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This paper is the synopsis of an ongoing qualitative research project on an intersectional and biopolitical analysis of selected war memoirs written by marginalized female war crime survivors. The primary object of this research is to explore the layers of subjectivity as expressed through the memoirs by women who, in different corners of the world, were subjected to different forms of war crimes during the late twentieth and the twenty-first century. The research paper aims to find whether these life-writings should be recognized only as chronicles of their silent sufferings or as bold proclamations of their resistance against the biopolitical oppressions they were exposed to. In order to do so, a theoretical framework comprising intersectionality and biopolitics will be used according to which the selected memoirs will be critically analyzed. The proposed research will follow a research methodology that is descriptive, correlational, analytical, and exploratory in approach. The primary findings reveal the historical trajectory of women's autobiographical writings related to war and conflicts, identifying the scarcity of such narratives that underscores the challenges faced by survivors in documenting their experiences. The expected outcome is to offer a counter-narrative to official war stories, demonstrating the efficacy of testimonial life-writings from marginalized individuals as human rights activism tools, with potential implications for policy-making, advocacy against sexual violence in conflict zones, and contributing evidence for prevention, justice, and support initiatives, while also highlighting ethical challenges and paving the way for further studies on the intersectional and biopolitical dimensions of sexual violence.

This paper is the synopsis of an ongoing qualitative research project on an intersectional and biopolitical analysis of selected war memoirs written by marginalized female war crime survivors. The primary object of this research is to explore the layers of subjectivity as expressed through the memoirs by women who, in different corners of the world, were subjected to different forms of war crimes during the late twentieth and the twenty-first century. The research paper aims to find whether these life-writings should be recognized only as chronicles of their silent sufferings or as bold proclamations of their resistance against the biopolitical oppressions they were exposed to. In order to do so, a theoretical framework comprising intersectionality and biopolitics will be used according to which the selected memoirs will be critically analyzed. The proposed research will follow a research methodology that is descriptive, correlational, analytical, and exploratory in approach. The primary findings reveal the historical trajectory of women's autobiographical writings related to war and conflicts, identifying the scarcity of such narratives that underscores the challenges faced by survivors in documenting their experiences. The expected outcome is to offer a counter-narrative to official war stories, demonstrating the efficacy of testimonial life-writings from marginalized individuals as human rights activism tools, with potential implications for policy-making, advocacy against sexual violence in conflict zones, and contributing evidence for prevention, justice, and support initiatives, while also highlighting ethical challenges and paving the way for further studies on the intersectional and biopolitical dimensions of sexual violence.

In recent years, life writing by survivors of sexual violence has attempted to contest the stigma of shame traditionally attached to women’s testimony. Among these authors, disabled and chronically ill survivors find themselves doubly marginalized by the patriarchal discourses prevalent in culture and medical spaces. For this reason, in their writing, they vindicate political and ethical approaches to their condition, based on emphasizing their bodily experience against the silencing of culture and institutions. This essay looks at Lucia Osborne Crowley’s I Choose Elena (2019) and Amy Berkowitz’s Tender Points (2015) as two examples of memoirs exploring the intersections between sexual trauma and chronic illnesses like endometriosis and fibromyalgia, as well as the possibilities for writing to contest stigma and move towards an ethical audience, inside and outside medical spaces. In their memoirs, these authors expose the physical, socioeconomic, and institutional boundaries that they encounter while vindicating political and engaged ways to live in their bodies.

Marina Warner’s Inventory of a Life Mislaid: An Unreliable Memoir (2021) is her second work belonging to the genre of life writing, more particularly the memoir. She had already written a biography, The Dragon Empress: The Life and Times of Tz’u-Hsi, Empress Dowager of China, 1835-1980, about a Chinese empress in 1972, but her memoir is more personal, rather focused on her parents’ marriage, life itineraries and travels through Italy, England and Egypt during and after WWII. Interestingly, many characteristics of her memoir fit with another life writing genre, identified by the French theorist Dominique Viart in the eighties as the ‘filiation narrative,’ initially in reference to French fiction of the same period. The filiation narrative focuses on a self-reflexive search for parental images, reconstructing the mother’s or father’s life through the excavation of documentation and archives, as well as speculation. This article will attempt to show how such thematic and structural features of the filiation narrative as ‘archeological’ narration, the use of archival documents and objects to restore a parent’s ‘lost’ life and, most importantly, the metabiographical aspect of the ‘enterprise’ are reflected, in various degrees, in Warner’s memoir, making it waver between fiction and non-fiction. These same features may thus pave the way for the English counterpart of the French ‘récit de filiation’ and build a pertinent generic continuity between both memoir and filiation narrative.

This article considers zine making as a form of independent literary production that can offer new insights into the understanding of creativity in literary studies and the humanities more broadly. It situates zines as a form of literary writing, reading, and distribution that cannot be incorporated into dominant accounts of literature or creativity because of their ephemerality. The article examines case studies by Kathy Acker, David Wojnarowicz, and the poet Hakim to demonstrate the unique forms of creativity zine making enacts. The author argues that the study of independent media requires the development of new, creative methodologies in cultural scholarship that can expand our understanding of the uses of creativity beyond understanding it as a practice that generates forms of value that can be transferred to other areas of civic life.

