Marlene Kadar, Susanna Egan

Tracing the Autobiographical

Herausgeber: Warley, Linda; Perreault, Jeanne

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

The essays in Tracing the Autobiographical work with the literatures of several nations to reveal the intersections of broad agendas (for example, national ones) with the personal, the private, and the individual. Attending to ethics, exile, tyranny, and hope, the contributors listen for echoes and murmurs as well as authoritative declarations. They also watch for the appearance of auto/biography in unexpected places, tracing patterns from materials that have been left behind. Many of the essays return to the question of text or traces of text, demonstrating that the language of autobiography, as well as the textualized identities of individual persons, can be traced in multiple media and sometimes unlikely documents, each of which requires close textual examination. These "unlikely documents" include a deportation list, an art exhibit, reality TV, Web sites and chat rooms, architectural spaces, and government memos, as well as the more familiar literary genres-a play, the long poem, or the short story. Interdisciplinary in scope and contemporary in outlook, Tracing the Autobiographical is a welcome addition to autobiography scholarship, focusing on non-traditional genres and on the importance of location and place in life writing. Read the chapter "Gender, Nation, and Self-Narration: Three Generations of Dayan Women in Palestine/Israel" by Bina Freiwald on the Concordia University Library Spectrum Research Repository website.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
• Seitenzahl: 288
• Erscheinungstermin: 27. Mai 2005
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 229mm x 152mm x 18mm
• Gewicht: 454g
• ISBN-13: 9780889204768
• ISBN-10: 0889204764
• Artikelnr.: 42341188

Autorenporträt

Marlene Kadar is an associate professor in humanities and women's studies at York University, and the former director of the graduate programme in interdisciplinary studies.

