Category: Biography

Editor’s Note, p. v

ARTICLES

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.

Continue reading “Biography, vol. 27, no. 3 (2004)”

Editor’s Note, p. iii

ARTICLES

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.

Continue reading “Biography, vol. 27, no. 2 (2004)”

SPECIAL ISSUE: Personal Effects

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

Cynthia 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

ARTICLES

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.

Continue reading “Biography, vol. 26, no. 4 (2003)”

Editor’s Note, p. iv

ARTICLES

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.

Continue reading “Biography, vol. 26, no. 3 (2003)”

Editor’s Note, p. iii

ARTICLES

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.

Continue reading “Biography, vol. 26, no. 2 (2003)”

SPECIAL ISSUE: Online Lives

Editor’s Introduction, p. v

ARTICLES

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

ARTICLES

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.

Continue reading “Biography, vol. 25, no. 4 (2002)”

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)”