This chapter introduces the volume by outlining some crucial scholarly histories: the feminist study of motherhood and mothering, and the literary study of mothers in fiction and life writing, across many differences. Since mothers, motherhood, and mothering not only are defined by physical and material experiences but also take shape in narratives—in stories and recorded accounts—these also need to be continuously studied and theorized if we are to understand the culturally specific meanings of motherhood. The chapter then introduces each of the separate studies in the volume. These variously demonstrate that literary representations of mothers and mothering foreground the ways that parenthood and parenting for women are imbricated with dimensions like class, race, age, and nationality, as well as how motherhood is connected to living a heterosexual, lesbian, queer, or trans everyday life. In original analyses of a range of representations, from absent/missing mothers to highly present ones, the studies that comprise this book engage in a dialogue with the previous research, raising questions about how motherhood and mothering are marked by absence and/or presence and by profound ambivalences, about how maternal perspectives and voices gain space or mix with filial voices in the narratives, and about how mothers are constructed in relation to ideals and norms of motherhood.

This open access volume offers original essays on how motherhood and mothering are represented in contemporary fiction and life writing across several national contexts. Providing a broad range of perspectives in terms of geopolitical places, thematic concerns, and theoretical and interdisciplinary approaches, it demonstrates the significance of literary narratives for understanding and critiquing motherhood and mothering as social phenomena and subjective experiences. The chapters contextualize motherhood and mothering in terms of their particular national and cultural location and analyze narratives about mothers who are firmly placed in one national context, as well as those who are in “in-between” positions due to migrant experiences. The contributions foreground and link together the themes central to the volume: embodied experience and maternal embodiment; notions of what is “normal” or natural (or not) about motherhood; maternal health and illness; mother-daughter relations; maternality and memory; and the (im)possibilities of giving voice to the mother. They raise questions about how motherhood and mothering are marked by absence and/or presence, as well as by profound ambivalences.

This chapter examines contemporary autobiographical narratives which explore the notion of motherhood as the central issue in women’s lives. These narratives have been important in offering alternative discourses and thereby broadening the concept of motherhood. This chapter discusses them in the light of motherhood studies and theories about matrilineal narratives in contemporary literature. Works by two highly acclaimed Canadian writers are at the center of our study: Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother (first published in 2001; 2008) and Sheila Heti’s Motherhood (2018). Both volumes convey an ambivalence toward motherhood and lean on emotions as well as intellectual argument. Theoretically, the point of departure is Toril Moi’s discussion about contemporary life writing as an “exercise of attention,” and furthermore the feminist examination of the definition of motherhood and mothering in a social context, from Adrienne Rich (1976) to Tina Miller (2005). The texts discussed in this chapter contest different “cultural scripts” (Miller)—discourses that affect societal and subjective views on motherhood and gender.

This chapter introduces the volume by outlining some crucial scholarly histories: the feminist study of motherhood and mothering, and the literary study of mothers in fiction and life writing, across many differences. Since mothers, motherhood, and mothering not only are defined by physical and material experiences but also take shape in narratives—in stories and recorded accounts—these also need to be continuously studied and theorized if we are to understand the culturally specific meanings of motherhood. The chapter then introduces each of the separate studies in the volume. These variously demonstrate that literary representations of mothers and mothering foreground the ways that parenthood and parenting for women are imbricated with dimensions like class, race, age, and nationality, as well as how motherhood is connected to living a heterosexual, lesbian, queer, or trans everyday life. In original analyses of a range of representations, from absent/missing mothers to highly present ones, the studies that comprise this book engage in a dialogue with the previous research, raising questions about how motherhood and mothering are marked by absence and/or presence and by profound ambivalences, about how maternal perspectives and voices gain space or mix with filial voices in the narratives, and about how mothers are constructed in relation to ideals and norms of motherhood.

This chapter examines contemporary autobiographical narratives which explore the notion of motherhood as the central issue in women’s lives. These narratives have been important in offering alternative discourses and thereby broadening the concept of motherhood. This chapter discusses them in the light of motherhood studies and theories about matrilineal narratives in contemporary literature. Works by two highly acclaimed Canadian writers are at the center of our study: Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother (first published in 2001; 2008) and Sheila Heti’s Motherhood (2018). Both volumes convey an ambivalence toward motherhood and lean on emotions as well as intellectual argument. Theoretically, the point of departure is Toril Moi’s discussion about contemporary life writing as an “exercise of attention,” and furthermore the feminist examination of the definition of motherhood and mothering in a social context, from Adrienne Rich (1976) to Tina Miller (2005). The texts discussed in this chapter contest different “cultural scripts” (Miller)—discourses that affect societal and subjective views on motherhood and gender.

This open access volume offers original essays on how motherhood and mothering are represented in contemporary fiction and life writing across several national contexts. Providing a broad range of perspectives in terms of geopolitical places, thematic concerns, and theoretical and interdisciplinary approaches, it demonstrates the significance of literary narratives for understanding and critiquing motherhood and mothering as social phenomena and subjective experiences. The chapters contextualize motherhood and mothering in terms of their particular national and cultural location and analyze narratives about mothers who are firmly placed in one national context, as well as those who are in “in-between” positions due to migrant experiences. The contributions foreground and link together the themes central to the volume: embodied experience and maternal embodiment; notions of what is “normal” or natural (or not) about motherhood; maternal health and illness; mother-daughter relations; maternality and memory; and the (im)possibilities of giving voice to the mother. They raise questions about how motherhood and mothering are marked by absence and/or presence, as well as by profound ambivalences.

Bridging the theoretical with the personal, autotheory is by nature a genre that exists between categories. This paper argues that it is this very in-between-ness of autotheory which enables an expression and circulation of affect. My analysis of Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments and Rebecca Hall and Hugo Martínez’ Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts showcases how the artistic expression of theoretical thought enabled by works of autotheory is particularly successful at making the personal stories that are being portrayed palpable. To make this case, the article first discusses theories of affect studies, autotheory and comic studies and brings them into conversation with each other. Afterwards, the results of this theoretical discussion are employed to analyze the role of affect in Wake and Wayward Lives.

