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The release of ChatGPT at the end of 2022 demonstrated to many educators that writing or, at least, the type of writing often asked of students had been automated. While this rightfully raised a host of practical concerns, mostly around cheating, it should also raise questions about what kind of intellectual life the liberal arts will open once they are no longer centered on writing. In this paper, I argue that the automation of writing and the subsequent decentering of writing within the liberal arts is a threat to the liberal arts' intellectual life. I first argue that technics always participate in the constitution of the intellectual life, and so any transformation in the technical supplement will transform the intellectual life. I then argue that the technical supplement of the liberal arts' intellectual life is writing. Thus, the decentering of writing transforms and threatens the liberal arts' intellectual life. Considering this transformation and threat, those of us involved in the liberal arts need to re-examine what type of intellectual life we want to/can live and pass on. It becomes imperative for those of us in the liberal arts to recognize and to respond creatively to this existential crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Food and food writing are demonstrative and evocative of culture. The iconic South African Indian cookbook Indian Delights, for example, has been studied numerous times as an example of a cookbook as a cultural repository. This article provides a fresh lens through which to view the cookbook’s cultural and historical significance. An examination of Indian Delights allows for an investigation into the distinct manner in which food literature has been created by and circulated among specific groups of marginalised women, particularly in their embellishment of the text. The continued curation of personal recipe books in diverse formats, and the interplay between memory and documented knowledge, is explored through engaging with personal memories associated with Indian Delights. Infused with autoethnographic reflections, food literature is discussed as a realm of personal and communal cultural creation and recollection, as is how the communal sometimes gives way to the individual. Beyond considering food writing as a vernacular literary practice, this article highlights the role of women as glossators, recognising their ability to claim the margins as a productive domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reads the decades-long correspondence between Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy as an account, following Judith Butler. Specifically, it argues that an epistolary subject emerges through the shared act of durational witness enacted in letter writing. Reading the correspondence as a Butlerian account clarifies why subjects choose a relational form like letter writing for the self-representation of trauma. It observes how particular forms of life writing—letters and the eulogy, among them—provide occasions for the reciprocity on which the account depends, even as they unavoidably fail to make selves more knowable to an other than they can be to themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using an autobiographical studies framework, this paper outlines the persistence of a Malayan nation-of-intent through contemporary life-writings which revisit the 1950s–60s. The imagined nation constituting the Federation of Malaya and Singapore is central to two texts by ethnic Chinese writers with contrasting ideological leanings—Home is Where We Are by Wang Gungwu and Margaret Wang, and The Mighty Wave by He Jin. As putative citizens of this nation-of-intent, they textually perform nation-building by narrating their involvement in formal institutions and grassroots capacity-building. In outlining key elements of nationhood such as language, political participation, and historical consciousness in both texts, distinct conceptions of Malayan political subjectivities emerge through the performative and relational aspects of both texts. Overall, this paper draws attention to political implications while demonstrating the relevance of the "Malaya as method" approach in literary studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this article is twofold. First, it summarises the life and writing of the English diplomat Sir William Temple (1628–99). In a literary career that was strongly influenced by his life in politics, Temple wrote an array of different books, which sold well in Britain and Continental Europe. Second, it outlines the various ways through which we can identify the owners and readers of his works. In doing so, this article demonstrates the prominent reputation that William Temple once enjoyed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In both her life and her writing, Constance Debré challenges the conventional norms of gender, class and identity. In her 2018 work, Play boy, Debré intertwines her personal and literary coming out as a lesbian, marking a radical departure from the life she had been living until that point. In her subsequent works, Love Me Tender (2020) and Nom (2022), Debré further rejects traditional roles related to family, career and motherhood. This article examines Debré’s engagement with queer praxis as an author, interpreting this trilogy as a counter-narrative that resists dominant cultural scripts, particularly those tied to heteronormativity and bourgeois values. By foregrounding her rejection of societal norms, Debré constructs a narrative of autonomy that challenges fixed identities and advocates for an ambiguous freedom found in solitude. Through her ongoing life-writing project, Debré crafts an antinormative self-portrait and offers an alternative vision of individual experience living within and against societal structures. This approach provides a critical lens for examining the role queer praxis plays in life writing, situating Debré within broader discussions of resistance in contemporary French autofiction as she disrupts gendered, sexual and class-based expectations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on the life writing genres of autoethnography and autotheory, this article reflects on the author's enduring friendships with research participants in El Salvador and Cuba through the seminal anthropological concept of the gift. