In the first comprehensive feminist critique of autobiography as a genre, Leigh Gilmore incorporates writings that have not up to now been considered part of the autobiographical tradition. Offering subtle and perceptive readings of a wide variety of texts-- from the confessions of medieval mystics to contemporary works by Chicana and lesbian writers-- she identifies an innovative practice of "autobiographics" which covers the entire spectrum of women's self-representation.
Originally published in 1990. This uniquely fascinating study approaches the problem of autobiography from two directions: first assessing theories of the self, consciousness and language developed by both Freud and Derrida; second through the reading of the autobiographical aspects of their writings. The book begins with looking at the issue of making sense of a life by means of representation, through autobiography, within the field of psychological phenomena – screen memories, mourning, obsession, hysteria, transference. Part 1 focuses on Freud’s case histories and psychoanalysis being used to make a narrative of behaviour in language. Part two considers Freud’s own Interpretation of Dreams and its autobiographical nature. Part 3 examines intellectual movements such as phenomenology, speed act theory and structuralism while Parts 4 and 5 turn to Derrida’s use of autobiography as self-criticism and his debt to Freud.
In The Limits of Autobiography, Leigh Gilmore analyzes texts that depict trauma by combining elements of autobiography, fiction, biography, history, and theory in ways that challenge the constraints of autobiography. Astute and compelling readings of works by Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Dorothy Allison, Mikal Gilmore, Jamaica Kincaid, and Jeanette Winterson explore how each poses the questions "How have I lived?" and "How will I live?" in relation to the social and psychic forms within which trauma emerges. First published in 2001, this new edition of one of the foundational texts in trauma studies includes a new preface by the author that assesses the gravitational pull between life writing and trauma in the twenty-first century, a tension that continues to produce innovative and artful means of confronting kinship, violence, and self-representation.
Beginning with an analysis of the abolitionist narratives of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ex-slaves, Olaudah Equiano and Harriet Jacobs, Chinosole traces the political and aesthetic linkages between these early writings and autobiographical literature produced by writers in the twentieth century, namely Richard Wright, Peter Abrahams, George Lamming, Agostinho Neto, Audre Lorde, Assata Shakur, and Evelyn Williams.
"A book about the graphic design work created by a sizeable group of atoms, molecules, fats, acids, proteins, cells and synapses that have come together to work in concert for a brief time span, regrettably now nearing its likely use-by date, and answering to the name of Alexander Stitt."
Arabic Disclosures presents readers with a comparative analysis of Arabic postcolonial autobiographical writing. In Arabic Disclosures Muhsin J. al-Musawi investigates the genre of autobiography within the modern tradition of Arabic literary writing from the early 1920s to the present. Al-Musawi notes in the introduction that the purpose of this work is not to survey the entirety of autobiographical writing in modern Arabic but rather to apply a rigorously identified set of characteristics and approaches culled from a variety of theoretical studies of the genre to a particular set of autobiographical works in Arabic, selected for their different methodologies, varying historical contexts within which they were conceived and written, and the equally varied lives experienced by the authors involved. The book begins in the larger context of autobiographical space, where the theories of Bourdieu, Bachelard, Bakhtin, and Lefebvre are laid out, and then considers the multiple ways in which a postcolonial awareness of space has impacted the writings of many of the authors whose works are examined. Organized chronologically, al-Musawi begins with the earliest modern example of autobiographical work in Ṭāhā Ḥusayn’s book, translated into English as The Stream of Days. Al-Musawi studies some of the major pioneers in the development of modern Arabic thought and literary expression: Jurjī Zaydān, Mīkḫāˀīl Nuˁaymah, Aḥmad Amīn, Salāmah Mūsā, Sayyid Quṭb, and untranslated works by the prominent critic and scholar Ḥammādī Ṣammūd, the novelist ʿĀliah Mamdūḥ, and others. He also examines the autobiographies of a number of women, including Nawāl al-Saʿdāwī and Fadwā Ṭūqān, and fiction writers. The book draws a map of Arab thought and culture in its multiple engagements with other cultures and will be useful for scholars and students of comparative literature, Arabic studies, and Middle Eastern studies, intellectual thought, and history.
Birren has conducted more than twenty-five years of autobiography groups, where participants recall, write, and share their life stories. He offers "how-to" tips for organizing, complementing, and understanding oral history works. He finds that the exercise is rewarding for adults entering periods of transitions, such as the elderly population, and encourages the sharing of experiences with others on the same journey.
Writing Selves in Diaspora is a work born out of long-term fieldwork by the author, Sonia Ryang, in Japan and the United States, spanning more than one and a half decades. It offers an unprecedented insight into Korean women's lives and their formation of self in diaspora in J...
Brimming with examples, this book demonstrates how qualitative researchers can use autoethnography as a method for qualitative research. Topics include a brief history of autoethnography; the purposes and practices of doing autoethnography; interpreting, analyzing, and representing personal experience; and evaluating autoethnographic work.