Women’s life narratives of the long nineteenth-century, encompassing the period from the early 1800s to the early 1900s, emerged against the backdrop of significant social, cultural, and political transformations in the United States. Despite their rich historical and cultural value, narratives that deviate from the Western canonical model of autobiography are often overlooked by literary and history scholars. This dissertation addresses this absence by focusing on the heterogenous terrain of autobiographical genres and the “outlaw” modes of self-(re)presentation that served Black, Indigenous, and women of color (BIWOC). Employing a deconstructionist approach that challenges the law of genre, as well as the authority and stability of genre classifications, I argue that classifications limit creativity, exclude marginalized voices, and reinforce power structures that are inevitably gendered, raced and classed. Adopting a more fluid, open approach to our understanding of life narration will allow new forms and possibilities to emerge. I analyze BIWOC stories within the geo-political moment and the positionality of the autobiographical/narrative “I.” I explore the African American slave narrative of Harriet Jacobs, Incident’s in the Life of a Slave Girl, alongside Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig: or Sketches from the Life of a Free Black. The authors employed and upended gothic conventions to emphasize the unique horror of captivity for Black women, both in the South and the free North. Destabilizing the image of the domestic sphere and who should be feared, they challenge the paternalistic notion that slavery was benign. I then examine the life-telling lectures of Indigenous activists Sarah Winnemucca (Paiute) and Zitkala-Ša (Sioux). Their narrative performances function as tools of survivance that contest the notion of the “vanishing Indian,” preserve oral traditions threatened by assimilation, and reimagine Native Americans as U.S. citizens and Indigenous tribal peoples. A

This chapter examines contemporary autobiographical narratives which explore the notion of motherhood as the central issue in women’s lives. These narratives have been important in offering alternative discourses and thereby broadening the concept of motherhood. This chapter discusses them in the light of motherhood studies and theories about matrilineal narratives in contemporary literature. Works by two highly acclaimed Canadian writers are at the center of our study: Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother (first published in 2001; 2008) and Sheila Heti’s Motherhood (2018). Both volumes convey an ambivalence toward motherhood and lean on emotions as well as intellectual argument. Theoretically, the point of departure is Toril Moi’s discussion about contemporary life writing as an “exercise of attention,” and furthermore the feminist examination of the definition of motherhood and mothering in a social context, from Adrienne Rich (1976) to Tina Miller (2005). The texts discussed in this chapter contest different “cultural scripts” (Miller)—discourses that affect societal and subjective views on motherhood and gender.

This open access volume offers original essays on how motherhood and mothering are represented in contemporary fiction and life writing across several national contexts. Providing a broad range of perspectives in terms of geopolitical places, thematic concerns, and theoretical and interdisciplinary approaches, it demonstrates the significance of literary narratives for understanding and critiquing motherhood and mothering as social phenomena and subjective experiences. The chapters contextualize motherhood and mothering in terms of their particular national and cultural location and analyze narratives about mothers who are firmly placed in one national context, as well as those who are in “in-between” positions due to migrant experiences. The contributions foreground and link together the themes central to the volume: embodied experience and maternal embodiment; notions of what is “normal” or natural (or not) about motherhood; maternal health and illness; mother-daughter relations; maternality and memory; and the (im)possibilities of giving voice to the mother. They raise questions about how motherhood and mothering are marked by absence and/or presence, as well as by profound ambivalences.

This paper examines the relationship between memoir and truth, and the implications of that relationship for the rhetorical work that memoirs do. It uses the grounding example of Tara Westover's 2018 memoir Educated and looks at how the recreation of events within her life works both in conjunction with the way she portrays them in the text and juxtaposed against other competing narratives, such as her mother's 2020 memoir Educating. This essay continues the work done by literary theorists such as Phillipe LeJeune, applies the critical framework developed by Katherine Mack and Johnathan Alexander in their article "The Ethic of Memoir," and encourages the reader to consider the ways in which memoirs are rhetorically acting upon the culture at large through their narrative and emotional aspects.

This chapter introduces the volume by outlining some crucial scholarly histories: the feminist study of motherhood and mothering, and the literary study of mothers in fiction and life writing, across many differences. Since mothers, motherhood, and mothering not only are defined by physical and material experiences but also take shape in narratives—in stories and recorded accounts—these also need to be continuously studied and theorized if we are to understand the culturally specific meanings of motherhood. The chapter then introduces each of the separate studies in the volume. These variously demonstrate that literary representations of mothers and mothering foreground the ways that parenthood and parenting for women are imbricated with dimensions like class, race, age, and nationality, as well as how motherhood is connected to living a heterosexual, lesbian, queer, or trans everyday life. In original analyses of a range of representations, from absent/missing mothers to highly present ones, the studies that comprise this book engage in a dialogue with the previous research, raising questions about how motherhood and mothering are marked by absence and/or presence and by profound ambivalences, about how maternal perspectives and voices gain space or mix with filial voices in the narratives, and about how mothers are constructed in relation to ideals and norms of motherhood.

This chapter examines contemporary autobiographical narratives which explore the notion of motherhood as the central issue in women’s lives. These narratives have been important in offering alternative discourses and thereby broadening the concept of motherhood. This chapter discusses them in the light of motherhood studies and theories about matrilineal narratives in contemporary literature. Works by two highly acclaimed Canadian writers are at the center of our study: Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother (first published in 2001; 2008) and Sheila Heti’s Motherhood (2018). Both volumes convey an ambivalence toward motherhood and lean on emotions as well as intellectual argument. Theoretically, the point of departure is Toril Moi’s discussion about contemporary life writing as an “exercise of attention,” and furthermore the feminist examination of the definition of motherhood and mothering in a social context, from Adrienne Rich (1976) to Tina Miller (2005). The texts discussed in this chapter contest different “cultural scripts” (Miller)—discourses that affect societal and subjective views on motherhood and gender.

