EDITORS’ NOTE, iii
ARTICLES
Telling the Life Story, Anxiously: The Memoirs of Teresa and Anna Campbell
Judith Lütge Coullie, 309
Category: Biography
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Biography, vol. 33, no. 1 (2010): Personal Narrative & Political Discourse
EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION
Autobiographical Discourse in the Theaters of Politics
Sidonie Smith, v
During the course of the 2008 presidential election in the United States, candidates, voters, journalists, pundits, and campaign operatives engaged directly and indirectly in an extended national debate about auto/biographical storytelling, its generic forms, its grounds of authenticity, its routes of circulation, and its afterlives in various media. In the wake of that election, scholars have been probing the conjunctions of personal discourse and political discourse, autobiographical acts, and the “theater” of politics. This introduction situates contributions to this special issue of Biography in the context of three broad themes: the personalization of politics over the last five decades, with its mobilization of the personal story to suture political persona and national fable; the social action of genre in constituting political publics, in such diverse genres as television reality shows, blogs, and national biography; and the archives of the fragment animating strategic biographism and scholarly methodology.
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Biography, vol. 32, no. 4 (2009)
EDITORS’ NOTE, iii
ARTICLES
Reagan’s Back: The Dutch Controversy and American Letters
Emily Bauman, 643
“Reagan’s Back” is a study of the reception surrounding Edmund Morris’s controversial biography of Ronald Reagan, Dutch. I argue that the hostility that greeted Morris’s experiment indicated a resistance to the image of Reagan presented in the book itself, a “free indirect” portrayal enabled by literary fictional techniques antithetical to Reagan iconography as it has developed over the past two decades.
Biography, vol. 32, no. 3 (2009)
ARTICLES
Between Candor and Concealment: Willa Cather and (Auto)Biography
Janis P. Stout, 467
Willa Cather’s noted convictions about privacy existed in tension with her more recently understood engagement in self-publicity. This tension is mirrored in her ambivalent thinking about the genres of biography and autobiography. The two genres became a deeply conflicted site for her, and one that often produced self-contradictions. Although Cather took steps to preserve her privacy late in life, she also manifested impulses toward self-writing.
Biography, vol. 32, no. 2 (2009)
EDITORS’ NOTE, iii
ARTICLES
Protecting Life from Language: John Ruskin’s Museum as Autobiography
Hilary Edwards, 297
This essay argues that Ruskin’s Museum constitutes his first sustained attempt to represent his life story, and as such is a crucial precursor to his autobiography, Praeterita. The Museum project fails, but the failure is redemptive: it forces Ruskin to come to terms with the necessity of language for the presentation of memory, and in so doing helps make Praeterita possible.
Biography 32, no. 1 (2009): IABA 2008: Life Writing & Translations
EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION
Shifting Ground: Translating Lives and Life Writing in Hawai‘i
Cynthia G. Franklin and Miriam Fuchs, vii
We open the Winter 2009 issue of Biography by calling attention to “Pacific People,” an evening of oli, mele, hula, theatre, poetry, autobiography, and biography, to articulate the significance of Hawai‘i as the location of the Sixth Biennial IABA Conference. For the contributors to this volume, translation is, in the broadest terms, a form of representation and action that mediates—inevitably by coming between—cultures and languages in genres that are continually emerging. These essays articulate with the concerns foregrounded in “Pacific People,” including a focus on human rights; an insistence on questioning what can and cannot be translated and the difference this makes to people’s lives; attention to translation as a practice that can bring to the surface “buried” lives; an emphasis on how linguistic translation is embedded in contexts unmistakably political and economic as well as cultural; and an exploration of how translation itself can be a form of political action. As evidenced by “Pacific People” performers, and as argued by contributors to this special issue, translation enables both the restitution of pre- and anticolonial histories and traditions, and also the ability to create awareness of other peoples and places, helping to create potentially transformative consciousness of the common and different grounds on which we stand in both metaphoric and literal terms.
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Biography, vol. 31, no. 4 (2008)
EDITORS’ NOTE, iii
ARTICLES
My Father and Myself: J. R. Ackerley’s Marginal Modernist Künstlerroman
Helena Gurfinkel, 555
Biography, vol. 31, no. 3 (2008)
IN LOVING MEMORY: LINDON BARRETT, v
EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION
Something Other Than Autobiography: Collaborative Life-Narratives in the Americas—An Introduction,
Kathleen McHugh and Catherine Komisaruk, vii
This Introduction to a special essay cluster on “Collaborative Life-Narratives in the Americas” suggests a field of texts and critical practices, arising from the material circumstances of colonialism in the Americas, that counters traditional autobiographical narrative. The essays explore the complicated relationships among literacy, identity, colonialism, and conquest, as the narration of marginalized lives invokes collaboration with technologies of literacy.
Biography, vol. 31, no. 2 (2008)
Cover artBiography, vol. 31, no. 1 (2008): Autographics
Cover artEDITORS’ INTRODUCTION
Self-Regarding Art
Gillian Whitlock and Anna Poletti, v
This Introduction to the Biography Special Issue on “Autographics” maps a field of texts and critical practices which are emerging in the rapidly changing visual and textual cultures of autobiography. Beginning with a survey of current thinking about the comics, it argues for autographic criticism as a practice that engages with new modes and media, such as graffiti and online social networking, where autobiographical narrative proliferates through fusions of the visual and the textual.
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Biography, vol. 30, no. 4 (2007)
Editors’ Note, iii
ARTICLES
Against Depression: Final Knowledge in Styron, Mairs, and Solomon
Lee Zimmerman, p. 465