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout her illustrious creative and scholarly career, which spanned over five decades, French-Guadeloupean writer Maryse Condé (1934-2024) earned a reputation as an iconoclast, a rebel disdainful of conventions and averse to simplistic formulas. A habitual provocateur, Condé reveled in her role as a rule-breaker, who challenged Negritude's masculinist discursive norms, and ushered in a paradigm shift in the prevailing vision of Africa as central to Caribbean cultural formation. This study examines the place of African diasporic literary traditions in La vie sans fards (2012). A confessional tale delivered in a taut, propulsive narrative brimming with equal amounts of tragic intensity and dramatic energy, the memoir traces Condé's eventful life in Africa in the turbulent decade of the sixties. I am especially interested in Condé's evocation of a vast array of African diasporic writers as inspirational in her own artistic development, and as crucial to the awakening of her diasporic vision. It is my contention that Condé's bold, radical departure from her earlier reactions vis-à-vis the African literary landscape demands attention. Considering the author's proclaimed goal to unravel the absolute, complete truth, this essay situates Condé's reminiscences within the broader context of a veritable boom in life writing and its study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The educational approach known as positive education emerged from positive psychology and frequently attributes its conception of flourishing to Aristotelian eudaimonia. This is a point of contention between scholars who see positive psychology's flourishing as an epithet of Aristotelian virtues and others who have identified critical divergences between the philosophical foundations of positive psychology and Aristotle's normative ethics. Few scholars have examined whether adolescent understandings of flourishing reflect Aristotelian eudaimonia, and whether this is different in positive education students. This paper explores notion of the good life through the writings of 226 adolescents, 93 of whom attend a school that has implemented positive education. These are analysed through an Aristotelian lens, finding more similarities than differences between the groups. Both groups discussed relationships, emotions, and accomplishments, but moral goodness and virtue were not prominent. Conclusions are drawn about the implications of this for 'positive' education and the role it plays in nurturing flourishing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Miron Białoszewski, an acclaimed Polish poet and playwriter, and Lech Emfazy Stefański, a poet, dramatist, director, and since the early 1970s a key parapsychologist in Poland, met first shortly after World War II. They shared a passion for avant-garde theatre, literature, and music, and were also interested in psychic phenomena which, though, manifested itself in their lives and writings with quite different intensities. This article seeks to provide an introduction to the role of the esoteric elements in their biographies, while at the same time situating their relationship against the background of political and cultural changes in communist Poland. The first part of the paper outlines Białoszewski’s and Stefański’s youth experiences and their collaboration in the Theatre at Tarczyńska Street. The second part of the article addresses Stefański’s contribution to the propagation of psychotronics in Poland; it also touches upon his literary texts; while the last section examines the encounters of the former collaborators in the 1970s, placing emphasis on the role of the blind poetess Jadwiga Stańczakowa in bringing the two men back together. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a discussion of a previously unpublished letter in the Keats House Collections written by Sara Coleridge, the poet and editor, and the only daughter of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Presented here is the first transcription of the letter to be printed – addressed to the artist Samuel Laurence (sometimes Lawrence) – and an analysis of its contents in relation to Sara's creative writing and life. The essay considers what the letter might be able to tell us about the author, her writing, her engagement with the arts, her position as a woman of letters in the late Romantic/early Victorian period in London, and her health, both physical and mental. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I use this narrative to trace ways in which writers such as Graham Greene and Michel de Montaigne escaped from tedium and unhappiness so that they could live better lives and write for greater pleasure and satisfaction. I then outline ways in which I have struggled to escape from the prison camp of strict academic writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reveals how contemporary immigrant authors challenge the conventions of autobiography as conceptualized by Philippe Lejeune in self-referential novels that blur the boundaries between fiction and reality, storytelling and truth-telling. We investigate the reality-fiction binary in the works of such authors as J.M. Coetzee, Salman Rushdie, W.G. Sebald, Aleksandar Hemon, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Junot Díaz, and Ocean Vuong, and show how their self-referential literary productions alter the way we perceive notions of truth and authenticity in contemporary literature. By combining a reader-oriented analysis with a postructuralist inquiry on writing and reading, we aim at providing a more comprehensive understanding of life writing in transnational immigrant narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contributors to Mere Light ask how 'light' falls in and through the non-visual medium of the literary text, illuminating that medium's potential to initiate an experience of immediacy. While we might look to the luminous inscriptions of medieval mystics for its template, a fascinating post-Enlightenment exemplar of this paradox is the literary 'self-recording' of the deafblind modern 'miracle' Helen Keller. 