This open access volume offers original essays on how motherhood and mothering are represented in contemporary fiction and life writing across several national contexts. Providing a broad range of perspectives in terms of geopolitical places, thematic concerns, and theoretical and interdisciplinary approaches, it demonstrates the significance of literary narratives for understanding and critiquing motherhood and mothering as social phenomena and subjective experiences. The chapters contextualize motherhood and mothering in terms of their particular national and cultural location and analyze narratives about mothers who are firmly placed in one national context, as well as those who are in “in-between” positions due to migrant experiences. The contributions foreground and link together the themes central to the volume: embodied experience and maternal embodiment; notions of what is “normal” or natural (or not) about motherhood; maternal health and illness; mother-daughter relations; maternality and memory; and the (im)possibilities of giving voice to the mother. They raise questions about how motherhood and mothering are marked by absence and/or presence, as well as by profound ambivalences.

This article claims that the UK immigration complex is best understood as an apparatus (in the sense of Foucault and Agamben) that uses stress as a tool. It further argues that the Refugee Tales project acts as a counter-apparatus, and that the project’s life writing branch makes visible the many roles which stress plays in the context of immigration legislation. Stress researchers in the humanities maintain that poverty is one of the greatest stressors (Baker), that cutting people off from their material and mental resources is the most effective way to produce stress (Hobfoll), and that disturbing established rhythms of stress and relaxation can lead to ‘zombification’ (Korovkin/Stephenson). Selected pieces of life writing by women and men in the four volumes of Refugee Tales published to date, shed light on how stress manifests for people caught up in the immigration apparatus. They do so by demonstrating how narrative can i) be a source of stress, ii) trigger stress originally caused by something else, iii) represent stress, iv) perform, v) communicate, but also vi) alleviate it. By visibilizing what the immigration apparatus keeps from view, the analysed pieces of life writing contribute to Refugee Tales’ overall goal of putting an end to indefinite detention in the UK.

This cluster took off from an interdisciplinary and international workshop hosted at the University of Vienna in May 2022. Some of the original contributors turned their presentations into articles for this cluster; other articles were recruited later on. The original idea for both the workshop and cluster was inspired by the UK’s Refugee Tales project, founded and organized by David Herd and Anna Pincus. Some of the articles collected here discuss the life writing aspect of this project from different angles and positions: Patience Agbabi as contributing author to the first Refugee Tales volume, Sandra Mayer as a scholar of literary celebrity, and Sylvia Mieszkowski as cultural analyst. Other articles take a look at other projects in which displaced persons work on life narratives alongside citizens of the host countries: Jessica Gustafsson writes about the Swedish Flyktpodden podcast and Helga Ramsey-Kurz about the Austrian ARENA initiative. Two articles provide the collection with an opening frame, as they focus on the paradoxes that are perpetually produced by immigration law and the cultural conceptions of ‘the refugee’ in the European context (Judith Kohlenberger) and in Austria, specifically for minors (Ayşe Dursun and Birgit Sauer). An Afterword by one of the founders and organizers of Refugee Tales (David Herd) closes the cluster, offering an assessment of the project’s role in the context of the UK’s political situation in the summer of 2023, just after both Houses of Parliament passed the Illegal Migration Bill, which the UN has publicly denounced as contrary to international law.

This chapter introduces the volume by outlining some crucial scholarly histories: the feminist study of motherhood and mothering, and the literary study of mothers in fiction and life writing, across many differences. Since mothers, motherhood, and mothering not only are defined by physical and material experiences but also take shape in narratives—in stories and recorded accounts—these also need to be continuously studied and theorized if we are to understand the culturally specific meanings of motherhood. The chapter then introduces each of the separate studies in the volume. These variously demonstrate that literary representations of mothers and mothering foreground the ways that parenthood and parenting for women are imbricated with dimensions like class, race, age, and nationality, as well as how motherhood is connected to living a heterosexual, lesbian, queer, or trans everyday life. In original analyses of a range of representations, from absent/missing mothers to highly present ones, the studies that comprise this book engage in a dialogue with the previous research, raising questions about how motherhood and mothering are marked by absence and/or presence and by profound ambivalences, about how maternal perspectives and voices gain space or mix with filial voices in the narratives, and about how mothers are constructed in relation to ideals and norms of motherhood.

This chapter examines contemporary autobiographical narratives which explore the notion of motherhood as the central issue in women’s lives. These narratives have been important in offering alternative discourses and thereby broadening the concept of motherhood. This chapter discusses them in the light of motherhood studies and theories about matrilineal narratives in contemporary literature. Works by two highly acclaimed Canadian writers are at the center of our study: Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother (first published in 2001; 2008) and Sheila Heti’s Motherhood (2018). Both volumes convey an ambivalence toward motherhood and lean on emotions as well as intellectual argument. Theoretically, the point of departure is Toril Moi’s discussion about contemporary life writing as an “exercise of attention,” and furthermore the feminist examination of the definition of motherhood and mothering in a social context, from Adrienne Rich (1976) to Tina Miller (2005). The texts discussed in this chapter contest different “cultural scripts” (Miller)—discourses that affect societal and subjective views on motherhood and gender.

