Download or read book Life Writing Representation and Identity written by Mukul Chaturvedi and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-03-27 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book focuses on varied forms of self-referential storytelling or life writing and its emergence as a democratic and inclusive genre, both globally and in India, and its intersections with history, fiction, memory, truth and identity. The book examines the practice of life writing and its scope for accommodating diverse voices, distinct identities, collaborations and non-hierarchical connections as it gives voice to oral, silenced and marginalized communities. It explores forms like auto/biographical fiction, digital storytelling, graphic memoirs, and testimonies of migration and exile, among others. The eclectic collection of essays in this volume draws attention towards the transformative possibilities of life writing as it engages with issues of resistance, recuperation, re-inscribing individual and collective memories, histories, and promotes an understanding of multicultural others. Focusing on the multiple ways in which the production, circulation, and consumption of life writing has helped to reimagine and redefine individual and collective identities in different cultural and geopolitical contexts, the collection breaks new ground by initiating a cross-cultural perspective in life writing studies. The book aims to encourage critical engagement with a vastly growing body of literature that has seen a publishing and translation boom in contemporary times, both globally and in India. With life writing emerging as a robust area of research, this edited collection provides a much-needed impetus to critically engage with issues of self-representation, memory and identity in recent times. This volume will serve as a significant and rich resource for university students, researchers, and academics of literature, comparative studies, cultural studies, history, indigenous studies and digital and media studies.

Download or read book Inscribed Identities written by Joan Ramon Resina and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-01-22 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Autobiography is a long-established literary modality of self-exposure with commanding works such as Augustine’s Confessions, Rousseau’s book of the same title, and Salvador Dalí’s paradoxical reformulation of that title in his Unspeakable Confessions. Like all genres with a distinguished career, autobiography has elicited a fair amount of critical and theoretical reflection. Classic works by Käte Hamburger and Philippe Lejeune in the 1960s and 70s articulated distinctions and similarities between fiction and the genre of personal declaration. Especially since Foucault’s seminal essay on "Self Writing," self-production through writing has become more versatile, gaining a broader range of expression, diversifying its social function, and colonizing new media of representation. For this reason, it seems appropriate to speak of life-writing as a concept that includes but is not limited to classic autobiography. Awareness of language’s performativity permits us to read life-writing texts not as a record but as the space where the self is realized, or in some instances de-realized. Such texts can build identity, but they can also contest ascribed identity by producing alternative or disjointed scenarios of identification. And they not only relate to the present, but may also act upon the past by virtue of their retrospective effects in the confluence of narrator and witness.

Download or read book Picturing Identity written by Hertha D. Sweet Wong and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2018-05-02 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Hertha D. Sweet Wong examines the intersection of writing and visual art in the autobiographical work of twentieth- and twenty-first-century American writers and artists who employ a mix of written and visual forms of self-narration. Combining approaches from autobiography studies and visual studies, Wong argues that, in grappling with the breakdown of stable definitions of identity and unmediated representation, these writers-artists experiment with hybrid autobiography in image and text to break free of inherited visual-verbal regimes and revise painful histories. These works provide an interart focus for examining the possibilities of self-representation and self-narration, the boundaries of life writing, and the relationship between image and text. Wong considers eight writers-artists, including comic-book author Art Spiegelman; Faith Ringgold, known for her story quilts; and celebrated Indigenous writer Leslie Marmon Silko. Wong shows how her subjects formulate webs of intersubjectivity shaped by historical trauma, geography, race, and gender as they envision new possibilities of selfhood and fresh modes of self-narration in word and image.

Download or read book Reading Autobiography written by Sidonie Smith and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: projects, and an extensive bibliography. --Book Jacket.