'Illustrated' with often surreal photographs that both marked their modernity and complemented their thematic preoccupation with the dynamics of light, Keller's nine autobiographies strove to replicate her primarily 'tactual' sense experience in graphic language while tendering apparently eyewitness images of light. Where these literary dissimulations bring the body of Keller's disabled I into view, they develop a complex 'sense of light' as vibrant, self-actualising literary metaphor, capable of moving between sight and touch, and thus beyond the limits of both. Projecting its speaking I as light's writing alongside illustrative photographs that projected that I as light-written, Keller's life-writing synthesises sight and touch. Epitomised in her experimental The World I Live In (1908), this was to 'photo' synthesise the mimetic pretenses of post-Enlightenment visualising technologies with a transhistorical disability aesthetics oriented around peripheral – hence invisible – embodiment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Life-writing by punks has grown at a remarkable rate and constitutes a significant new addition to the canon of punk cultural production that deserves an equal place alongside music, fashion, and zines. Punk has always sought to document itself in the form of recordings, film, photography, fanzines, and video. It is time to add memoirs to these archival impulses and examine how punk culture is now mediated and sustained by autobiography. Whereas punk life writing might be dismissed as so many nostalgic trips down memory lane, this article begins from the premise that writing about a life involves more than nostalgia. Considering punk memoirs as works that offer new ways of thinking about a life attached to punk, this article surveys a broad range of punk memoirs and asks questions that reframe some punk scholarship by emphasizing how individuals live within and outside of punk simultaneously. What are some of the dominant features of punk memoirs? What kinds of interventions do they make? How do they introduce and develop particular ways of documenting and thinking about punk culture and its legacies? How does life writing about the past transform punk in the present? What ways of thinking, lines of inquiry, understanding, and feelings do memoirs establish and examine as central to the thought of punk, in particular, and the study of culture more broadly? The article seeks to demonstrate how these trajectories might shift and renovate work undertaken by scholars of punk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article situates Richard Norwood's (1590–1674) manuscript spiritual autobiography "Confessions" at the intersection of diverse literary influences and modes of writing, including artisan and "middling sort" life writing and travel writing of the early modern period. It argues that, in Norwood's hands, spiritual autobiography became a highly flexible textual template and a rich testimony of his mobility, which intertwined with and gave shifting meanings to Norwood's spiritual and embodied movement throughout the narrative. My argument is informed by a material reading of the manuscript (held in Bermuda Archives) and recent work in nonlinear and "ongoing" migration and mobility studies, seeing Norwood's text as a rich retrospective, yet unsettled record of his perpetual geographic and social mobility, which Norwood explained by his precarious employments and inability to settle in his faith. Considering the material text in relation to Norwood's mobility allows scholars to approach the text and its author from a fresh vantage point, and to reevaluate its retrospective processing, construction, and editing, appreciating how "Confessions" presents Norwood's life as "unmoored," never reaching the spiritual settling he so yearned for. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geographers have regularly employed biography as a means to an end, that is, as a useful method for the investigation of some other phenomenon. But writing, reading, and collecting biographical memoirs has an inherent and not just an instrumental value. Linked to memory, biography becomes a way of recalling lives, including those not personally known to the reader, and remembering how one's own life and work is connected to those of predecessors and, by implication, those of successors. This article examines how biography can be used to foster an inclusive and diverse picture of the discipline which more fully appreciates the difficulties many geographers have overcome to pursue their geographical work, and the unnamed collaborators – colleagues, friends, and family – who supported them in their work. Portraiture is introduced as a complement to written memoir, as a subject which would bear further scrutiny. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper showcases how the intersubjective is at the heart of women's associations through Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain's nurturance and support of younger colleagues in colonial Bengal. Arguing that individual memory can be constitutive of institutional history/identity, it focuses on Shamsunnahar Mahmud's Rokeya Jibani (1937), the first 'official' biography of Rokeya, and Sufia Kamal's memoir, Ekale Amader Kal (1988), both of which posit Rokeya as a foremother to women's movements of the time and inscribe her within a silsila (chain) of activist women who are sources of inspiration to successive generations. It also explores how Mahmud and Kamal emulate and extend Rokeya's paradigm of multigenerational sorority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to the scholarship on Giuseppe Mazzini’s impact on British radicalism, through an analysis of British idealist engagements with his life and writings between 1858 and 1929. Section one introduces the topic. Section two sketches a background for the analysis, highlighting Mazzini’s place within the milieu of European exiles living in Britain from the 1840s to the 1870s, ultimately focusing on Mazzini’s engagements at Oxford. Section three explores the ways in which, despite areas of agreement, ultimately the Weltanschauung of the foundational figure in British idealist social and political thought and practice, Thomas Hill Green, differed fundamentally from that of Mazzini. Section four argues that despite these fundamental philosophical differences, Green’s practical political theory drew