This open access volume offers original essays on how motherhood and mothering are represented in contemporary fiction and life writing across several national contexts. Providing a broad range of perspectives in terms of geopolitical places, thematic concerns, and theoretical and interdisciplinary approaches, it demonstrates the significance of literary narratives for understanding and critiquing motherhood and mothering as social phenomena and subjective experiences. The chapters contextualize motherhood and mothering in terms of their particular national and cultural location and analyze narratives about mothers who are firmly placed in one national context, as well as those who are in “in-between” positions due to migrant experiences. The contributions foreground and link together the themes central to the volume: embodied experience and maternal embodiment; notions of what is “normal” or natural (or not) about motherhood; maternal health and illness; mother-daughter relations; maternality and memory; and the (im)possibilities of giving voice to the mother. They raise questions about how motherhood and mothering are marked by absence and/or presence, as well as by profound ambivalences.

Writing autobiographically includes complicated responsibilities to the subjects involved: to family members, friends, colleagues, and even cultural communities. This article explores creative developments occurring during the process of writing an autobiographical novel called ‘The longing’, which is drawn from a recollection of intergenerational lived experiences of a middle-class Chinese Indonesian family from 1956 to 2018. I reflect on my strategies and approaches on tackling challenges that arose while using autobiographical material and autofictional techniques to write fiction and communicating cultural complexities for it allows agreeable distance between the author and her writing subject. In the article, I also argue that the use of terms such as life writing, autobiographical fiction and generational novel is most fitting for my project, since they form the postmodern life narratives produced by culturally and historically marginalised women.

In this article, I as researcher and my mother as collaborator present small stories about our own and my late grandmother’s lived experiences during the New Order and Reformasi eras in Indonesia. Both perform a collaborative witnessing, which is a form of “relational autoethnography” that enables researchers to focus on and evocatively tell the lives of others through conversation and shared storytelling as a source that informs my life writing practice. Collaborating with my mother, this article is a reflection on how I, as a young Chinese Indonesian woman writer, capture and negotiate my family’s hybrid identities as double minorities through writing an autobiographical novel on my late grandmother’s and my mother’s lived experiences as well as my own.

En 1995, Jennifer A. González acuñó el término de “autotopografía” para referirse a aquellas colecciones de objetos que contienen información autobiográfica y que pueden llegar a convertirse en museos de identidad. Esta propuesta analiza M Train, de Patti Smith, como una narración autotopográfica en la que la autora expone (a través del texto y de la fotografía) aquellos objetos que la conectan con el pasado, actuando como desencadenantes de recuerdos y depósitos de identidad. Estudiar la naturaleza de los objetos autobiográficos y sus vínculos con las diferentes maneras de recordar, nos permite entender más a fondo cómo se constituyen las vidas sobre el papel., In 1995, Jennifer A. González coined the concept of “autotopography” to refer to those collections of objects which contain autobiographical information and may therefore become “museums of the self.” This paper analyzes Patti Smith’s M Trainas an autotopographical narrative in which the author displays (through text and photography) the many objects that connect her to the past, acting as triggers for her memories and as repositories of identity. This article stresses that looking into the nature of autobiographical objects, and their links to the different ways of remembering, will allow us to further understand how lives are constituted on the page.

This is a study of the memoir of Tage Carlsson, a man from the margin who lived between1908-2002 in the small town of Sillerud, Värmland. The purpose of this study is to show howmodernization affected him during the 20th century; what he valued, which ideals he tried touphold and the way he narrated his life. His narrative and character are studied through the lensof the Life Writing field. Previous research on the Swedish phenomenon “skötsamhet” (wellbehaved-ness) and “folkbildning” (education of the people) lays the foundation of this study aspart of the modernization process. The content of the memoir is analyzed thematically and isdiscussed in three parts: the well-behaved person, the educated person, and the modern person.Tage fits well into all the above, and this study encourages research on the margin as it showsthat it mirrors the ideas of the center, and vice versa.

Uppsatsen studerar två nutida reportage i reportagebokens format: Klubben av Matilda Gustavsson, och Smärtpunkten av Elisabeth Åsbrink. Syftet är att undersöka hur reportern själv och det journalistiska arbetet framställs i reportagen och vad det får för konsekvenser för reportagens journalistiska syften. I uppsatsen tillämpas narratologisk teori utifrån begrepp som modus, tempus, röst, konsonans och dissonans. Även journalistisk teori om objektivitet och transparens, samt teorier om trovärdighet, autenticitet och life writing används. Båda reportagen har en komplex narratologisk konstruktion som innehåller en subjektivt jag-berättande reporter och en ramberättelse som detaljerat beskriver reporterns eget journalistiska arbete. Analysen visar hur konstruktionen med ramberättelsen om det journalistiska arbetet och det subjektiva jag-berättandet skapar trovärdighet, närvaro och engagemang för reportagets ärende. I synnerhet i Klubben används det subjektiva jag-berättandet som en strategi som stämmer väl överens med teorierna om life writing. Detta framhäver reportagets vittnande karaktär, där både reportern och de karaktärer som hon berättar om framstår som röster och vittnesbörd i en större berättelse om förövare och offer, men också i berättelsen om journalistikens viktiga roll att granska samhället och avslöja missförhållanden. Det subjektiva berättandet, med sina drag av life writing, bidrar alltså till engagemang, autenticitet, trovärdighet och transparens i beskrivningarna av både de händelser som reportagen beskriver och av det journalistiska arbetet i sig.