Download or read book Writing and Identity written by Roz Ivani? and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1998 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Writing is not just about conveying 'content' but also about the representation of self. (One of the reasons people find writing difficult is that they do not feel comfortable with the 'me' they are portraying in their writing. Academic writing in particular often poses a conflict of identity for students in higher education, because the 'self' which is inscribed in academic discourse feels alien to them.)The main claim of this book is that writing is an act of identity in which people align themselves with socio-culturally shaped subject positions, and thereby play their part in reproducing or challenging dominant practices and discourses, and the values, beliefs and interests which they embody. The first part of the book reviews recent understandings of social identity, of the discoursal construction of identity, of literacy and identity, and of issues of identity in research on academic writing. The main part of the book is based on a collaborative research project about writing and identity with mature-age students, providing: - a case study of one writer's dilemmas over the presentation of self;- a discussion of the way in which writers' life histories shape their presentation of self in writing;- an interview-based study of issues of ownership, and of accommodation and resistance to conventions for the presentation of self;- linguistic analysis of the ways in which multiple, often contradictory, interests, values, beliefs and practices are inscribed in discourse conventions, which set up a range of possibilities for self-hood for writers.The book ends with implications of the study for research on writing and identity, and for the learning and teaching of academic writing.The book will be of interest to students and researchers in the fields of social identity, literacy, discourse analysis, rhetoric and composition studies, and to all those concerned to understand what is involved in academic writing in order to provide wider access to higher education.

Download or read book Vulnerable Subjects written by G. Thomas Couser and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-06 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "My primary concern is with the ethics of representing vulnerable subjects—persons who are liable to exposure by someone with whom they are involved in an intimate or trust-based relationship, unable to represent themselves in writing, or unable to offer meaningful consent to their representation by someone else.... Of primary importance is intimate life writing—that done within families or couples, close relationships, or quasi-professional relationships that involve trust—rather than conventional biography, which can be written by a stranger. The closer the relationship between writer and subject, the greater the vulnerability or dependency of the subject, the higher the ethical stakes, and the more urgent the need for ethical scrutiny."—from the Preface Vulnerable Subjects explores a range of life-writing scenarios-from the "celebrity" to the "ethnographic"—and a number of life-writing genres from parental memoir to literary case studies by Oliver Sacks. G. Thomas Couser addresses complex contemporary issues; he investigates the role of disability in narratives of euthanasia and explores the implications of the Human Genome Project for life-writing practices in any age when many regard DNA as a code that "scripts" lives and shapes identity. Throughout, his book is concerned with the ethical implications of the political and economic, as well as the mimetic, aspects of life writing.

Download or read book Writing Life Writing written by Paul John Eakin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-07-02 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do we endlessly tell the stories of our lives? And why do others pay attention when we do? The essays collected here address these questions, focusing on three different but interrelated dimensions of life writing. The first section, "Narrative," argues that narrative is not only a literary form but also a social and cultural practice, and finally a mode of cognition and an expression of our most basic physiology. The next section, "Life Writing: Historical Forms," makes the case for the historical value of the subjectivity recorded in ego-documents. The essays in the final section, "Autobiography Now," identify primary motives for engaging in self-narration in an age characterized by digital media and quantum cosmology.

Download or read book The Limits of Life Writing written by David McCooey and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-12-18 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the age of social media, life writing is ubiquitous. But if life writing is now almost universal—engaged with on our phones; reported in our news; the generator of capital, no less—then what are the limits of life writing? Where does it begin and end? Do we live in a culture of life writing that has no limits? Life writing—as both a practice and a scholarly discipline—is itself markedly concerned with limits: the limits of literature, of genres, of history, of social protocols, of personal experience and forms of identity, and of memory. By attending to limits, border cases, hybridity, generic complexities, formal ambiguities, and extra-literary expressions of life writing, The Limits of Life Writing offers new insights into the nature of auto/biographical writing in contemporary culture. The contributions to this book deal with subjects and forms of life writing that test the limits of identity and the tradition of life writing. The liminal case studies explored include magical-realist fiction, graphic memoir, confessional poetry, and personal blogs. They also explore the ethical limits of representation found in Holocaust life writing, the importance of ficto-critical memoir as a form of resistance for trans writers, and the use of ‘postmemoir’ to navigate the traumas of diasporic experience. In addition, The Limits of Life Writing goes beyond the conventional limits of life writing scholarship to consider how writers themselves experience limits in the creation of life writing, offering a work of life writing that is itself concerned with charting the limits of auto/biographical expression. This book was originally published as a special issue of Life Writing.