directly on Mazzini’s writings, although differing over the crucial issue of the proper role of the state in the republic. From this basis, section five analyses the engagements with Mazzini’s writings by the next generation of British idealists, especially John MacCunn. The analysis concludes that although in 1881 Toynbee had reasonable grounds for characterising Mazzini as ‘the true teacher of our age,’ this claim became increasingly unsustainable from the late 1880s onwards, as evolutionary theory came to ground British idealist political thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nancy Emerson, a middle-class white woman who lived with her brother's family in Augusta County, Virginia, kept a diary intermittently between May 1862 and November 1864. Emerson's diary can be defined as a narrative of crisis, generated to respond to, reduce, contain, and mitigate trauma due to the potential physical and psychological threat of the American Civil War. The narrative construction of traumatic experiences is a form of purification and catharsis, allowing Emerson to experience the stages of recovery by regaining a sense of community and establishing safety through writing, attending prayer meetings, reporting news, remembrance of and mourning for the dead, and Christian resignation. By combining psychiatric, literary, and historical approaches, this study offers contextualization of Emerson's narration, representation, and writing about physical and psychological crisis as a process of working through and recovery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Article PDF first page previewGraphGraphCloseBy James Kyung-Jin LeeReported by Author [Extracted from the article]

The article discusses the theological work of St. Bonaventure, focusing on his lectures on the first chapter of Genesis known as Collations on the Hexaëmeron. The text is described as deeply theological and symbolic, addressing challenges faced by the Franciscan order. The author, Douglas Dales, provides a detailed commentary on Bonaventure's work, highlighting its historical context and theological significance. Despite some minor inaccuracies, the article praises Dales' commentary as a valuable resource for scholars and students interested in Bonaventure's theological writings. [Extracted from the article]

The American philosophical tradition emphasizes the role of experience as part of philosophical discourse and scholarship. Individuals like Henry Bugbee and Henry David Thoreau described their experiences walking, for example, and connected these experiences with philosophical concepts. My overall contention is to remind us of the importance of sport experiences for our scholarly work. In Part One, I outline the nature of experience and why this is crucial for sport philosophers and sport philosophy. In Part Two, I turn to the process of reflecting on experience, exploring how reflection happens and the import of reflection for our lives and writing. Finally, in Part Three, I move to the writing process related to sport experiences. The manner in which we articulate philosophic principles and arguments, even though these points may be written in third-person, may also be informed by and through an experiential lens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay engages with the hitherto embargoed letters, drawings and case notes of Stella Coomber ("Susan"), the subject of Marion Milner's case history The Hands of the Living God. Using these documents as a starting point, I decode the identities of medical staff, institutions, and contacts whose names are disguised in Milner's book, and reconstruct some of Stella's life behind the scenes of, and after, Hands. The letters disclose her project of writing an autobiographical companion volume to Milner's, a project which was never realized. In later letters Stella is increasingly despondent about her failure to write this book, feeling that her life has been wasted, for she has not produced "anything of note." The essay suggests that there is a way of reading her "notes" as themselves both autobiography and counter case-history. I approach Stella's correspondence as a piece of life writing: not a traditional narrative, but one whose fragmentary form gives expression to her complex and exemplary experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides an original analysis of a young man's diary from his time in the National Socialist Labour Service in 1942. It sheds light on what can be called the identity work of an 18-year-old, who struggled with the purpose of his service in the organization and his life during the Second World War. With an innovative reading focusing on masculinity, religion and youth, the article identifies three very different normative frameworks important in the diary. These are described as a Catholic's, a soldier's or a 'working man's' (Arbeitsmanns) paths into adulthood. The analysis discusses how National Socialist imperatives were appropriated or rejected for the young man's interpretations of these normative frameworks. The paper advances our knowledge of how young Catholics could (self)mobilize for the German war effort and interpret their service in a National Socialist organization by taking up the long-neglected perspective 'from below'. Rather than attempting to create pure categories, it shows not only how different normative frameworks intersect in the diary, but also how they could be made to align to National Socialist imperatives (while) growing up in the Labour Service on the Eastern Front. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This book review examines "German-Jewish Life Writing in the Aftermath of the Holocaust: Beyond Testimony" by Helen Finch. The review delves into the experiences of four postwar German-Jewish writers and their struggles to publish their works. It explores the themes of the Holocaust, sexual abuse, and racialized violence present in their writings. The review also questions the argument made by Finch regarding the rejection of survivors' testimonies and raises concerns about the validity of her conclusions. [Extracted from the article]

