Category: Biography

Cover Art

Editors’ Note, p. iii

ARTICLES

Nancy K. Miller
I Killed My Grandmother: Mary Antin, Amos Oz, and the Autobiography of a Name, p. 319
Read together as autobiographies of a name, these two very different narratives provide unexpected points of connection to my silenced family story. The essay explores the extent to which my identity as a third-generation American has been entangled with a collective history shaped by the trauma of departure. I reimagine the documents of my personal archive within the grand immigration sagas of the twentieth century.

Continue reading “Biography, vol. 30, no. 3 (2007)”

Editors’ Note, p. iii

ARTICLES

Susan Bruce
Sherston’s Imaginary Friend: Siegfried Sassoon’s Autobiographical Prose and the Idea of Photography, p. 173
Continue reading “Biography, vol. 30, no. 2 (2007)”

Special Issue: Life Writing and Science Fiction

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION, p. v

John Rieder
Life Writing and Science Fiction: Constructing Identities and Constructing Genres, p. v
Each essay in the issue grapples with problems attending the social and literary construction of personal identities. Juxtaposing life writing and science fiction also suggests that generic identities ought to be grasped as complex social practices that connect discourse and power in a variety of ways.

Continue reading “Biography, vol. 30, no. 1 (2007): Life Writing and Science Fiction”

Cover Art

Editors’ Note, p. v

ARTICLES

Erica L. Johnson
Auto-Ghostwriting Smile, Please: An Unfinished Autobiography, p. 563
Jean Rhys’s Smile, Please: An Unfinished Autobiography was not actually written by Rhys, but by novelist David Plante in an act that can only be characterized as ghostwriting. This essay theorizes ghostwriting in the context of autobiography and life writing, and shows how the ghostwriting process results in contested layers of written and spoken texts. Rhys resists the ghostwriter’s displacement of her spoken text by quoting her own written texts verbatim throughout Smile, Please, thus in effect auto-ghostwriting her autobiography.

Continue reading “Biography, vol. 29, no. 4 (2006)”

Cover Art

Editors’ Note, p. iii

ARTICLES

Jaume Aurell
Autobiographical Texts as Historiographical Sources: Rereading Fernand Braudel and Annie Kriegel, p. 425
This article engages autobiographical texts by French historians Fernand Braudel and Annie Kriegal as historiographical sources that help us comprehend the intersection between personal lives and scholarly production. This perspective serves as a reference for comprehending the way historians construct our access to the knowledge of the past to increase our understanding not only of history, but importantly, of the writing of history.

Continue reading “Biography, vol. 29, no. 3 (2006)”

Editors’ Note, p. v

ARTICLES

Hsuan L. Hsu
Personality, Race, and Geopolitics in Joseph Heco’s Narrative of a Japanese, p. 273
Joseph Heco, a Japanese castaway who spent the 1850s working and studying in the US, played a significant role as translator, entrepreneur, and advisor after returning to Japan. This article examines the circum-Pacific contexts and stylistic idiosyncrasies of Heco’s autobiographical Narrative of a Japanese, arguing that its formal flaws reflect disjunctions between the conventions of equality that underwrite Western autobiography and the uneven conditions governing Japan’s forced modernization.

Continue reading “Biography, vol. 29, no. 2 (2006)”

SPECIAL ISSUE: Self-Projection and Autobiography in Film

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

Linda Haverty Rugg
Keaton’s Leap: Self-Projection and Autobiography in Film, p. v
In exploring what we are talking about when we talk about a film as the self-projection of a filmmaker, this introduction suggests film’s potential for not only recrafting the act of self-representation, but also for examining the nature of selfhood and its construction, as the very impossibility of cinematic autobiography aids in the discovery of a more implicated, complex, and unrepresentable subject.

Continue reading “Biography, vol. 29, no. 1 (2006): Self-Projection and Autobiography in Film”

Editors’ Note, p. iii

ARTICLES

Eugene Stelzig
A Cultural Tourist in Romantic Germany: Henry Crabb Robinson as Nineteenth-Century Life Writer, p. 515
Henry Crabb Robinson is mostly remembered for having cultivated the acquaintance of many of the leading writers of his time in Germany and England, and for his value as a source of historical information about his better known peers. This article argues that despite the fact that Robinson never completed his Reminiscences, his letters, diaries, journals, and other writing indicate that he deserves to be considered an important nineteenth century autobiographer.

Continue reading “Biography, vol. 28, no. 4 (2005)”

Editors’ Note, p. iii

ARTICLES

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.

Continue reading “Biography, vol. 28, no. 3 (2005)”

Editors’ Note, p. v

ARTICLES

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.

Continue reading “Biography, vol. 28, no. 2 (2005)”

SPECIAL ISSUE: Inhabiting Multiple Worlds: Auto/Biography in an (Anti-)Global Age

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

David 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

ARTICLES

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.

Continue reading “Biography, vol. 27, no. 4 (2006)”