Download or read book Life Writing in the Long Run written by Sidonie Smith and published by Maize Books. This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Life Writing in the Long Run gathers twenty-one essays by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson written in collaboration or solo and published over the last quarter-century. It includes the introductions to their five edited collections; essays focused on such autobiographical genres as autoethnography, Bildungsroman, diary, digital life writing, genealogy, graphic memoir, human rights witnessing, manifesto; and essays engaging the key concepts of authenticity, performativity, postcoloniality, relationality, and visuality. Available in print, eBook, and open access versions, this collection captures decades of exciting developments in the field, making it indispensable reading for courses on modes and media of self-presentation in cultural, gender, and literary studies and feminist theory.

Download or read book Narrative and Identity written by Jens Brockmeier and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2001-01-01 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Annotation This text evolved out of a December 1995 conference at the International Research Center for Cultural Studies (IFK) in Vienna, attended by scholars from psychology, psychiatry, philosophy, social sciences, literary theory, classics, communication, and film theory, and exploring the importance of narrative as an expression of our experience, as a form of communication, and as a form for understanding the world and ourselves. Nine scholars from Canada, the US, and Europe contribute 12 essays on the relationship between narrative and human identity, how we construct what we call our lives and create ourselves in the process. Coverage includes theoretical perspectives on the problem of narrative and self construction, specific life stories in their cultural contexts, and empirical and theoretical issues of autobiographical memory and narrative identity. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

Download or read book Essays in Life Writing written by Kylie Cardell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-11-29 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book showcases a unique, innovative form for contemporary life narrative scholarship. Life Narrative is a dynamic and interdisciplinary field defined through attention to diverse styles of personal and auto/biographical narration and to subjectivity and ethics in acts of self-representation. The essay is a uniquely sympathetic mode for such scholarship, responsive to diverse methods, genres, and concepts and enabling a flexible, hybrid critical and creative approach. Many of the essays curated for this volume are by the authors of creative works of life writing who are seeking to reflect critically on disciplinary issues connected to practice, ethics, audience, or genre. Others show academics from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds engaged in creative critical self-reflection, using methods of cultural analysis, ethnography, or embodied scholarship to address foundational and emerging issues and concepts in relation to identity, experience, or subjectivity. Essays in Life Writing positions the essay as a unique nexus of creative and critical practice, available to academics publishing peer-reviewed scholarly work from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, and a form of scholarship that is contributing in exciting and vigorous ways to the development of new knowledge in Life Narrative as a field. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Life Writing.

Download or read book Text and Image in Women s Life Writing written by Valérie Baisnée-Keay and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-01-12 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the relationship between words and images in various life-writing works produced by nineteenth to twenty-first century American and British women. It addresses the politics of images in women’s life writing, contending that the presence or absence of images is often strategic. Including a range of different forms of life writing, chapters draw on traditional (auto)biographies, travel narratives, memoirs, diaries, autofiction, cancer narratives, graphic memoirs, artistic installations, quilts and online performances, as life writing moves from page to screen and other media. The book explores a wide range of women who have crossed the boundary between text and image: painters who have become writers, novelists who have become painters, writers who hesitate between images and words, models who seize the camera, and artists who use the frame as a page.

Download or read book Signifying Bodies written by G. Thomas Couser and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2009-10-22 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sheds new light on the memoir boom by asking: Is the genre basically about disability?