In 2018, Behrouz Boochani's testimonial memoir No Friend but the Mountains confronted Australian readers with their complicity in the nation's carceral border-industrial complex. In the five years since its publication, it has been translated and sold into eighteen languages in twenty-three countries and adapted for film, theatre and a song cycle. This article uses a book-historical approach to present a short biography of No Friend, analysing how it has evolved as a noteworthy work that has taken on distinct lives in the nation and beyond. It analyses two significant moments of recognition in the biography of this book: the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards, and the special issue of the life writing journal Biography. The life of this book—its production, reception and material form—suggests the potential for allegiances between cultural and literary elites in the reception of life narratives by forcibly displaced people. These allegiances mark the early versions of No Friend and have been central to its extensive mobility to new readerships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses two recent essays published by the memoirists Amani Haydar (The Mother Wound) and Lucia Crowley-Osborne (I Choose Elena; My Body Keeps Your Secrets) during 2020–2022. By conceptualising these essays as paratext, drawing on Gillian Whitlock's consideration of the paratext as a critical apparatus in an ethics of reading memoir, this article argues that Haydar and Crowley-Osborne are amplifying a broader call for care from Australian authors who write about trauma, illness and disability in autobiographical genres. Negotiating with some of the formal, cultural and generic limits for memoir as social justice, these essays emphasise the cultural value of narrating life stories as well as potential personal and community benefits. In their essays, Haydar and Crowley-Osborne offer exegetical insights on process and craft, but they also draw attention to trauma memoirs' afterlives: to the evolving impact of circulation, reception and promotion on autobiographical life writing and in the context of what Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson name the unstable "futurity" of this genre. In doing so, these writers make visible ongoing wellbeing and other challenges for the author of trauma memoir after the work is published. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the concept of transnationalism and its relevance to Australian society and culture. It highlights the importance of understanding movement and change across various spheres of activity in a multicultural society like Australia. The article focuses on the representation of transnational Australian identity in life writing, particularly in refugee writing, travel writing, and migrant writing. It also explores the value of collective biography and the role of webcomics and graphic novels in exposing the violences of Australia's border spaces. Additionally, the article examines the relationship between language and culture in memoirs by Australian journalists with non-Anglo migrant backgrounds. Finally, it discusses the craft of writing about trauma and the ethical considerations involved in publishing and promoting memoirs. Overall, the article emphasizes the need for a nuanced understanding of transnationality in Australian life writing. [Extracted from the article]

In light of abortion's recurrent political centrality in the United States, examining abortion narratives remains critically urgent. This article analyzes the abortion narratives found in the 1993 anthology The Worst of Times compiled by Patricia G. Miller, which collects individual stories of illegal abortions from the post–World War II years. It analyzes these narratives in the context of the postwar period's growing sensational political fascination with abortion pain, alongside the second-wave feminist positioning of abortion as the paramount feminist issue and inherent basis of feminist community. Against these discourses, the semi-anonymous narrators of The Worst of Times disrupt hierarchized, universal, and exclusionary models of pain. Rather, this article argues that, in constructing life writing centered around the painful experience of illegal abortion, the narrators' experiences cohere into relational clusters that evince commonalities while also maintaining differences. In engaging with their painful abortion experiences, these narratives reshape the medical, national, and feminist power structures that attempted to define the pain that abortion signified. In a moment when abortion legislation faces continued assaults, these narratives invite a consideration of how the embodied, personal pain of abortion can facilitate creative models of community that rethink the power structures that restrict reproductive autonomy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In her autofictional writings, Marta Sanz exhibits herself tattooing her own middle-aged, diseased body before the public gaze. Her body could be any woman’s body: it becomes a privileged locus from which to examine a sense of vulnerability that exceeds the author herself. Sanz’s work serves as an entry point to the study of an emerging mode of socially committed autofiction produced by a transgenerational group of contemporary feminist authors, including Paula Bonet, Layla Martínez and Sara Torres. I turn to the works of Jacques Rancière and Sara Ahmed to examine how the aesthetics of these texts might affect the reader, thereby shedding light on the political – the relations to be established between what is seen and what is imaginable; what is done and what can be done –. The life writings recently published by Bonet, Martínez, Sanz and Torres, I sustain, signal the passage from a centripetal and patriarchal model of autofiction, where the author monologues with himself, to a centrifugal model, where the author reaches out to her audience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on palliative care emphasizes the crucial role of narratives in the encounter with suffering and dying patients because we need to learn from the dying in order to improve care for them. Autobiographical narratives by terminally ill writers contribute to a more encompassing understanding of what it means to be dying as they often thematize dying and death, besides theorizing all kinds of implications of terminal illness. Among such autothanatographers are well-known writers such as Gillian Rose, Jenny Diski, and Tom Lubbock. The process