Mme d’Arconville stands out amongst eighteenth-century women of letters be-cause she combined the practice of literature with the more unexpected study of science.When at the end of a very long life she returns to what she calls the‘story of her head’, theanecdotes she recounts constitute a genealogy of her thought stemming from her child-hood’s encyclopaedic curiosity. This essay examines this intellectual narrative throughtwo unpublished autobiographical manuscripts written around1803: the‘Histoire dema littérature’and‘Mes souvenirs’. These are less concerned with rooting identity inan intimate sense of self than with investigating the genealogy of what would later becalled anintellectual personality. Her autobiographical writing thus invites us to rediscovera world both within and outside the self and makes it not only possible to retrace the in-tellectual history of a woman, but also to apprehend experiences from the period’svastnetworks of sociability.

Uppsatsen studerar två nutida reportage i reportagebokens format: Klubben av Matilda Gustavsson, och Smärtpunkten av Elisabeth Åsbrink. Syftet är att undersöka hur reportern själv och det journalistiska arbetet framställs i reportagen och vad det får för konsekvenser för reportagens journalistiska syften. I uppsatsen tillämpas narratologisk teori utifrån begrepp som modus, tempus, röst, konsonans och dissonans. Även journalistisk teori om objektivitet och transparens, samt teorier om trovärdighet, autenticitet och life writing används. Båda reportagen har en komplex narratologisk konstruktion som innehåller en subjektivt jag-berättande reporter och en ramberättelse som detaljerat beskriver reporterns eget journalistiska arbete. Analysen visar hur konstruktionen med ramberättelsen om det journalistiska arbetet och det subjektiva jag-berättandet skapar trovärdighet, närvaro och engagemang för reportagets ärende. I synnerhet i Klubben används det subjektiva jag-berättandet som en strategi som stämmer väl överens med teorierna om life writing. Detta framhäver reportagets vittnande karaktär, där både reportern och de karaktärer som hon berättar om framstår som röster och vittnesbörd i en större berättelse om förövare och offer, men också i berättelsen om journalistikens viktiga roll att granska samhället och avslöja missförhållanden. Det subjektiva berättandet, med sina drag av life writing, bidrar alltså till engagemang, autenticitet, trovärdighet och transparens i beskrivningarna av både de händelser som reportagen beskriver och av det journalistiska arbetet i sig.

This is a study of the memoir of Tage Carlsson, a man from the margin who lived between1908-2002 in the small town of Sillerud, Värmland. The purpose of this study is to show howmodernization affected him during the 20th century; what he valued, which ideals he tried touphold and the way he narrated his life. His narrative and character are studied through the lensof the Life Writing field. Previous research on the Swedish phenomenon “skötsamhet” (wellbehaved-ness) and “folkbildning” (education of the people) lays the foundation of this study aspart of the modernization process. The content of the memoir is analyzed thematically and isdiscussed in three parts: the well-behaved person, the educated person, and the modern person.Tage fits well into all the above, and this study encourages research on the margin as it showsthat it mirrors the ideas of the center, and vice versa.

Two of the recurring concerns identified in teacher education are a lack of curricular coherence and a schism between content and practice. In this article, we discuss a specific intervention that was aimed at addressing these two challenges as they relate to English and History specifically. We argue that through the use of a carefully selected historical memoir, much tighter coherence between these subjects can be articulated in ways that facilitate students' mastery of core concepts and skills across both these learning areas, as well as a richer appreciation of their implication for teaching practice. For the purposes of this article, we define curricular coherence as an experienced sense of connectedness within and across modules. Focusing on the use of Trevor Noah's memoir, Born a Crime (2016), we argue that engaging with a single historical text across multiple modules can improve curricular coherence and offer a more integrated approach to engaging with written texts and historical resources. With close reference to the Department of Higher Education and Training's Policy on the Minimum Requirements for Teacher Education Qualifications, we reflect on our experiences of integrating this memoir into an undergraduate Intermediate Phase (IP) teacher education programme at the University of Johannesburg (UJ). We show how this memoir was integrated into four modules that form part of the second year of the degree, namely English for the Primary School, Social Sciences for the Intermediate Phase, Teaching Methodology for English, and Teaching Methodology for the Social Sciences.

This thesis investigated one ongoing life storytelling project, Humans of New York (HoNY) and, in particular, commenters’ networked participation on its Facebook page. HoNY collects oral life stories and portraits of ordinary people worldwide primarily through impromptu conversations, before transcribing and publishing them on its official website and social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Since its establishment in 2010, HoNY has attracted approximately 30 million social media followers and given rise to more than 50 projects imitating its format around the world. This thesis focused on the comments and stories posted on HoNY’s Facebook page and aimed to answer two research questions: 1) How can HoNY be understood as a life storytelling project? ; 2) In what ways do commenters on the HoNY Facebook page participate in the project? The broader concern of this thesis was to examine the interplay between life storytelling and social media, and especially, how they are being reshaped by each other in this digital age. To answer the two research questions, two groups of theoretical perspectives were applied in this thesis. The first group was drawn from the literature on storytelling and narratives, mainly including “second stories”, “small stories” and “dimensions of living narratives”, focusing on the narrating aspect of HoNY. The second group incorporates “communication community”, “egological intersubjectivity” and “radical intersubjectivity”, “participatory culture” and “networked publics”, focusing on the interactive and participatory aspects of HoNY. Narrative analysis and textual analysis were the two main methodologies utilised for data analysis. The main findings of the thesis were as follows. HoNY is a life storytelling project embedding a contradiction between the diversity in the lived experiences of its protagonists and the uniformity in its narrator and narrating format. In HoNY, protagonists’ life narratives undergo a transition

Mme d’Arconville stands out amongst eighteenth-century women of letters be-cause she combined the practice of literature with the more unexpected study of science.When at the end of a very long life she returns to what she calls the‘story of her head’, theanecdotes she recounts constitute a genealogy of her thought stemming from her child-hood’s encyclopaedic curiosity. This essay examines this intellectual narrative throughtwo unpublished autobiographical manuscripts written around1803: the‘Histoire dema littérature’and‘Mes souvenirs’. These are less concerned with rooting identity inan intimate sense of self than with investigating the genealogy of what would later becalled anintellectual personality. Her autobiographical writing thus invites us to rediscovera world both within and outside the self and makes it not only possible to retrace the in-tellectual history of a woman, but also to apprehend experiences from the period’svastnetworks of sociability.

