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Self-Deception, Self-Knowledge, and Autobiography

Somogy Varga

in The Philosophy of Autobiography

Authors engaging in autobiographical projects are usually driven by a desire for a profound self-knowledge. However, the process of recollection and reflection that is involved in this process is ... More

Authors engaging in autobiographical projects are usually driven by a desire for a profound self-knowledge. However, the process of recollection and reflection that is involved in this process is prone to self-deception. This chapter addresses the issue of self-deception in the context of autobiographical writing.Less

A Question of Blood: The Conflict of Sex and Class in the Autobiografía of Victoria Ocampo

Emilie Bergmann, Greenberg Janet, Gwen Kirkpatrick, Francine Masiello, Francesca Miller, Morello-Frosch Marta, Kathleen Newman, and Mary Louise Pratt

in Women, Culture, and Politics in Latin America

This chapter presents Victoria Ocampo's autobiography that has exposed neglected aspects of the writings of an important figure in Argentine literary history. Ocampo's journalistic writing and ... More

This chapter presents Victoria Ocampo's autobiography that has exposed neglected aspects of the writings of an important figure in Argentine literary history. Ocampo's journalistic writing and activity had an important impact on twentieth-century literary movements in Latin America. The publication of the Autobiografía seems to have kept the range of conjectures about her life alive, but has not yet given rise to substantial critical debate over its content or import in the context of Ocampo's collected work. It then investigates Ocampo's attempt to reconcile through the autobiographical writing the contradictions that she displays as a woman and a self-avowed feminist who also championed the patriarchal values of the ruling class. The work reveals in one bold, consolidated text both the extent of Ocampo's feminist rebellion and the restrictions imposed on it by her loyalty to the upper class into which she was born.Less

Embedded: Memoir and Correspondents

Gillian Whitlock

in Soft Weapons: Autobiography in Transit

This chapter turns to what Leigh Gilmore calls the “limits” of autobiography: its trading in trauma—and war. It also identifies memoir as a vehicle for haunted and fragmented accounts of the ... More

This chapter turns to what Leigh Gilmore calls the “limits” of autobiography: its trading in trauma—and war. It also identifies memoir as a vehicle for haunted and fragmented accounts of the professional self in a specific historical context. The memoir is traditionally the prerogative of the literate elite. It is a distinctive space for autobiographical writing. The impacts of graphic accounts of trauma in war journalism from Iraq are an important issue. Journalists' memoirs from Baghdad rapidly take up performatively the spatial organization of news coverage. Travels in American Iraq is a nomadic memoir: processual and unresolved. Naked in Baghdad provides a valuable thick description of the correspondents' world, using the tools, customs, and technology of Anne Garrels' craft to autobiographical and ethnographic effect. The terrible and spectral presence of the victims of war is implanted in the American experience of Iraq.Less

Autobiography in Time

Qi Wang

in The Autobiographical Self in Time and Culture

This chapter traces the cultural-historical origins of the autobiographical self by contrasting autobiographical writings in ancient and modern times, in East and West. It argues that autobiography ... More

This chapter traces the cultural-historical origins of the autobiographical self by contrasting autobiographical writings in ancient and modern times, in East and West. It argues that autobiography is inevitably conditioned by the cultural conception of self that transforms across historical eras. Through analyzing the structure, content, and function of autobiographical writings against their cultural and historical backdrops, the chapter pursues the idea that the autobiographical self gains cultural stance unique to a time and space in the history of human civilization.Less

Introduction. A Clutch of Brothers: Alterity and Autothanatography

E. S. Burt

in Regard for the Other: Autothanatography in Rousseau, De Quincey, Baudelaire, and Wilde

This introductory chapter begins by presenting the book's rationales for pushing the discussion of the other in autobiography toward a consideration of an alterity outside the subject's categories, ... More

This introductory chapter begins by presenting the book's rationales for pushing the discussion of the other in autobiography toward a consideration of an alterity outside the subject's categories, all of which address its open-endedness and its specificity as written text. It then explains the reasons behind the focus on Rousseau. It argues that if one doesn't pay attention to the text as witnessing to the subject's death, one neglects that it proposes new, extramural transactions instead of simply reporting on past ones. The subsequent chapters are driven by the urgent sense that, in the midst of the current critical dialogue on cultural diversity, on nationalisms and transnationalisms, we have ever and again to look at texts that have done more than simply make use of already extant modes for reporting on the I's love for, exclusion of, or dispossession by the other. It is, rather, the possibility of collecting and calculating in advance with what exceeds the subject—and in doing so, of making the subject responsible to and for what lies outside knowledge as its conditions—that there is potential to consider autobiography as providing surprises, something more than the confirmation of previous models.Less