of writing about the last stage of their lives is palliative narrative praxis because the narrative act alleviates suffering. Exploring dying and death in philosophical, literary, and often highly poetic terms needs to be read and interpreted within a more complex web of meaning-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I am writing this review as an essential reading for readers and writers of the book--Crafting Autoethnography: Processes and Practices of Making Self and Culture, edited by Jackie Goode, Karen Lumsden, and Jan Bradford, which explores the art of crafting autoethnography (Goode et al., 2023). As a novice autoethnographer, I have grappled with challenges and explored borders while shaping my narrative as a self-narrator of autoethnographic writing. So, in this review, I have attempted to engage readers by offering the invitation, encouraging initial reading as entry to the book, subsequent re-entry, and eventual exit as my evaluation of the book. This book resonates with me, emphasizing the significance of writing our lives and stories, developing selfawareness through performative, philosophical, and artistic writing, and shaping our identity--advocacy and transformation. Through diverse perspectives--from sociology to the visual arts--the contributors of the book illuminate their processes, inviting novice and veteran autoethnographers to write to explore the intricate craft of autoethnography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Zachary McLeod Hutchins' book, "Before Equiano: A Prehistory of the North American Slave Narrative," explores the early Black African life in colonial North America through an analysis of newspapers and archival materials from the early eighteenth century. Hutchins argues that the popular understanding of slavery underwent a transformation between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and that the genre of the slave narrative has been defined based on this later understanding. The book expands the archive of early Black life writing and provides important context for the nineteenth-century slave narrative and the broader tradition of Black life writing. [Extracted from the article]

As Wittgenstein still eludes classification as either an analytic or a poetic philosopher, this article considers his work under the perspective of essayism as a hybrid intellectual attitude that combines elements from both modes of thinking. Drawing on Adorno's and Musil's accounts, I present four characteristics of essayism that can be applied to Wittgenstein's writing: (a) essayism does not claim access to primal knowledge or an absolute starting point of thought, but typically reacts to given ideas; (b) it is systematic insofar as it is concerned with words, things, and events in systemic contexts rather than in isolation; (c) it is anti‐systematic insofar as it neither accepts the given conceptual system nor strives for an ultimate system in which all things are in their place and all problems ultimately solved; (d) it is aware of, and emphasizes, the mediatedness of its objects and warns of any equation of the conceptual ordering with the order of reality. As a consequence, essayism goes beyond a particular text form, but concerns an attitude towards the world that manifests itself in various forms. It thus turns out to be not merely a form of writing but ultimately a form of life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay takes as its focus the everyday writing that people compose: the self-sponsored, nonobligatory texts that people write mainly outside of work and school. Through analysis of 713 survey responses and 27 interviews with accompanying writing samples, this study provides a panoramic view of the functions of self-sponsored writing and rhetorical activity for U.S. adults, ages 18 to 65+ years, from a range of geographic, cultural, and professional backgrounds. The Taxonomy of Life Writing presented in this essay demonstrates the range of ways that writing functions in people's daily lives. It includes 19 key functions of life writing, organized into six metafunctions: Creativity and Expression, Identity and Relationships, Organization and Coordination, Preservation and Memory, Reflection and Emotion, and Teaching and Learning. Based on our findings, we affirm the important and diverse functions that life writing serves and propose expanding the threshold concepts of writing to include greater focus on nonobligatory, self-sponsored writing activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay, I seek to redefine life writing to encompass the very forms used for recordkeeping in eighteenth‐century commonplace books, in the flow of life as it happened, primarily through lines in grids used in indexes for separating pieces of information and designating subject headings. These lines, which functioned as inscriptional marks that required graphic literacy to use, help broaden the conception of manuscript ("written by hand") to include media other than words formed on a page. John Locke's index‐based system for designing commonplace books, devised in A New Method of Making Common‐Place Books, as well as various examples of eighteenth‐century manuscript commonplace books will be the main objects of focus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Touch mediates relations between self‐other, writers, and readers; it is material and affective. This paper is the outcome of writing touch as a collaborative activity between eight women writers across different times and locals. In sharing experiences of touch during and beyond the pandemic, we engage with collaborative writing articulated here as colligere, involving the assembling of writing in a holding space. The meanings and feelings of touch arise from our distinct writer positionalities as we think, work, and write in and about life, research, organizations, and organizing. We suggest that writing that reflects on/through touch presents epistemic vulnerability and openness to unknowing in the nexus of intercorporeal relationships. Writing touch contributes to writing and doing academia differently, particularly by offering sensorial encounters that reframe the ethico‐political conditions of academic knowledge creation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article "Necessary Metamorphosis. Rereading São Paulo" presents two book reviews that explore the figure of Jesus and the Gospels, as well as the importance of Saint Paul in civilization and his influence on human thought throughout history. Both reviews offer a clear and well-founded vision of the topics addressed, focusing on the life and writings of the Apostle Paul. Topics such as sources of information about Paul, his relationship with Jesus, his teamwork, his vocation as a writer, and his relationship with hope are discussed. The author also analyzes the importance of faith and fraternity in Paul's life, and encourages us to purify our understanding of Christianity and to live in a community based on faith in Christ. [Extracted from the article]