This article examines some of Greta Thunberg’s life writing as an example of the creativity and ingenuity with which some young people engage with the identity category of ‘youth’ in their life writing. It argues that Thunberg’s activism uses personal testimony in order to amplify expertise testimony as an epistemic source that demands action on climate change. This strategic use of life writing produces a paradoxical, but seemingly effective, form of life writing in which Thunberg provides personal testimony to the future. The article analyses how this paradoxical form of testimony is produced by situating Thunberg’s life writing in the context of the social and political investment in youth as an identity genre central to understanding of the human life course, and to how political responsibility is figured in contemporary western democracies. Drawing on theories of new media as an affective site in which life unfolds, rather than being represented, the paper concludes by reflecting on how Wendy Chun’s argument that networks involve the twinning of habituation and crisis mirrors Thunberg’s argument that action on climate change demands that habitual ways of living and acting must be rethought in response to the climate crisis.

The research underpinning this article was carried out thanks to a Visiting Fellowship for Doctoral Research Fellows granted by the Spanish Ministry of Education (EST2017/0008) for a short research period at Harvard University. The author also wishes to acknowledge the support of the research project “Gender and Pathography from a Transnational Perspective”, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (PID2020-113330-GBI00)., This article examines the Map of Down Below as a central element for understanding Leonora Carrington’s "Down Below" (1944). Carrington’s Surrealist memoir about madness, first dictated in French and then translated into and published in English, recounts her experience of being interned in a mental asylum during the early Francoist dictatorship in Spain while trying to flee from the Nazis in France. The text has often been read as a Surrealist autobiography contesting André Breton’s "Nadja" (1928). However, and without disavowing this reading, I argue that the way in which Carrington narrates her experience of madness is a means to gather knowledge about the world and the Self beyond the literary and institutional conventions of the time, namely, autobiography and eugenic psychiatry as part of the authoritarian state. Thus, I explore how "Down Below", as life writing, illuminates a form of truth that deviates from the autobiographical tradition of the unitarian Self. Carrington’s found truth sheds light on other possibilities of experiencing —or creating— the Self, while she also challenges both the normative Francoist psychiatry and traditional life writing., RESUMEN: Este artículo examina el «Map of Down Below» como elemento central para comprender «Down Below» (1944), las memorias sobre la locura de la autora surrealista Leonora Carrington. El texto, primero dictado en francés y luego traducido al inglés y publicado en este idioma, relata la experiencia de cuando Carrington fue internada en un hospital psiquiátrico en los comienzos del franquismo mientras intentaba huir de los nazis en Francia. A menudo, el texto se ha leído como una autobiografía surrealista que pretende refutar la «Nadja» de André Breton (1928). Sin embargo, y sin desacreditar esta lectura, en este artículo argumento que Carrington narra su experiencia de la locura vista como medio para descubrir la realidad y el Yo más allá de las convenciones literarias e institucionales de la época, a saber, la autobiografía y la psiquiatría eugenésica como herramienta del estado autoritario. Por lo tanto, explico cómo «Down Below», en tanto que autobiografía, muestra una forma de verdad que se desvía de la tradición autobiográfica del Yo unitario. La verdad que Carrington encuentra arroja luz sobre otras posibilidades de experimentar —o de crear— el Yo, a la vez que desafía la psiquiatría franquista normativa y la escritura autobiográfica tradicional., Ministerio de Educación, Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (MICINN), Depto. de Estudios Ingleses: Lingüística y Literatura, Fac. de Filología, TRUE, pub

Mass Observation (MO) was formed in Britain in 1937 as an innovative research project, to develop new methods for accurately gauging public opinion, thereby contributing to a more democratic form of politics and public policy formation. The archive of its first phase (1937-49) was transferred to the University of Sussex in 1970. In 1981 it was revived as the Mass Observation Project (MOP), which continues to the present. The documentation which MO and MOP together generated includes a significant body of life writings. The purpose of this cluster of articles is to introduce the ways in which the interaction between the aims and approaches of MO's founders and its later MOP refounders, and the responses of its contributors, produced specific forms of life writing; and to explore aspects of the 'afterlife' of these texts – their contextualisation, publication, and interpretation. This introduction situates the original, multifaceted and idiosyncratic, MO project within wider political and cultural trends of the 1930s, and then examines MO's methods, which aimed at 'the observation by everyone of everyone, including themselves'.

This dissertation explores experiences of women in Germany and Poland during World War II and the Cold War by investigating the incorporation of memory in literature and film. In my interpretation of literary and cinematic forms of life-writing, I seek to understand how memories of the Second World War and its aftermath situate female identity retrospectively. Analyzing narratives that address political turning points in Germany and Poland between 1939 and 1989, this dissertation considers the various ways in which female identity is refracted into multiple and contradictory figures through acts of memory. I argue that working through the complex relationships between mothers and daughters, female adolescents, and female workers in Christa Wolf’s Kindheitsmuster (Patterns of Childhood, 1976), Tanja Dückers’s Himmelskörper (Celestial Bodies, 2003), Anna Janko’s Mała Zagłada (Little Annihilation, 2015), and Paweł Pawlikowski’s Zimna Wojna (Cold War, 2018) help to break up and disperse the seemingly unified dynamics of female identity in memories that cross both individual and generational boundaries. Looking to the crossing of these boundaries in the multifarious ways in which women are remembered in literary and cinematic texts, I suggest that aesthetic engagements with memory help to overcome some of the limits that historical narratives face when it comes to rendering the irreducibility of female experience. It is not history, I argue, but memory which provides the adequate resources for coming to terms with the “in-finite” complexity of female identity.

