Search Results

This chapter presents a reading of Marie-Jeanne Roland's Memoirs (1793) and Anne Frank's The Diary and Tales from the Secret Annexe (1942–44). Both writers wrote memorial narratives to preserve details of their lives because they believed that writing about their ideas, experiences, and feelings would help to sustain them in the exceptional circumstances of confinement. Both writers also became popular heroines: their prison writings have been continuously in print since shortly after their deaths. Yet their personal memoirs of different kinds have been read and valued as historic witness accounts of wider, catastrophic events: the French Revolution and the Holocaust. Both writers were conscious of their roles as historic witnesses, but the chapter seeks to refocus attention on their ideas of themselves as writers and the primary functions of their texts as literary testimony to unique personal identities rather than the historic victims of terror they came to represent for later readers.

Arthur Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha captures the duality of the geisha who is both revered as an artist and reviled as a sex slave. At its worst, the geisha tradition involves force, fraud, deception, and the horrifying practice of selling one's own children into slavery for purposes of sexual exploitation. In striving for historical accuracy and narrative verisimilitude, Golden obtains an intimate interview with a real geisha named Mineko Iwasaki. The fairy-tale quality of the novel, its unusual narrative style, and its poetic prose, created an instant literary success for Arthur Golden. However, four years after its publication in 1997, Iwasaki shocked the literary world by filing a lawsuit against Arthur Golden and his publishers claiming breach of a confidentiality agreement, quantum meruit, unjust enrichment, copyright infringement, defamation of character, misappropriation of property, and violation of her rights to privacy and publicity. This chapter tries to answer the following two questions about the cultural tradition of the geisha: first, is the geisha tradition (as described by Golden in his fictional biography) a variant of sex trafficking and sexual slavery, which despite possible cultural justifications should be abolished by law? Second, did Iwasaki's lawsuit have any legal merit? To answer these questions, this study will proceed in accordance with structuralist and post-structuralist literary critical methods by looking first at the text itself and then its context, subtext, and post-text to explain the plaintiff's pre-text for suing. It analyzes the narrative structures and style of the text; the legal and historic context of the novel; the legal issues hidden in the subtext (which include sex trafficking, feminist legal theory, and the role of cultural relativism as a justification for the geisha tradition); the post-text (which are the merits, if any, of Iwasaki's legal claims in the Complaint she filed four years after the publication of the fictional biography); and finally, the big issue, the pre-text, or why the real geisha sued Arthur Golden and his publishers.

This lecture presents the text of the speech about visions of European unity since 1945 delivered by the author at the 2007 Elie Kedourie Memorial Lecture held at the British Academy. It discusses Jean Monnet's Memoirs, wherein he expressed the hope for a United States of Europe, and comments on the French and Dutch rejection of the draft Constitutional Treaty of the European Constitution in 2005.

Freud familiarizes his readers with the notion that telepathy may become a valid communication form. He also suggests that individuals may have initially utilized telepathy as the original, archaic communication method. His concept was probably based on several earlier notions regarding one's ability to directly communicate with others. Also, it addresses psychoanalytic concepts about unconscious communication and unconscious intersubjective exchanges between the text and its readers. Autobiographical memoirs and epistolary fiction play no small part in creating subjectivity as these ideas connect together the origins of the eighteenth-century novel. This chapter utilizes Mary Hay's Memoirs of Emma Courtney as a part of the Enlightenment project in the studying of the human mind. Particular focus is drawn to an ideal communication form referred to as the ‘vehicular state’.

Rusch returned to Japan to find destruction, despair, and starvation everywhere. Rusch began his work for the Civil Intelligence Section in Tokyo, uncovering evidence for the International Military Tribunal of the Far East (IMTFE). Rusch hoped that the Allies would bring justice to postwar Japan, but the Americans had an agenda. As part of the effort to facilitate a peaceful occupation, Rusch secured evidence supportive of American policy, absolving Emperor Hirohito of blame for the Pacific War. Rusch was instrumental in acquiring the Saionji-Harada Memoirs, volumes of notes cataloguing the imperial family’s resistance to militarism. Rusch also recovered evidence of an international Communist conspiracy in Japan, a development that greatly enhanced his standing among his anti-Communist superiors. Rusch soon discovered the level of compromise and corruption in the Occupation government as he saw innocent Japanese being purged while some war criminals, such as the biological warfare mastermind Shiro Ishii, received immunity. During this time, Rusch met a former kamikaze pilot, Ryo Natori, a teenager he hired as a houseboy. Natori became a surrogate son and was a key figure in the rest of Rusch’s life. Rusch also used his considerable power to punish those who sold Seisen-Ryo and stripped Rikkyo University of its Christian identity.