Autobiography: History or Fiction?: William Baldwin Writing History “under the Shadow of Dreames and Visions” in A Mirror for Magistrates (1559)

Meredith Anne Skura

in Tudor Autobiography: Listening for Inwardness

This chapter moves from arguments about literary and discursive convention to debates about the place, if any, of fiction in autobiography. One of the most important unrecognized texts in the history ... More

This chapter moves from arguments about literary and discursive convention to debates about the place, if any, of fiction in autobiography. One of the most important unrecognized texts in the history of autobiography is William Baldwin's A Mirror for Magistrates (1559). Mirror, a collection of first-person fictional monologues by “ghosts” of fallen English princes, is framed by Baldwin's own first-person tongue-in-cheek account of how he and his coauthors composed the monologues. Mirror's unique combination throughout of outward-looking history and inward-looking “poesie,” rather than disqualifying it for a place in the history of autobiography, inspired later autobiographical writing by both its contributors and its readers.Less

In or Out? The Dislocations of Hélène Cixous

in Poststructuralism and Postcoloniality: The Anxiety of Theory

This chapter analyses Hélène Cixous's disjunctions and displacements across three types of material in her corpus. First, Cixous's most famous theoretical works, ‘Sorties’ and the original ‘Le Rire ... More

This chapter analyses Hélène Cixous's disjunctions and displacements across three types of material in her corpus. First, Cixous's most famous theoretical works, ‘Sorties’ and the original ‘Le Rire de la Méduse’, reveal the instabilities of ‘theory’ as a genre. In their profusion, wordplay, and chaotic structure, the essays already blur boundaries between poetry and analysis, between creative writing and philosophy. Second, Cixous's eclectic autobiographical writing is also the scene of an exploration of the writing persona's relationship with Algeria in Photos de racines, Les rêveries de la femme sauvage, and some of the more recent essays. The final section of the chapter discusses Cixous's reading relations, in particular her prolonged and intense engagement with the work of Jacques Derrida.Less

Profiles: Two Generations, One Identity

Anne Stefani

in Unlikely Dissenters: White Southern Women in the Fight for Racial Justice, 1920-1970

This chapter presents the typical profile of the women examined in the book. Autobiographical writings and interviews show that all the women received the same white supremacist education, a ... More

This chapter presents the typical profile of the women examined in the book. Autobiographical writings and interviews show that all the women received the same white supremacist education, a combination of racist prejudices and specific gender norms, which rendered any personal interaction with black men and women impossible. It then shows how these women came to reject their education by deliberately unlearning racism and liberating themselves from the prescriptions of white southern womanhood in the process. Typically, the women who became involved in the “long” civil rights movement started with an acute sense of guilt through a traumatic episode or an epiphany constituting the catalyst for their repudiation of white supremacy. The chapter analyzes the main factors of their subsequent transformation, i.e. interracial contact, religion, and higher education. It concludes by showing how these women's racial activism inevitably entailed their emancipation from southern gender norms.Less

Writing Your Way to Freedom: Autobiography as Inquiry in Prison Writing Workshops

David Coogan

in Working for Justice: A Handbook of Prison Education and Activism

This chapter details how the use of a biography-based writing workshop helps imprisoned authors think about their pasts, reframe their presents, and construct new possible futures. It explores the ... More

This chapter details how the use of a biography-based writing workshop helps imprisoned authors think about their pasts, reframe their presents, and construct new possible futures. It explores the deeper communication issues that structure narratives of criminality and violence but that also, when addressed truthfully, enable imprisoned men to begin to author new lives. The chapter contextualizes the men's autobiographies within the larger field of prison writing since the 1970s—particularly, the emergent genre of prison autobiography. The discussion is limited to work published by men primarily because the workshops examined here are filled with men. However, the process of crafting new selves via autobiographical writing is not inherently different for men and women any more than it is for black or white prisoners.Less

Alice Munro’s Dance of the Happy Shades: The personal voice

Denis Sampson

in The Found Voice: Writers' Beginnings

Alice Munro has identified ‘The Peace of Utrecht’ as her first ‘personal’ story. Written in 1959 soon after her mother’s death, it deals with painful autobiographical material, and marks her movement ... More

