Category: Biography

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”

Editor’s Note, p. iii

ARTICLES

Specimen Daze: Whitman’s Photobiography, p. 477
Sean Meehan
Whitman’s use of photography throughout his career plays a key role in the conception of his work’s autobiographical nature. Focusing on and around his prose autobiography Specimen Days (1882), this essay argues that Whitman incorporates photography (in both image and word) to produce a faithful version of his autobiography, but at the same time, that Whitman writes with an understanding of the dy-namic play of the process of photographic representation that serves to question the accuracy and completion presumed in photographs. In Specimen Days, Whitman thus uses photography against its own positivist grain, provoking the recognition of the relationship between the positive identity represented and the means of its representation.

Continue reading “Biography, vol. 22, no. 4 (1999)”

Editor’s Note, p. iii

ARTICLES

Virginia Woolf, Leslie Stephen, Julia Margaret Cameron, and the Prince of Abyssinia: An Inquiry into Certain Colonialist Representations, p. 323
Panthea Reid

Only a fragment of Virginia Woolf’s 1940 account of the 1910 “Dreadnought Hoax” has survived. Her brother Adrian Stephen has little to say about her involvement. Thus her masquerade as a prince of Abyssinia has been open to wildly varied readings. However, a chain of connections between the political journalism of her father, Leslie Stephen, the photography of her great-aunt, Julia Margaret Cameron, nineteenth-century Anglo-Abyssinian history, and Virginia’s 1910 work on her first novel, The Voyage Out, provides documentary evidence for the reasons behind her disguise. This evidence suggests that Virginia was aware of ways in which Abyssinians had been well- and mis-represented in words and images (some of which are reproduced here). The Abyssinian disguise which she and others adopted, then, can be read as a protest against colonialist stereotypes of Africans and as an expression of solidarity with a princely victim of English imperialism.

Continue reading “Biography, vol. 22, no. 3 (1999)”

Editor’s Note, p. iii

ARTICLES

Getting Modern: The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, p. 177
Carolyn A. Barros

With The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein radically alters the history of autobiography. Stein effects the shift to modernist autobiography by eschewing the romantic conception of the self—a set of feelings and internal motives—to construct herself as a modernist work of art, a collage of multiple identities, a multi-perspectival “Master-piece.”

Continue reading “Biography, vol. 22, no. 2 (1999)”

Special Issue: Festschrift for George Simson

Editors’ Note: Essays in Honor of George Simson, p. iii

ARTICLES

What I Know of George Simson: Scrappy Notes for a Distant Biography of the Founder of Biography, p. 1
Gabriel Merle

Through retracing the history of a relationship which began by a community of interests quickly developing into friendship, the author outlines the portrait of a man of strong convictions, who, he feels, has always been, as a private person, a scholar, and a citizen, a faithful servant to truth, freedom, and justice.

Continue reading “Biography, vol. 22, no. 1 (1999): Festschrift for George Simson”

Editor’s Note, p. iii

ARTICLES

Raising Adam: Ethnicity, Disability, and the Ethics of Life Writing in Michael Dorris’s The Broken Cord, pp. 421-444
G. Thomas Couser

Michael Dorris’s The Broken Cord (1989) combines elements of several life writing genres–for example, Native American autobiography, autoethnography, parental memoir, and disability memoir. Its mixture of genres raises questions about the ethics of parental life writing and the representation of people with disabilities. Ultimately, despite its reformist intentions, the book echoes rather than revises traditional inscriptions of race and disability.

Continue reading “Biography, vol. 21, no. 4 (1998)”