This epilogue recounts how, terrified of anti-Jewish violence, Pauline Wengeroff died, ‘lonely and miserable’, in Minsk in 1916, at the age of 83, in the midst of the First World War and a disintegrating tsarist empire, having encouraged one grandson to practise the piano so that he might get to America. The grandson, Nicolas Slonimsky, eventually succeeded in reaching the United States, as did three of Wengeroff's children, after Wengeroff's death. Ultimately, through her resonance with a generation hungry for what she had to offer, Wengeroff tried to help right some of the losses of Jewish modernity, to which she knew she had contributed. With her memoirs she hoped to inscribe herself, and some chosen others, on the tablet of Jewish memory but, above all, to perpetuate and give life, a future, to Jewish memory. In that goal she was not alone but part of a vigorous stream. Whether Memoirs of a Grandmother or the conviction that it had reached its target audience and purpose gave her any comfort in her last days no one knows; but one can hope.

Chapter 3 argues that Beckford's Biographical Memoirs of Extraordinary Painters (1780) should be regarded as an idiosyncratic response to the connoisseurial discourse elaborated in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Beckford's knowledge of art and art theory, combined with his talents as a satirical novelist, produced a work which was not only funny but also theoretically insightful. Beckford's work directly responded to, and was inspired by, other contemporary writing on art and artists. Indeed, the Memoirs was closely related to other artistic satires produced in England, by writers such as Henry Bate Dudley, Peter Pindar, and Anthony Pasquin. Beckford's text also contains certain tropes and topoi – already present in Walpole's Anecdotes – which participated in constructing specific artistic individualities, some of which would re-emerge later in the lives of historical British painters.

This chapter discusses Amelia Opie's Memoir of her husband, the painter John Opie. It argues that Opie's Memoir marks a pivotal transition in the biographical writing of artists' lives in Britain. Unlike most other lives of artists published in Britain in the eighteenth century, Opie's Memoir portrayed her subject in a private setting. The domestic environment in which Amelia Opie set her biography marked a sharp contrast with the public and often cosmopolitan spheres in which earlier lives of painters had been inscribed. The private world in which Amelia chose to present her husband was not without its tensions, however. This chapter shows that the dynamic between biographer and subject was complicated by gendered issues, and especially by the biographer's conflicting duty and desire to pay tribute to the life of her spouse, while at the same time implicitly promoting her own work and career as a successful novelist.

Novels of the eighteenth century often treat sexuality in highly explicit terms, by the standards even of our own time, and certainly by Victorian standards. This chapter addresses the topic of sexual explicitness, looking at the role of law in regulating artistic expression in our period. It argues that we tend today to think of a legal doctrine of obscenity as quite natural, regardless of whether we like the doctrine as it exists. However, the doctrine did not exist at all until the eighteenth century and did not have any real bite in English law until the publication of John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure in 1748. The chapter traces the origins of the obscenity doctrine in English law in order to show, among other things, that it was not a meaningful part of either English or American law until well after the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was enacted. Looking at the nonregulation of highly explicit literature by law informs us about our legal concepts, past and present.

This chapter situates Judge Daniel Paul Schreber's vision of the non-Jewish unmanned Wandering Jew (or “Eternal Jew”; der ewige Jude) in relation to contemporaneous constructions of the Wandering Jew as soteriological figure and antisemitic stereotype. Specifically, it undertakes analyses of Wolfgang Kirchbach's play The Last Men, Henri Meige's psychiatric monograph The Wandering Jew in the Salpêtrière, and Oskar Panizza's short narrative “The Operated Jew.” The chapter then presents Schreber's own gendered and ethnic characterization of the “Eternal Jew” and demonstrates his overlooked identification with that figure in his Memoirs of My Mental Illness. It explores the conditions for Schreber's identification by placing it in the context of devirilizing representations of Jewish men, his family ties to the Leipzig's Jewish community, and to his apparent syphilophobia.

