Fantasy, fear, and freedom all play a part in A Story of Witchery, a book-length narrative poem by Jennifer Calkins, and newly illustrated by Thor Harris. Here we meet Emily, our “small and weedy” ...protagonist, an orphan complicit (perhaps) in her own abandonment who is caught up, as poet Amy Gerstler writes in her Introduction, in a story “entwined with science facts and twisted clinical fictions.” In language rolling and tripping with spare precision, Calkins makes a modern pilgrim progress into the imagination and the dark world of medicine. Rich and haunting images create a seemingly familiar environment which, like the internal landscape of the protagonist, dissolves only to reform, until finally resolving into a healed whole.
This is the first book-length study of the fictional autobiography, a subgenre that is at once widely recognizable and rarely examined as a literary form with its own history and dynamics of ...interpretation. Heidi L. Pennington shows that the narrative form and genre expectations associated with the fictional autobiography in the Victorian period engages readers in a sustained meditation on the fictional processes that construct selfhood both in and beyond the text. Through close readings of Jane Eyre, David Copperfield, and other well-known examples of the subgenre, Pennington shows how the Victorian fictional autobiography subtly but persistently illustrates that all identities are fictions.Despite the subgenre's radical implications regarding the nature of personal identity, fictional autobiographies were popular in their own time and continue to inspire devotion in readers. This study sheds new light on what makes this subgenre so compelling, up to and including in the present historical moment of precipitous social and technological change. As we continue to grapple with the existential question of what determines "who we really are, " this book explores the risks and rewards of embracing conscious acts of fictional self-production in an unstable world.
Darman Moenir's autobiographical novel, Bako, relates the experience of the protagonist - the 'I' of the narrative - residing with his mother in the community of his father's relatives, the bako of ...the title. According to the principles of Minangkabau matriliny, neither he nor his mother are members of the father's kin group and there is a tension in the relationship between mother and son on one side and the bako on the other. Through successive chapters, each concerning a significant individual in the protagonist's boyhood and adolescence, the novel explores this tension and its effects on his mother. A close reading of key passages that employ a narrative device of shifting voices - the boy's, the narrator's, the author's - reveals how the writing works to persuade the reader of the dramatic intensity of the boy's quest for self-knowledge. A comparison with novels of Minangkabau society of an earlier period shows both continuity and change. The undisguised use of autobiographical experience on which the novel draws is explored through an illuminating comparison with Pramoedya Ananta Toer's stories and through a glance at the genre of Japanese autobiographical novels and its conventions.
In creating autobiographical narratives through games, there exists a new theoretical problem in the game-player tension: how may a game creator relate their own story through a medium that relies ...primarily on another (the player) to execute? The blurring and shifting lines between the game creator and player resemble the same death knell Roland Barthes sounds for the literary Author in "La mort de l'auteur" (1967). This paper proposes a more nuanced theory for understanding the 'player positioning' of autobiographical games with a triangulated framework. The player position is a player/author persona collaboration that facilitates a shared presence in the game space through various ratios of three positions: the player as the protagonist, protagonist-proxy, and witness. Through a close reading of the autobiographical game Memoir En Code: Reissue by Alex Camilleri, the paper explores how the player may perceive the autobiographical game. Viewed through the protagonist, protagonist-proxy, and witness lens, the paper interrogates how the player position alters the nature of player-author identity within the game. It offers an approach for considering how the different perspectives of the author-player persona offer meaningful game(play), and argues for the shifting presentation of the author-player persona as an effective negotiation of a shared experience in the design of autobiographical games.
The Fifth Principle is the first of three books that take as their subject aspects of the author's life. This book reflects upon a period between birth and eight years of age; the second book will ...address adolescence and the third, adulthood. It would be misleading to consider what follows to be autobiography, or the "case history" of an individual. The author of the book, and the individual written about, are not the same person. It is a piece of literature that furnishes an account of the methods of a mind in its efforts to prevail in oppressive circumstances.
One essential function of autobiographical writing is to provide not an account of oneself but rather a model for others. Creating the self as a narrative object involves establishing an ambiguous ...intersubjective space, where complex acts of mirroring-the writer's ego imposed upon the reader, the reader's desire fulfilled within the writer's life-complicate the assessment of authenticity. This article examines how this effect is both amplified and undercut by autofictional satire in Samuel Shem's famous novel about his year-long medical internship, The House of God (1978). Considering the text in light of aesthetic theory, philosophy, and narrative medicine reveals how the novel's own form deliberately resists its reader's pursuit of an intersubjective identification. Just as The House of God's narrator establishes an identity equally disorienting and empowering, so too does the novel's deployment of competing genres and traditions use humour to blur the lines between aesthetic mimesis and social role-modeling, forcing us to reassess utilitarian and cathartic reading practices in the medical professions. In the era of COVID-19-a timewhen aspirational medical narratives have taken on new cultural power-Shem's troubled negotiation between what 'should be' and what 'is' continue to challenge how we should read.
Aborda, de manera conjunta, el estudio de la representación autorial en la narrativa, el audiovisual y el teatro hispánico partiendo de la hipótesis de que la autoficción responde a una tendencia ...general en el arte contemporáneo en la que, aun asumiendo la imposibilidad de un referente estable, los creadores siguen afanándose en plasmar sus identidades, si bien de forma precaria y fragmentaria.Texto de la editorial
Beginning with Tolstoy's first extant records of his written
œuvre, this anthology assembles seventy-seven unabridged texts that
cover more than seven decades of his life, from 1835 to 1910. It
...constitutes the most complete single-volume edition to date of the
rich variety of Tolstoy's philosophical output: apothegmatic
sayings, visions, intimate sketchbook and day notes, book reviews,
open letters, dialogues, pedagogic talks, public lectures, programs
and rules for personal behavior, fictions, and reminiscences. Most
of these newly translated and thoroughly annotated texts have never
been available in English. Among the four reprinted translations
personally checked and authorized by Tolstoy is the text titled
"Tolstoy on Venezuela," an archival restoration of an authentic
first publication in English of "Patriotism, or Peace?" (1896) that
had been deemed lost. In the inaugural piece, a seven-year-old
Tolstoy describes violent but natural animal life in contrast with
the lazy life of a peaceful barnyard in the countryside. The last
entry in the anthology written by an eighty-year-old Tolstoy for
his grandchildren provides a lesson on vegetarianism and
non-violence that a hungry wolf teaches a hungry boy during their
conversation when both are on their way to lunch.
It was the insolvable, the "scandalous," problems of philosophy
that never gave Tolstoy any rest: freedom of the will, religious
tolerance, gender inequality, the tonal shape of music, the value
of healthy life habits, the responsibilities of teaching, forms of
social protest, cognitive development, science in society, the
relation between body and mind, charity and labor, human dignity
and public service, sexual psychology, national war doctrines,
suicide, individual sacrifice, the purposes of making art. And
always: What are the sources of violence? Why should we engage in
politics? Why do we need governments? How can one practice
non-violence? What is the meaning of our irrepressible desire to
seek and find meaning? Why can't we live without loving? The
typeset proofs of his final insights were brought to Tolstoy for
approval when he was already on his deathbed. The reader will find
all the texts in the exact shape and order of completion as Tolstoy
left them. No matter their brevity or the occasion on which they
were written, these works exemplify Tolstoy as an artistically
inventive and intellectually absorbing thinker.
