What happens when an autobiographical project is taken up by film? How can visual media extend, distort, and reshape the image of the author? Janet Frame was a writer particularly concerned with ...modes of authorial representation, both visual and writerly. Her posthumous novel In the Memorial Room (2013) describes the writer Harry Gill's tenure of the Watercress-Armstrong Fellowship in Menton, France. At the reception celebrating his arrival in Menton, he is greeted by Connie Watercress, benefactor of the fellowship, her husband Max and their son Michael, a 'handsome richly bearded young man, the perfect stereotype of the 'young writer''. At this reception, the mayor of Menton approaches the foursome to take a photograph with the new Watercress-Armstrong Fellow - and mistakenly extends his hand to Michael.
This article explores the repressed autobiographical narrative that runs through Margaret Ogola's Place of Destiny (2005). Based on Ogola's experience, the novel takes the form of a fictional ...autobiography as it documents the story of Amor A. Lore, a business executive woman in her late forties, from the moment she was diagnosed with liver cancer and ends with her eventual demise. In this article, I critically reflect on Margaret Ogola's personal experience of writing about cancer and how she focuses on the complex dynamics of self-representation, challenges, and opportunities related to fictional autobiography. While emphasizing the victims' experience of cancer in this fictional life story, I argue that Margaret Ogola rewrites the cancer narrative by fictionalizing her personal experience as a means of stationing the authority of the artistic enterprise in the desires of a diseased body to overcome the trauma of disintegration. This essay draws on the ideas of Ann Jurecic and Leigh Gilmore to conceptualize the dialectical interplay between facts and fiction in an attempt to understand possibilities of thinking about and experiencing disease without submitting the text to an effusive paranoid reading.
The French fictional journal Raoul, Valerie
The French fictional journal,
1980, 19801215, 1980, Letnik:
40, 40.
eBook
In this context Raoul discusses more than fifty novels or short stories wholly or partly in diary form and written in France between 1800 and the present.
Did affection for members of his family influence Tolstoy's characterizations in War and Peace? Comparison of the novel with the writer's family history reveals preferential treatment of those with ...greater relatedness to him--excluding his autoportraits. It also explains many narrative gaps and curious devices, including coincidences, "fate," and incest.
The mother-daughter partnership that produced the Little House books has fascinated scholars and readers alike. Now, John E. Miller, one of America's leading authorities on Laura Ingalls Wilder and ...Rose Wilder Lane, combines analyses of both women to explore this collaborative process and shows how their books reflect the authors' distinctive views of place, time, and culture. Along the way, he addresses the two most controversial issues for Wilder/Lane aficionados: how much did Lane actually contribute to the writing of the Little House books, and what was Wilder's real attitude toward American Indians.Interpreting these writers in their larger historical and cultural contexts, Miller reconsiders their formidable artistic, political, and literary contributions to American cultural life in the 1930s. He looks at what was happening in 1932—from depression conditions and politics to chain stores and celebrity culture—to shed light on Wilder's life, and he shows how actual "little houses" established ideas of home that resonated emotionally for both writers. In considering each woman's ties to history, Miller compares Wilder with Frederick Jackson Turner as a frontier mythmaker and examines Lane's unpublished history of Missouri in the context of a contemporaneous project, Thomas Hart Benton's famous Jefferson City mural. He also looks at Wilder's Missouri Ruralist columns to assess her pre–Little House values and writing skills, and he readdresses her literary treatment of Native Americans. A final chapter shows how Wilder's and Lane's conservative political views found expression in their work, separating Lane's more libertarian bent from Wilder's focus on writing moralist children's fiction. These nine thoughtful essays expand the critical discussion on Wilder and Lane beyond the Little House. Miller portrays them as impassioned and dedicated writers who were deeply involved in the historical changes and political challenges of their times—and contends that questions over the books' authorship do not do justice to either woman's creative investment in the series. Miller demystifies the aura of nostalgia that often prevents modern readers from seeing Wilder as a real-life woman, and he depicts Lane as a kindred artistic spirit, helping readers better understand mother and daughter as both women and authors.
This essay offers a new perspective on the queerness of the encounters between self and other in Coetzee's autobiographical fiction. It attends to the dynamics of openness and reservation, immediacy ...and mediation, desire and longing played out between Anya and Señor C in Diary of a Bad Year (2007) and John and his female cousin, who is represented by the characters Agnes in Boyhood: A Memoir (1997), Ilse in Youth (2002), and Margot in Summertime (2009). Building on Lauren Berlant's notion of minor intimacy-which asks us to pay attention to encounters without a canon and to desires too elusive for heterosexual conventions- it offers a framework for uncovering modes of attachment in Coetzee's autobiographical fiction that do not obey the strictures of the couple form. I draw on queer studies on intimacy and phenomenological studies on emotions and embodiment to explore the modes of attachment between self and other.
The Guermantes way Proust, Marcel; Carter, William C
01/2019, Letnik:
3
eBook
An authoritative new edition of the third volume in Marcel Proust's epic masterwork, In Search of Lost Time Marcel Proust's monumental seven-part novel In Search of Lost Time is considered by many to ...be the greatest novel of the twentieth century. This edition of volume three, The Guermantes Way, is edited and annotated by noted Proust scholar William C. Carter, who endeavors to bring the classic C. K. Scott Moncrieff translation closer to the spirit and style of the author's original text. Continuing the story begun in Swann's Way and continued in In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, The Guermantes Way follows Proust's young protagonist as he advances through aristocratic French society in late-nineteenth-century Paris. A departure from the intimacy of the sprawling novel's previous two installments, part three unfolds against a colorful backdrop of Parisian life, moving from literary salon to opulent social gathering to provide a biting and satirical commentary on culture, human foibles, the ways of the world, and the irretrievable loss of time.
In our age the categories of memory, monumentality, and truth telling are all far from stable. In the highly charged world of what Foucault termed 'parrhesia' - a mode of free speech 'linked to ...courage in the face of danger' - testimony can challenge a state's version of events and autobiographical fictions offer contexts through which trauma might be understood. In this essay, I argue that this danger and instability has come to supersaturate concrete and textual representations of traumatic experience, and also to link the discourses with which these different renderings are debated. Such works function analogously as what Pierre Nora termed 'lieux dé memoire' that generate forms knowledge about the relations between truth, memory and memorial. As Leigh Gilmore puts it, they have the 'potential to reorganize what justice and knowledge look like in the context of trauma'. The seemingly distinct memory projects manifested in, for example, war memorials, autobiographical literature, and legal testimony have, I suggest, developed against and alongside a common set of problematic conceptual, linguistic and socio/political principles. Each of these projects similarly map out and produce idiosyncratic representations of the nature of these boundaries, the genre-blurring and interdisciplinary character of which my own argument echoes.
The Inferno Strindberg, August; Field, Claud
2009
eBook
Swedish novelist and playwright August Strindberg led a tumultuous life defined by giddy heights and despairing depths. One of his most intense periods of depression resulted in profound ...psychological and existential distress that Strindberg later came to refer to as his "Inferno" crisis. In this gripping memoir, he recounts his spiritual turmoil and awakening, along with his experiments in the occult and black magic.
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