For the first six decades of the nineteenth century, the existing British astronomical journals were tied either to the Royal Astronomical Society or to a government or university observatory. These journals were initially geared toward the gentlemen of science, the predominantly Oxbridge-educated Anglicans who controlled all of British science during the first half of the century. Beginning with the founding of the Astronomical Register in 1863, and then the Observatory in 1877, a series of commercial astronomical journals were founded with new audiences of “amateurs” in mind. This chapter focuses on six new society-based journals founded in the late Victorian period: the Journal of the Liverpool Astronomical Society, the Journal of the British Astronomical Association and the Memoirs of the same society, the Journal and Transactions of the Leeds Astronomical Association, and the Journal of the Astronomical Society of Wales (subsequently renamed the Cambrian Natural Observer). For these society-based journals, the sharing of observations and information was given the highest priority as a means for creating community. But issues of scale and identity could determine how long a society journal survived as well as complicate the formation of a community of astronomers.

This chapter examines gender and class in Pauline Wengeroff's Memoirs of a Grandmother. In Volume II of Memoirs, Wengeroff asserts a stark, globalized claim of gender disparity about tradition and its loss among modernizing Russian Jews. The chapter then reflects on her life and experience in St. Petersburg. The organized Jewish community that formed in the capital in the 1860s was that of the moneyed elite; the city was the home of the elite that championed selective integration. In St. Petersburg, the Jewish leadership class was literally under the government's gaze, acutely aware of its self-appointed role as the official model for Russian Jewry and as representative of the community's interests before the authorities. The chapter also describes the struggle between Wengeroff and her husband, Chonon, over Jewish observance. It explores the notions of love and marriage in traditional Jewish culture. Whatever the divergence between Wengeroff's depictions and evidence from German Jewry, she echoes one crucial aspect of middle-class German Jewish experience: the domestication of women.

This chapter explains that the central point of the second volume of Pauline Wengeroff's Memoirs of a Grandmother is the consequences of the loss of tradition in Russian Jewish families, exemplified by what transpired in her marital home. Her main narrative line is dramatic, accessible, and seductive. In it, she and her fellow Jewish women are victims — of Chonon/Jewish husbands, and of the overwhelming forces of modernity. Well before all this, however, Wengeroff was a prime agent of subverting tradition. She thus felt culpable and guilty not only for the sins of her youth but for those of her married adulthood that resulted in the failure to transmit tradition to her children. The chapter then considers the complexity of Wengeroff's and Chonon's Jewishness and of their relationship. It also looks at how Wengeroff found outlets for her Judaism as well as her need for meaningful activity outside the home as a bourgeoise before she wrote Memoirs. Both Chonon and Wengeroff participated in the trend of Russian Jewish philanthropy by supporting trade schools for poor children.

What must strike any reader of Doris Lessing's 1962 novel, The Golden Notebook, is the extent to which its protagonist, AnnaWulf, has been affected by the experience of loss. Anna's attempt to convince herself that her pain and that of other women like her represents ‘not much loss’ is belied by the experience of reading the entire novel and by Lessing's continuing preoccupation with the idea of loss in her later novels, Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971) and The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974). This chapter explores how, in her work in the 1960s and the early 1970s, Lessing rewrites the experience of loss as potentially creative, productive and transformative. In her vision of what the chapter calls a ‘melancholy cosmopolitanism’, Lessing challenges the closed-off, paranoid legacy of the Cold War in the 1950s. In Memoirs and Briefing, she further develops the distinction between the claustrophobic, nostalgic relation to loss that is characteristic of mourning and the creative work of melancholia.

This chapter proposes that in Memoirs of the Blind, Derrida is engaged in a deconstruction of Christianity. The deconstruction takes place through the self-portrait, which is a figure of auto-affection. But this figure of auto-affection seems to center on one painting: Jan Provost's Sacred Allegory. The central point in what Derrida writes about this painting is that the eye has nothing to do with sight but with weeping, with tears. What is important about tears is that they are ex-orbitant, they pass over the limit of the ocular globe. Tears of mourning for a departed lover, as they run down the face, draw lines, tracings, or figures, whose forms, we might say, proclaim, like Scripture (of course, écriture, in French), an other still to come, becoming thereby tears of joy. At the end of Memoirs of the Blind, Derrida wonders whether animals can cry too. And if they can cry, do they not also, like us, wait for an other still to come, do they not also wait for the revelation? In any case, when we think about crying, we must think of the eye as a source-point, as an origin.