Inhaltsangabe

Table of Contents for Tracing the Autobiographical, edited by Marlene
Kadar, Linda Warley, Jeanne Perreault, and Susanna Egan
Introduction: Tracing the Autobiographical: Unlikely Documents, Unexpected
Places Jeanne Perrreault and Marlene Kadar
Katie.com: My Story: Memoir Writing, the Internet and Embodied Discursive
Agency Helen M. Buss
Reading the Autobiographical in Personal Home Pages Linda Warley
Reality TV Has Spoken: Auto/biography Matters Gabriele Helms
Performing the Auto/biographical Pact: Towards a Theory of Identity in
Performance Sherrill Grace
Domestic Space and the Idea of Home in Auto/biographical Practices Kathy
Mezei
The Shifting Grounds of Exile and Home in Daphne Marlatt's Steveston
Susanna Egan
Law Stories as Life Stories: Jeanette Lavell, Yvonne Bédard and Halfbreed
Cheryl Suzack
Muriel Rukeyser: Egodocuments and the Ethics of Propaganda Jeanne
Perreault
Gender Nation and Self-Narration: Three Generations of Dayan Women in
Palestine/Israel Bina Toledo Freiwald
Giving Pain a Place in the World Aboriginal Women's Bodies in Australian
Stolen Generation Autobiographical Narratives Christine Crowe
Circular Journeys and Glass Bridges: The Geography of Postmemory Adrienne
Kertzer
The Devouring: Traces of Roma in the Holocaust: No Tattoo, Sterilized Body,
Gypsy Girl Marlene Kadar
The Authors and Their Essays
Acknowledgements
Works Cited
The Authors and Their Essays
Helen Buss is Professor Emeritus in the Department of English at the
University of Calgary and the author of numerous interdisciplinary studies
of autobiography. Buss's Mapping Our Selves (McGill-Queen's, 1993) won the
Gabrielle Roy Prize in 1994. Buss also edited (with Kadar) Working in
Women's Archives in 2001; as Margaret Clarke she has published novels,
short stories, and poetry. Buss's article, "Katie.com: My Story: Memoir
Writing, the Internet, and Embodied Discursive Agency", analyzes the young
adult "cyberself" of Katherine Tarbox as an autobiographical script that
has consequences for her development as a young woman. Using a feminist
autocritical method, Buss explores Katie's growing agency-from victim to
scapegoat to survivor. The stages of Katie's growth are revealed in the
form of the memoir and ultimately in her uses of the Internet.
Christine Crowe is Head of Credit Studies, Continuing Education, at the
University of Regina. She teaches and researches in the area of Canadian
and Australian Aboriginal autobiographical narratives and theories. She
also works in the area of Aboriginal student retention and factors
affecting first-year Aboriginal student success. Crowe's paper, "Giving
Pain a Place in the World: Australian Stolen Generations Autobiographical
Narratives", considers the body as a tool for opening political and
dialogic space, and explores how maimed and tortured bodies have been
represented in Australian Aboriginal women's autobiographical narratives.
Crowe also discusses Stolen Generation autobiographies as a way to achieve
political change.
Susanna Egan is Professor in the Department of English at the University of
British Columbia. She has published extensively on autobiography, her most
recent monograph being Mirror Talk: Genres of Crisis in Contemporary
Autobiography (University of North Carolina Press, 1999). She is currently
working on problems of imposture in autobiography. Egan's paper, "The
Shifting Grounds of Exile and Home in Daphne Marlatt's Steveston", focuses
on Daphne Marlatt's long-poem cycle, Steveston, the fishing community at
the mouth of the Fraser River just south of Vancouver. The poem gives rise
to questions about Marlatt's autobiographical narration of exile and home.
As an immigrant to Canada from Australia and Malaysia, Marlatt situates
herself in this fishing community to which Japanese immigrants came from
the end of the nineteenth century, expecting to return home, but from which
they were removed for internment during WWII. Egan illustrates how
Marlatt's attention to the constant movement of people and water and fish
includes the movement of land and of horizons, so that the migrant situates
herself in a shared impermanence that she defines in terms of particular
place.
Bina Toledo Freiwald is Associate Professor of English at Concordia
University. Her areas of teaching and research include critical theory,
women's writing, auto/biography and identity discourses, and Canadian
literature. Recent publications include: "Nation and Self-Narration: A View
from Québec/Quebec", Canadian Literature 172 (Spring 2002); "Translational
and Trans/national Crossings: French-American Feminist Mis/Dis/
Connections", Works and Days 20.1&2 (Spring/Fall 2002). Approaching
life-narratives as privileged sites for both the construction and
interrogation of the nation, Freiwald's essay, "Gender, Nation, and Self-
Narration: Three Generations of Dayan Women in Palestine/Israel", examines
the auto/biographical writings of three women. These writings represent
three generations of one of Israel's most public families, and offer
insights into the making of the imagined community that is present-day
Israel.
Sherrill Grace is Professor of English at the University of British
Columbia, where she holds the Brenda and David McLean Chair in Canadian
Studies, 2003-05, and is a Distinguished University Scholar. She has
published widely on twentieth-century literature and Canadian culture, with
books on Expressionism, Margaret Atwood, and Malcolm Lowry. Her most recent