“‘My style will become itself a part of my story’: A Study of Generic Innovations in the Life-Writing Narratives of Georges Perec and Camille Laurens,” examines how serial life-writers develop forms of writing that mirror the ways in which they work through trauma. I argue that the life-writing forms employed by these authors are as much a part of their writing project as the content of their narratives. The first chapter presents an overview of life-writing as a genre, with a particular focus on autobiography and autofiction. The second chapter analyzes the structure of Perec’s W ou le souvenir d’enfance and seeks to explain why two of its three narratives were conceived as fictions. The third and final chapter investigates the effects of repetition on Laurens’s autofictional corpus, especially the role of repetition in the characters’ understanding of themselves and of patterns of loss in their lives.

This article compares the books about the Lifes of Thomas More written by Roper and Harpsfield and the work Tomás Moro by Fernando de Herrera. The comparison is taken as a case in point of the divergent early development of the biographical genre in England and in Spain. The three texts were written by Catholic humanists, but under different contexts, which produced different kinds of text. Roper’s and Harpsfield’s Catholicism, marked by a close contact with the Morean tradition, the English form of Counter-Reformation under Mary, and the Elizabethan reversion to Protestantism, makes them drift towards an early form of modern biography. Fernando de Herrera, however, sets out to write his text from the background of the Spanish Counter-Reformation and a different discursive and textual conception of life writing.

In much early-twentieth-century Anglophone writing, the imagining of China see-sawed between high Modernist Chinoiserie and the Yellow Peril. This thesis looks elsewhere for a different China, one which is found in the overlooked, non-canonical works of women travellers to and residents in China, published between 1895 and 1937. It examines the writings of both well-known and under-studied authors: Isabella Bird, Mary Gaunt, Emily Georgiana Kemp, Dorothea Hosie, and Florence Ayscough, in order to reconsider the complex relationship of gender, mobility, affect, and cosmopolitanism. Foregrounding elements of disorderly mobility and affective sociability, I explore how movement and transcultural encounters are gendered, embodied, and configured through relationships with Chinese people, places, objects, landscape, language and literature. In the process, I show how these very different women found themselves adopting creative approaches to the contested relations between self and other, home and abroad, root and route, tradition and modernity, configuring various forms of gendered cosmopolitanism. In addressing the ongoing re-examination of women writers’ contribution to the intellectual, literary, and cultural history, this thesis shows how a better, fuller understanding of women’s mobility demands new ways of appreciating the history of women’s lives as well as the history of West/East cultural exchanges.

This dissertation explores experiences of women in Germany and Poland during World War II and the Cold War by investigating the incorporation of memory in literature and film. In my interpretation of literary and cinematic forms of life-writing, I seek to understand how memories of the Second World War and its aftermath situate female identity retrospectively. Analyzing narratives that address political turning points in Germany and Poland between 1939 and 1989, this dissertation considers the various ways in which female identity is refracted into multiple and contradictory figures through acts of memory. I argue that working through the complex relationships between mothers and daughters, female adolescents, and female workers in Christa Wolf’s Kindheitsmuster (Patterns of Childhood, 1976), Tanja Dückers’s Himmelskörper (Celestial Bodies, 2003), Anna Janko’s Mała Zagłada (Little Annihilation, 2015), and Paweł Pawlikowski’s Zimna Wojna (Cold War, 2018) help to break up and disperse the seemingly unified dynamics of female identity in memories that cross both individual and generational boundaries. Looking to the crossing of these boundaries in the multifarious ways in which women are remembered in literary and cinematic texts, I suggest that aesthetic engagements with memory help to overcome some of the limits that historical narratives face when it comes to rendering the irreducibility of female experience. It is not history, I argue, but memory which provides the adequate resources for coming to terms with the “in-finite” complexity of female identity.

“‘My style will become itself a part of my story’: A Study of Generic Innovations in the Life-Writing Narratives of Georges Perec and Camille Laurens,” examines how serial life-writers develop forms of writing that mirror the ways in which they work through trauma. I argue that the life-writing forms employed by these authors are as much a part of their writing project as the content of their narratives. The first chapter presents an overview of life-writing as a genre, with a particular focus on autobiography and autofiction. The second chapter analyzes the structure of Perec’s W ou le souvenir d’enfance and seeks to explain why two of its three narratives were conceived as fictions. The third and final chapter investigates the effects of repetition on Laurens’s autofictional corpus, especially the role of repetition in the characters’ understanding of themselves and of patterns of loss in their lives.

This article compares the books about the Lifes of Thomas More written by Roper and Harpsfield and the work Tomás Moro by Fernando de Herrera. The comparison is taken as a case in point of the divergent early development of the biographical genre in England and in Spain. The three texts were written by Catholic humanists, but under different contexts, which produced different kinds of text. Roper’s and Harpsfield’s Catholicism, marked by a close contact with the Morean tradition, the English form of Counter-Reformation under Mary, and the Elizabethan reversion to Protestantism, makes them drift towards an early form of modern biography. Fernando de Herrera, however, sets out to write his text from the background of the Spanish Counter-Reformation and a different discursive and textual conception of life writing.