Ina Linge's book, "Queer Livability: German Sexual Sciences and Life Writing," explores the experiences of queer and transgender individuals in twentieth-century Germany. Linge analyzes several German (auto)biographical narratives to understand the challenges faced by these individuals in understanding their sex and gender identity and navigating societal norms. Linge argues for a hospitable reading of these memoirs to comprehend the hardships and agency of their narrators. The book highlights the desire and efforts of queer and transgender people for safety, subjectivity, survival, self-exploration, and livability, challenging the conventional approach of viewing them as passive objects. Linge's analysis offers valuable insights for scholars and students of gender and queer studies, as well as German cultural and literary studies. [Extracted from the article]

This article traces the leisure travel of British homosexual men in continental Europe between 1950 and 1975. The aim of this article is to challenge narratives of British post-war sexual rights discourses as isolated from continental Europe. Taking a transnational approach, which examines the ways in which Britain was embedded in processes of social and cultural change across Europe, it charts informal encounters and networks of cultural communication forged by homosexual men themselves during the post-war tourist boom. Using Oral Histories deposited at the British Library Sound Archive, I emphasize the role of homosocial spaces in the production and performance of the sexual self and establish how affluence provided access to spaces for sexual self-development during a period when homosexuality remained criminalized in Britain. It explores two distinct types of holidays taken by homosexual travellers, examined via a life writing approach—the Amsterdam city break and the southern European beach holiday—and shows how these experiences shaped their self-conception and hopes for a more tolerant society at home. In revealing how foreign forms of homosexual sociability influenced domestic politics, I argue for a stronger emphasis on British entanglements with continental Europe when tracing political and social transformations during the post-war period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the activities of the Dutch administration of the Cape of Good Hope between 1652 and 1795 is fulsomely recorded in the vast archive of the Dutch East India Company (VOC), ego documents or life writing, such as private diaries and letters, from ordinary inhabitants of the colony are very rare. This state of affairs hampers historians' understanding of how the population of the Cape during this era reacted to and felt about events that we know well from the viewpoint of the VOC. For this reason alone, the existence of three letters by a burgher militiaman during the contest over the Cape between Britain and the VOC authorities during June to September 1795, is significant. Although these letters have resided in the manuscript collection of the National Library of South Africa in Cape Town for half a century, they remain unknown to most historians and the general public. This article presents a translation with commentary of these letters and reveal the valuable insights a perceptive reader can glean from them, not just about the military operations of mid-1795, but also about the political, social and cultural history of the Cape at the end of the eighteenth century from the viewpoint of an ordinary citizen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global publishing phenomenon Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls launched a wave of biography aimed at children. Styled as feminist bedtime stories and as a reinvention of the fairy tale, the trademark celebratory biographical arcs which focus on women's lives and stories as heroic have also attracted critique. This paper argues that Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls draws deliberate attention to both the limits and possibility of biography as a genre that has distinctive, ideological, and cultural power in conferring visibility and status to the subjects of representation. In interactive journal pages appended to each Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls volume, and in publications like I Am A Rebel Girl, the reader becomes a participant in the biographical project, invited to practise auto/biography and to create their own 'rebel' story. Rebel Girls work within the limits of but also models a potential for auto/biography as a feminist, activist tool, available to be taken up self-consciously by a generation of 'rebel' readers who may themselves become the rebel writers of their own or others' lives, inventing and evolving the possibility for biography as a feminist mode. