literary studies, media studies, philosophy, psychology, and neurosciences. “Cultural memory studies” – as defined in this handbook – came into being at the beginning of the 20th century, with the works of Maurice Halbwachs on mémoire collective. In the course of the last two decades this area of research has witnessed a veritable boom in various countries and disciplines. As a consequence, the study of the relation of “culture” and “memory” has diversified into a wide range of approaches. This handbook is based on a broad understanding of “cultural memory” as the interplay of present and past in sociocultural contexts. It presents concepts for the study of individual remembering in a social context, group and family memory, national memory, the various media of memory, and finally the host of emerging transnational lieux de mémoire such as 9/11.
Download or read book W Or The Memory of Childhood written by Georges Perec and published by David R. Godine Publisher. This book was released on 2003 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Combining fiction and autobiography in a quite unprecedented way, Georges Perec leads the reader inexorably towards the horror that lies at the origin of the post-World War Two world and at the crux of his own identity.
Download or read book And You Shall Tell Your Children The Intersection of Memory Identity and Narrative in Contemporary German Jewish Autofiction written by Doria Beth Killian and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation examines the autofictional works of three Jewish women writing in German, combining a close textual analysis with a narratological framework in order to understand how narrative, storytelling, and writing are used at both the diegetic and meta-levels to negotiate familial and cultural memory and to construct a contemporary German Jewish identity. The works analyzed herein-Barbara Honigmann's Roman von einem Kinde (1986), Damals, dann und danach (1999), and Ein Kapitel aus meinem Lebens (2004); Gila Lustiger's So sind wir (2005); and Katja Petrowskaja's Vielleicht Esther (2015)-are all written by second- or third-generation post-Holocaust Jews whose familial pasts include stories of exile, deportation, and internment, and whose individual presents are marked by trauma, intergenerational silence, and multiplex identities. As they navigate these heavy subjects, interweaving stories of their parents' and grandparents' lives alongside tales from their own childhoods and contemporary lives, each of these authors also thematizes narrative itself, rendering storytelling, writing, and literature as significant to these works as the stories and anecdotes contained within them. Using memory theory from a variety of scholars to examine this thematization of narrative and its connection to memory, identity, and family dynamics, I argue that, rather than being used to merely recount the past, narrative in these works becomes the very site in which familial and individual identity is constructed and construed. In addition, each chapter also centers on a narratological element that is particularly salient in each of the three authors' work, specifically: plot/narrativity, metanarration, and intertextuality. I then relate the thematization of narrative at the diegetic level to the author's own construction of narrative at the meta-level, using feminist narratological scholarship to explore the interrelation of content and form. This dissertation serves to further the ongoing scholarly conversation on memory, identity, and belonging in relation to contemporary German Jewish life and, in its conception of narrative as contingent on cultural context rather than as proceeding from universal norms, also contributes to postclassical feminist narratology and works to broaden our understanding of the role of narrative in human life.
Download or read book Fool written by Johanna Skibsrud and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-08-31 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Combining personal narrative, interviews, and literary analysis, Fool elaborates the potential for fool figures from throughout literary history to reconfigure subject-object relations and point towards new possibilities in creative and critical thought. Drawing on Johanna Skibsrud’s experience in clown classes in France and the US, Fool challenges and extends the correlation Theodor Adorno suggests between thinking and clowning. It considers a diverse range of literary and theoretical sources from Richard Wagner’s Parsifal to Karen Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway. The book also refers to a varied cast of literary and historical clowns and fools, including the early Shakespearean actor Richard Tarlton, Alban Berg’s Wozzeck, and Cirque du Soleil’s Shannan Calcutt. Skibsrud elaborates on the role of the ‘fool’ and ‘foolishness’ in literature, not as an element of a particular work’s content, plot, or style but instead as a creative mode of thought activated through the reading and writing of literary texts. This innovative book charts new ground in literature, philosophy, and performance studies, and is an invaluable resource for specialists in all three fields.
Download or read book Contested Selves written by Katja Herges and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2021 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Investigates the field of German life writing, from Rahel Levin Varnhagen around 1800 to Carmen Sylva a century later, from Döblin, Becher, women's WWII diaries, German-Jewish memoirs, and East German women's interview literatureto the autofiction of Lena Gorelik.
