Editors’ Note, p. iii
Heidi Kolk
Tropes of Suffering and Postures of Authority in Margaret Fuller’s European Travel Letters, p. 377
This article traces the prodigal child mythos in Fuller’s autobiographical travel letters, arguing that the povera soletta and similar types appearing in her later correspondence were the culmination of the material realities and competitive practices inherent in nineteenth-century travel experience.
Editors’ Note, p. v
Marysa Demoor
From Epitaph to Obituary: The Death Politics of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, p. 255
This essay explores how modernist writers adopted and adapted the epitaph, the obituary, and the memoir. In particular, posthumous homages by Eliot and Pound to Virginia Woolf, Henry James, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, and James Joyce show the two modernist poets reworking traditional memorial genres for their own purposes, by using such age-old salutes to dead colleagues to position themselves and their generation within literary history and the canon.
EDITOR’S INTRODUCTIONDavid Parker
Inhabiting Multiple Worlds: Auto/Biography in an (Anti)Global Age, p. v
While globalization is often associated with provisional identities ever in the flux of reinvention, the papers in this special issue seem on the whole skeptical of such postmodernist theorizing. They tend instead to show the importance of relationality as a paradigm in auto/biography studies, with its renewed interest in the ethical dimensions of life narrative. Many of the papers can be seen as ethical and political explorations of the extended relations between self and other in a newly “compressed” world.
Ambrose King
Opening Remarks of Welcome, p. xvi
Continue reading “Biography, vol. 28, no. 1 (2005): Inhabiting Multiple Worlds”
Editor’s Note, p. v
Victoria A. Elmwood
“Happy, Happy, Ever After”: The Transformation of Trauma between the Generations in Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, p. 691
This essay considers Maus as a work that spans the genres of autobiography and collaborative biography, as Art Spiegelman negotiates the difficulties of heteropathic identification—most successfully with his father Vladek, and more problematically with his mother Anja and brother Richieu. In analyzing the ways that Spiegelman struggles to narrate an identity within a family for whose founding trauma he was absent, the essay also investigates the ways that he seeks to intervene in public debates on visual art of the Holocaust.
Editor’s Note, p. v
Ruth Dawson with Waltraud Maierhofer
German Rediscovery of Life Writing: Introduction to Essays on German-Speaking Women as Rulers, Consorts, and Royal Mistresses in the Long Eighteenth Century, p. 483
This introduction to the analysis of the construction of aristocratic life writing by and about German women during the long eighteenth century explores the ongoing reevaluation of autobiography and biography by historians, Germanists, and other scholars in the humanities and social scientists.
Editor’s Note, p. iii
Juan Velasco
Automitografías: The Border Paradigm and Chicana/o Autobiography, p. 313
For Chicana/o cultural critics, the border paradigm has defined the boundaries of writing and experience in contemporary Chicana/o autobiography, and has constituted a valuable contribution to American Studies. In fact, the unique voices coming from Chicana/o autobiography are expressed through a network of cultural codes involving liminality and hybridity, the rewriting of borders, and the challenging of boundaries created by mainstream cultures and official truth. Based on this deep relationship of border paradigm, Chicana/o experience, and the writing and representation of that experience, in this article I will discuss the possibility of building an organic and systematic methodology for studying autobiography.
EDITOR’S INTRODUCTIONCynthia Franklin and Laura E. Lyons
Bodies of Evidence and the Intricate Machines of Untruth, p. v
Franklin and Lyons discuss how the essays and interviews in this volume evidence the important ways that the agency that witnesses to human rights abuses possess is both circumscribed by state institutions and ideologies, and asserted in the face of state violence, past and present. They also analyze two contexts not addressed within the special issue. In examining Argentinian Claudia Bernardi’s artwork, pictured on the cover, they consider the connections between anthropological excavation of massacre sites and the forensic uses of human rights testimony in the public sphere. Concluding with a reading of Nancy Stohlman and Laurieann Aladin’s Live from Palestine, Franklin and Lyons explore how this collection provides testimony to the horrors of the Occupation that speaks to both individual responses and collective resistance, demonstrating important possibilities for the testimonial uses of life writing.
Continue reading “Biography, vol. 27, no. 1 (2004): Personal Effects”
Editor’s Note, p. v
Carolyn Tilghman
Autobiography as Dissidence: Subjectivity, Sexuality, and the Women’s Co-operative Guild, p. 583
This article examines British working-class women’s autobiography as a form of political dissidence. Crucial to guildswomen’s collective autobiographical practice was writing about the reproductive body within the socio/historical context of class and gender relations from the perspective of women. As revealed in Maternity: Letters from Working Women (1915) and in Life as We Have Known It (1931), guildswomen’s life writing contested boundaries between political and domestic spheres, shifted emphasis from the individual to a collective identity, and demanded the inclusion of reproductive rights within the domain of human rights.
Editor’s Note, p. iv
Jennifer Sinor
Inscribing Ordinary Trauma in the Diary of a Military Child, p. 405
Using her own diary as a case study, the author examines how the life writing of a military child inscribes ordinary trauma, defining ordinary trauma as a response to extraordinary events masked as ordinary. For the military child, the possibility of war is made ordinary and rendered such in her writing.
Editor’s Note, p. iii
G. Thomas Couser
Identity, Identicality, and Life Writing: Telling (The Silent) Twins Apart, p. 243
Identical twins challenge the Western valorization of the individual, and thus the major life-writing genres, autobiography and biography. The intense bond between Jennifer and June Gibbons, and their elective mutism, made their biography an unlikely project, but their obsessive journal-writing documented their lives in great detail. Marjorie Wallace’s The Silent Twins demonstrates—and surmounts—the difficulty of representing identical twins.
Editor’s Introduction, p. v
Madeleine Sorapure
Screening Moments, Scrolling Lives: Diary Writing on the Web, p. 1
An analysis of online diaries suggests some of the ways in which autobiographical stories and subjects are shaped on the Web. The computer as a writing tool, and the Web as a publishing medium, influence the practices of diary writing, affecting how diaries are written, what is written and to whom, and how they are read and interpreted.
Continue reading “Biography, vol. 26, no. 1 (2003): Online Lives”
Editor’s Note, p. iii
Adam Sonstegard
Performing the ‘Unnatural’ Life: America’s First Gay Autobiography, p. 545
A man known as Claude Hartland wrote America’s first gay autobiography, ostensibly a case history intended to help physicians treat the pathologies of “inverts.” But as he performs the “unnatural” life these physicians expected, Hartland courts sympathizers, subtly flirting with potential sexual partners he locates among his readers.
