Editor’s Introduction, p. iii

ARTICLES

Richard Schur
Critical Race Theory and the Limits of Auto/Biography: Reading Patricia Williams’s The Alchemy of Race and Rights Through/Against Postcolonial Theory, p. 455

This article examines how Patricia Williams’s The Alchemy of Race and Rights develops critical race theory by carrying out the concerns, methods, and goals of Gayatri Spivak’s articulation of the subaltern and postcolonial theory within the context of U.S. law. Williams’s book performs a critique of legal subjectivity by first creating and then deconstructing a series of auto/biographical moments. By placing critical race theory and postcolonial theory into dialogue, the article demonstrates how these distinct theoretical orientations rely on auto/biography to supplement the limits of the Western political tradition in order to realize its potential.

Continue reading “Biography, vol. 25, no. 3 (2002)”

Editor’s Introduction, p. iii

ARTICLES

Richard Freadman
Genius and the Dutiful Life: Ray Monk’s Wittgenstein and the Biography of the Philosopher as Sub-Genre, p. 301

This article argues for the existence of the “biography of the philosopher” as a sub-genre of life writing, and identifies a number of coordinates that assist in characterizing the writing, reading, and interpretation of examples of this sub-genre. Exemplifying the need to consider biographies of philosophers on a case-by-case basis, a reading of Ray Monk’s biography of Wittgenstein in light of these coordinates reveals a resemblance between Wittgenstein’s later thought and Monk’s biographical methodology.

Continue reading “Biography, vol. 25, no. 2 (2002)”

SPECIAL ISSUE: Biography and Geography

Editor’s Introduction, p. iv

ARTICLES

Sarah Ann Wider and Ellen Percy Kraly

The Contour of Unknown Lives: Mapping Women’s Experience in the Adirondacks, p. 1

Women have rarely been written into the literary and social histories of woods life. This uneasy silence begins to speak through the carefully created camp designed in the 1920s by Adelaide Breckenridge and Katharine Whited. Their Adirondack home, with its book collection, annotated topographical maps, and quotation book, opens the door into a vibrant women’s community, while shedding light on the literary traditions that created and documented it.

Continue reading “Biography, vol. 25, no. 1 (2002)”

Editor’s Note, p. iv

ARTICLES

Jeremy D. Popkin

Coordinated Lives: Between Autobiography and Scholarship p. 781

Edited collections of specially prepared autobiographical essays have become a common form of autobiographical publication in the past few decades, especially in American academia. Their development raises questions about autobiographical writing that departs from the individualist assumptions prevalent in the genre, and about the boundary between autobiographical and scholarly writing.

Continue reading “Biography, vol. 24, no. 4 (2001)”

Editor’s Note, p. iv

ARTICLES

Alan Rosen

Autobiography from the Other Side: The Reading of Nazi Memoirs and Confessional Ambiguity, p. 553

While most autobiographers can expect sympathetic readings of their work, autobiography “from the other side” deals with lives, and thus narratives, characterized by a profound indecency. This essay explores author and reader strategies found in Nazi memoirs, using Rudolf Hoess’s “My Soul” as a test case. By examining the work’s confessional transparency, the memoir’s complex nature and questionable power are revealed, as the confession that we read is undermined by the confessions witnessed within the text.

Continue reading “Biography, vol. 24, no. 3 (2001)”

Editor’s Introduction, p. iii

ARTICLES

Richard Freadman

Genius and the Dutiful Life: Ray Monk’s Wittgenstein and the Biography of the Philosopher as Sub-Genre, p. 301

This article argues for the existence of the “biography of the philosopher” as a sub-genre of life writing, and identifies a number of coordinates that assist in characterizing the writing, reading, and interpretation of examples of this sub-genre. Exemplifying the need to consider biographies of philosophers on a case-by-case basis, a reading of Ray Monk’s biography of Wittgenstein in light of these coordinates reveals a resemblance between Wittgenstein’s later thought and Monk’s biographical methodology.

Continue reading “Biography, vol. 24, no. 2 (2001)”

SPECIAL ISSUE: Autobiography and Changing Identities

Editor’s Introduction, ix
Guest Editors Susanna Egan and Gabriele Helms
Welcome to the Conference, xxi
Martha C. Piper

PERFORMING IDENTITIES

Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson
The Rumpled Bed of Autobiography: Extravagant Lives, Extravagant Questions, 1

Two recent works, Tracey Emin’s installation “My Bed” and Dave Eggers’s memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, exemplify the provocative self-presentations in diverse media that are “rumpling” the procrustean bed of autobiography and raising intriguing theoretical questions about autobiographical acts. Are these presentations of “life” embodied materiality, “authentic” citation, or exploitation? Are these violations of norms of gender and class “sincere” self-disclosure or transgressive excess? How do such performances both maintain and breach the autobiographical pact? And how do the performances of “bad girls” and macho “boys” call upon critics to remake theory?

Continue reading “Biography, vol. 24, no. 1 (2001)”

Editor’s Note, p. iii

ARTICLES

Jane Campion Frames Janet Frame: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young New Zealand Poet, p. 651
Suzette A. HenkeIn her 1989 film An Angel At My Table, Jane Campion boldly imbricates into her cinematic adaptation of Janet Frame’s Autobiography scenes and details borrowed from Frame’s novel Faces in the Water. By strategically amalgamating fact with autofiction, Campion expands Frame’s textual self-disclosure and produces a poignant cinematic portrait that reinforces the testimonial impact of her protagonist’s life story.

Continue reading “Biography, vol. 23, no. 4 (2000)”

Editor’s Note, p. iii

ARTICLES

The Exile and the Ghostwriter: East-West Biographical Politics and The Private Life of Chairman Mao, p. 481
Margaretta Jolly

This article examines the biographical politics of The Private Life of Chairman Mao by Mao’s physician Zhisui Li. As a debunking exposé, it represents revived critical ambitions for the genre in China, despite its official ban there. At the same time, it reflects U.S. commercial and ideological interests through the ghost-writing of the U.S. Sinologist and journalist Anne Thurston. Thurston’s own dissatisfaction with Li’s lack of personal confession is also assessed in the light of the political role of autobiography as well as biography across West and East.

Continue reading “Biography, vol. 23, no. 3 (2000)”

Editor’s Note, p. iii

ARTICLES

Self-Writing, Literary Traditions, and Post-Emancipation Identity: The Case of Mary Seacole, p. 309
Evelyn J. Hawthorne

This study addresses the virtually unexplored topic of how first generation, free(d) Caribbean subjects constructed their identities from the conflictual heritages in the post-Emancipation period. Focusing on the nineteenth-century work The Wonderful Adventures of Mary Seacole in Many Lands, the author explores its meanings in the contexts of Victorian literary traditions, ideological discourses, and Caribbean history.

Continue reading “Biography, vol. 23, no. 2 (2000)”

SPECIAL ISSUE: The Biopic

Editor’s Introduction, p. v
Guest Editor Glenn Man

ARTICLES

Not the Full Story: Representing Ruth Ellis, p. 1
Sue Tweg

Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in Britain, lingers in the popular imagination in two films, the fictional Yield to the Night (1956) and the Ellis biopic Dance with a Stranger (1985). This article examines how the film medium reworks biographical details to shape and define Ellis herself, her fictional alter ego, and two female film stars.

Continue reading “Biography, vol. 23, no. 1 (2000): The Biopic”