Alice Munro has identified ‘The Peace of Utrecht’ as her first ‘personal’ story. Written in 1959 soon after her mother’s death, it deals with painful autobiographical material, and marks her movement away from writing ‘exercises’ in the style of other, admired, writers. It embraced memories from her childhood in rural Ontario and the nearby town, which she calls Jubilee, although it was a decade before the collection Lives of Girls and Women established this as her fictional territory. For much of that decade, her ambition was to write a novel, but she abandoned that goal after writing two other stories of childhood in 1967. These two stories are continuous with the first ‘personal’ story in focusing on her father in counterpoint to her mortally ill mother, and exploring the contrasting voices of her parents and the ways in which they became a permanent part of her and her memoir-fiction.Less

Introduction

Olivia Weisser

in Ill Composed: Sickness, Gender, and Belief in Early Modern England

This chapter introduces the book’s main historical figures and central argument: despite key overlaps, seventeenth-century English men and women perceived illness in gendered ways. Patients’ ... More

This chapter introduces the book’s main historical figures and central argument: despite key overlaps, seventeenth-century English men and women perceived illness in gendered ways. Patients’ perceptions, however, were not shaped by gender alone. Rather, a host of beliefs, expectations, and experiences intersected with gender to inform patients’ views. The chapter discusses three categories that are particularly central to the analysis in this book: writing practices, religious beliefs, and economic status. The chapter then situates the project in three bodies of literature: the history of the patient, early modern gendered experience, and early modern autobiographical writing. The discussion closes by outlining the diverse sources that are used in the book to recover patients’ perceptions.Less

Mediating Trauma: How do we Read the Holocaust Memoirs?

Piotr Kuhiwczak

in Tradition, Translation, Trauma: The Classic and the Modern

This chapter argues that Holocaust memoirs should be considered a special case despite sharing a lot of features with other memoirs. This claim is based on two premises. First of all, unlike any ... More

This chapter argues that Holocaust memoirs should be considered a special case despite sharing a lot of features with other memoirs. This claim is based on two premises. First of all, unlike any other type of autobiographical writing the Holocaust memoirs have been incorporated into a wider debate about the extermination of the Jews during the Second World War. They are called upon to support, or disprove, a whole gamut of political views and interpretations of those past events. As a result, this often instrumental treatment of memoirs has had some impact on the popularity of some authors but has also contributed to the fact that other, perhaps equally interesting but less ‘useful’ writing has sunk without trace. The second premise is that to many readers, Holocaust memoirs are available only in translation. While the texts written in German or French were much more widely known and disseminated, those in less known languages had a smaller chance to be noticed and translation was often the only way of ensuring a wider readership.Less

Hand-rails to the past: McGahern and the memory of the Irish revolution

R. F. (Roy) Foster

in John McGahern: Authority and Vision

This chapter looks at the way McGahern represents the memory of the Irish revolution in Amongst Women, That They May Face the Rising Sun, and in his autobiographical writings. The disillusioned and ... More

This chapter looks at the way McGahern represents the memory of the Irish revolution in Amongst Women, That They May Face the Rising Sun, and in his autobiographical writings. The disillusioned and often bitter reflections of his protagonists partly reflect his own family’s experience, but also echo a strong reaction among writers and ex-activists in the 1920s and 1930s, whose responses and regrets are traced through the writings of people such as P.S. O’Hegarty, Desmond Ryan, Ernie O’Malley and Bulmer Hobson, as well as private letters and reflections. It is suggested that McGahern is in a sense channelling a powerful theme in the history of independent Ireland, that of living with the memory of violence by means of evasion and suppression, and that this lends his fiction a historical dimension which has not been fully appreciated. Less

A Life in Absence: Mario Pieri

Konstantina Zanou

in Transnational Patriotism in the Mediterranean, 1800-1850: Stammering the Nation

Chapter 8 tells the story of Mario Pieri (1776–1852) and of certain other Ionian and Greco-Italian diaspora intellectuals with whom he was connected. Drawing both from his unpublished diary and his ... More

Chapter 8 tells the story of Mario Pieri (1776–1852) and of certain other Ionian and Greco-Italian diaspora intellectuals with whom he was connected. Drawing both from his unpublished diary and his published autobiography, and by following Pieri’s steps from Russian-controlled Corfu to Napoleonic and Habsburg Padua, Treviso, and Venice, and from there to Restoration Florence and back to British-controlled Corfu, it explores the way this ex-Venetian subject and transnational patriot came to see himself as a diaspora Greek through his involvement in Italian, and more specifically Tuscan philhellenism. The chapter thus hopes to tell something about the perceptions of the war from a position far removed from the theatre of battle, as well as of the impact that the Greek revolution and the European philhellenisms had on the peoples of the ‘Greek diasporas’, reshaping even the very meaning of this notion.Less