Download or read book The Novel and the New Ethics written by Dorothy J. Hale and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2020-11-24 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For a generation of contemporary Anglo-American novelists, the question "Why write?" has been answered with a renewed will to believe in the ethical value of literature. Dissatisfied with postmodernist parody and pastiche, a broad array of novelist-critics—including J.M. Coetzee, Toni Morrison, Zadie Smith, Gish Jen, Ian McEwan, and Jonathan Franzen—champion the novel as the literary genre most qualified to illuminate individual ethical action and decision-making within complex and diverse social worlds. Key to this contemporary vision of the novel's ethical power is the task of knowing and being responsible to people different from oneself, and so thoroughly have contemporary novelists devoted themselves to the ethics of otherness, that this ethics frequently sets the terms for plot, characterization, and theme. In The Novel and the New Ethics, literary critic Dorothy J. Hale investigates how the contemporary emphasis on literature's social relevance sparks a new ethical description of the novel's social value that is in fact rooted in the modernist notion of narrative form. This "new" ethics of the contemporary moment has its origin in the "new" idea of novelistic form that Henry James inaugurated and which was consolidated through the modernist narrative experiments and was developed over the course of the twentieth century. In Hale's reading, the art of the novel becomes defined with increasing explicitness as an aesthetics of alterity made visible as a formalist ethics. In fact, it is this commitment to otherness as a narrative act which has conferred on the genre an artistic intensity and richness that extends to the novel's every word.

Download or read book The Limits of Autobiography written by Leigh Gilmore and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2023-07-15 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Limits of Autobiography, Leigh Gilmore analyzes texts that depict trauma by combining elements of autobiography, fiction, biography, history, and theory in ways that challenge the constraints of autobiography. Astute and compelling readings of works by Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Dorothy Allison, Mikal Gilmore, Jamaica Kincaid, and Jeanette Winterson explore how each poses the questions "How have I lived?" and "How will I live?" in relation to the social and psychic forms within which trauma emerges. First published in 2001, this new edition of one of the foundational texts in trauma studies includes a new preface by the author that assesses the gravitational pull between life writing and trauma in the twenty-first century, a tension that continues to produce innovative and artful means of confronting kinship, violence, and self-representation.

Download or read book Performing Autobiography written by Katrina M. Powell and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-06-14 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Performing Auto/biography: Narrating a Life as Activism analyzes the rhetorical strategies employed in five authors’ auto/biographical texts, examining their representations of identities and the public implications of writing individual identity. Exploring the ways race, class, culture, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality might affect the form(s) in which writers choose to write (e.g., memoir, fictional autobiography, poetry), questions how autobiographers challenge notions of genre, truth, and representation. This builds on the argument that constructing identity is a Performing Autobiography performance, one that can simultaneously use and subvert traditional notions of rhetoric and genre. By examining the auto/biographical texts of Zora Neale Hurston, Audre Lorde, Dorothy Allison, Joyce Johnson, and Shirley Geok-lin Lim together, the book theorizes self-representation and genres as rhetorical performances, and therefore their texts can be seen as “performative auto/biography”—transgressive archives where readers are asked to consider their own identities and act accordingly. In doing so, this book contributes to growing theories in feminist rhetorics and auto/biography studies, arguing that these performative genres advocate for life narratives as political and social activism.

Download or read book How Our Lives Become Stories written by Paul John Eakin and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-06-30 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The popularity of such books as Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes, Mary Karr's The Liars' Club, and Kathryn Harrison's controversial The Kiss, has led columnists to call ours "the age of memoir." And while some critics have derided the explosion of memoir as exhibitionistic and self-aggrandizing, literary theorists are now beginning to look seriously at this profusion of autobiographical literature. Informed by literary, scientific, and experiential concerns, How Our Lives Become Stories enhances knowledge of the complex forces that shape identity, and confronts the equally complex problems that arise when we write about who we think we are. Using life writings as examples—including works by Christa Wolf, Art Spiegelman, Oliver Sacks, Henry Louis Gates, Melanie Thernstrom, and Philip Roth—Paul John Eakin draws on the latest research in neurology, cognitive science, memory studies, developmental psychology, and related fields to rethink the very nature of self-representation. After showing how the experience of living in one's body shapes one's identity, he explores relational and narrative modes of being, emphasizing social sources of identity, and demonstrating that the self and the story of the self are constantly evolving in relation to others. Eakin concludes by engaging the ethical issues raised by the conflict between the authorial impulse to life writing and a traditional, privacy-based ethics that such writings often violate.