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although there is accumulating evidence for an inverse relation between life meaning and anxiety, most of this research has used cross-sectional designs. We examined the relation between life meaningandanxietywithanexperimentaldesign (N= 103), hypothesizing that compared to control, a brief life-purpose intervention administered after a filmstressor would result in less anxiety and film-related rumination and that anxiety wouldmediate the intervention-rumination relation. After viewing a validated "trauma film" depicting a racially motivated physical assault, participants completed either a life-purpose intervention comprised of reading about life meaning and writing about intrinsically valued goals or one of two control groups consisting of either a distracting theme (computers) or a threatrelevant theme (racial equality), both designed to be engaging without evoking life purpose. Results showed that compared to control, the life-purpose participants reported less postintervention anxiety and film-related rumination and that the intervention effect on rumination was mediated by anxiety. The findings support the promise of meaning interventions for stressor-related responses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What might ethnography—as both practice and text—offer for thinking about and with non-narrative forms of pain representation? Ethnography operates as an inherently fragmentary, episodic form of knowledge-making: the central acts of observing and writing social life rest upon moments plucked and crafted from the unruly, relentless rush of intersubjective experience. Bringing an ethnographic sensibility to bear on clinical encounters around pain thus attunes us to both the partiality and the sociality of representation. Drawing from ongoing research into how clinicians encounter patients' pain, here I hold together two ethnographic moments, reading across them to explore the consequential forms of attention and of representation at work in the ephemeral utterances and exchanges of everyday work in clinical settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Activists present themselves on- and offline using a diverse range of tools, discursive strategies, and means of self-presentation, all conducive to making both themselves and their cause well known. To that end, of paramount importance is their ability to make audiences and readers empathize, and a key factor all strategies have in common is the repetitive nature of their multiplatform, multimodal discourse. I build on previous research about platforms such as Twitter and TED talks as forms of self-narration to look at the ways human rights activists deploy such strategic communicative techniques to construct a public persona. I focus on young women from the Global South using English as a lingua franca. These tend to re-use rhetoric drawn from famous historical figures who stood for social justice in the past, and nuanced repetitive techniques characterized by emotion and affect to mobilize various constituencies. Both kinds of repetition, enhanced by the affordances of technology, create a new kind of ubiquity and can thus potentially influence policymaking. The article makes the case that the recent global viral popularity of young women activists such as Malala Yousafzai, Bana Alabed, and Nujeen Mustafa deserves deeper analysis. At stake is whether digital affordances of immediacy and reach can not only amplify such activists' messages, but help them cross new borders and create new kinds of transnational solidarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article adds significantly to the literature on the value of Chancery court documents, depositions in particular, demonstrating their worth as a source of information about early modern community relations, and collective and individual identity. Through a detailed reading of one particular late seventeenth-century case, it argues that depositions should be viewed as collaborations between plaintiffs, defendants, legal counsel and deponents. These sources are framed as communally produced and as the results of collaborations between multiple members of various overlapping community circles. Using the concept of relationality, as it is defined and deployed by scholars of life writing who note that virtually all autobiographical acts involve biographies of others, the article casts new light on the ways in which subjectivities were formed by individuals' positions in relation to others. When applied to Chancery documents, close reading practices allow us to speculatively recreate the communities from which depositions and pleadings arose and to identify instances of contextualised self-construction within deponents' representations of themselves, others, and those communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article makes a case for reframing refugee literature through reading Behrouz Boochani's No Friend but the Mountains, translated from Farsi by Omid Tofighian. Written in detention on Manus Island via text messages on WhatsApp, Boochani's book has won wide acclaim in Australia and internationally, not only among literary critics, but as a work of popular appeal in writers' festivals and cultural prizes. The popular narrative around No Friend but the Mountains has introduced it, on the one hand, as a representative specimen of refugee literature, and more specifically as an example of life writing of a stateless Kurd. We argue that Boochani's work resists reductive characterisations of refugee literature both through its literary investments and its multiple affiliations with political and discursive interests. By attending closely to stylistic properties and its discursive contexts, we emphasise that No Friend but the Mountains is not just a protest against Boochani's own treatment by the Australian government but a tracing of how the lived experience and literary subjectivity of refugees in the Global South contests facile categorisation and unitary nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During this time of ecological crisis, spiritual guides are needed to provide inspiration and impel action. In the Roman Catholic tradition, saints act as role models and are associated with particular causes, locations, or professions. Who, then, are the ecological saints, whose witness can inspire hope and action in support of the environment? This article explores that question in two ways. First the writings and accounts of saints who are traditionally connected to the environment are examined to produce six indicators of the beliefs, characteristics, and actions of ecological saints. Second, a green gaze is applied to Saint Marguerite Bourgeoys, a seventeenth‐century educator who lived in what would become Montreal, Canada, by comparing her writings and accounts of her life to the six indicators of an ecological saint. Identifying more ecological saints can promote environmental responsibility, and the six indicators of an ecological saint can be the lens through which beloved saints are re‐examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]