books are Canada and the Idea of North (2001) and Performing National
Identities: International Perspectives on Contemporary Canadian Theatre,
coedited with A.R. Glaap. Grace's paper, "Performing the Auto/Biographical
Pact: Towards a Theory of Identity in Performance", explores some of the
challenges faced by playwrights who create autobiographical plays. Drawing
on recent theories of autobiography, Grace develops a theory of
autobiography-in-performance and suggests how theatre practice differs from
other autobiographical practices.
At the time of her death from cancer on December 31, 2004, in Vancouver,
Gabrielle Helms was Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the
University of British Columbia, where she taught courses and conducted
research in the fields of Canadian literature and culture and
auto/biography studies. She is the author of Challenging Canada: Dialogism
and Narrative Techniques in Canadian Novels (McGill-Queen's 2003), and
co-editor (with Susanna Egan) of two special issues of the scholarly
journals Canadian Literature (2002) and biography (2001). She has published
several essays on life writing and Canadian literature and contributed to
reference works such as the Encyclopedia of Life Writing and the Cambridge
Companion to Life Writing. In "Reality TV Has Spoken: Auto/biography
Matters" Helms demonstrates what critics of autobiography can bring to
debates about the proliferation and popularity of reality television shows
such as Survivor and Big Brother. She examines how these shows draw on
familiar strategies and discourses of auto/biography-such as the
autobiographical pact, the confession, the diary, and the crisis-resolution
plotand she considers what these shows can reveal about contemporary modes
of self-representation.
Marlene Kadar is Associate Professor in Humanities and Women's Studies at
York University, and the former director of the Graduate Programme in
Interdisciplinary Studies. Her Essays on Life Writing: From Genre to
Critical Practice (UTP 1992) won the Gabrielle Roy Prize in 1993. Kadar's
research interests include the politics of life writing, including survivor
narratives; the construction of privilege and knowledge in women's life
writing; and Hungarian and Romani auto/biography in historical accounts,
biographical traces, and fragments. Kadar's essay, "The Devouring: Traces
of Roma in the Holocaust: No Tattoo, Sterilized Body, Gypsy Girl", examines
three troubling images in order to more fully appreciate the power of
autobiographical traces and fragments in historical memory, especially in
relation to the experience of Roma in the Porrajmos.
Adrienne Kertzer is Professor of English at the University of Calgary. Her
book, My Mother's Voice: Children, Literature, and the Holocaust (Broadview
Press, 2002), won the Canadian Jewish Book Award for scholarship on a
Jewish subject. Her essay, "Fugitive Pieces: Listening as a Holocaust
Survivor's Child", won the F.E.L. Priestley Prize. Forthcoming essays
include "The Problem of Childhood, Children's Literature, and Holocaust
Representation", in Teaching the Representation of the Holocaust, ed.
Marianne Hirsch and Irene Kacandes, MLA series Options for Teaching, and
the entry on "Holocaust Literature for Children" in the Oxford Encyclopedia
of Children's Literature, ed. Jack Zipes, Oxford UP. The author of numerous
essays on Holocaust literature and children's literature, she is currently
working on comedy and representations of trauma. Kertzer's essay, "Circular
Journeys and Glass Bridges: The Geography of Postmemory", constructs a map
of postmemory, one whose coordinates position it temporally within the
second generation, and representationally within the discourse of adult
texts. Asking numerous locational questions, it asserts that postmemory's
geography is a map that we rarely share with children, that the
representation of memory in children's books is very different from the
representation of postmemory in adult texts.
Kathy Mezei is Professor in the Humanities and English Departments at Simon
Fraser University. Her research interests are Canadian literature, Quebec
literature and translation, modern British fiction, Virginia Woolf, and
feminist literary criticism. Recently she has guest-edited a special issue
of BC Studies (winter 2003/04) and a special forum of Signs (Spring 2002).
Mezei's essay, "Domestic Space and the Idea of Home in Auto/biographical
Practices", examines how domestic spaces-houses and gardens-and the
detritus of domestic life, along with everyday objects and rituals,
function as structural and thematic devices in visual and literary
representations, from photography to memoirs by Mary Gordon and Dionne
Brand.
Jeanne Perreault is Professor in the Department of English at the
University of Calgary. She has published widely in the fields of American
women's writing, theories of subjectivity, race and gender, and Native
Canadian and American literature.She is the author of Writing Selves:
Contemporary Feminist Autography, and "Imagining Sisterhood, Again" for a
special issue of Prose Studies, edited by Cynthia Huff. Perreault's essay,
"Muriel Rukeyser: Egodocuments and the Ethics of Propaganda", examines the
unpublished materials Muriel Rukeyser produced during her period as a
propagandist in the Office of War Information. Perreault argues that these
papers can be read as "egodocuments" or life-writings, asserting Rukeyser's
deeply held ethical and poetic sense of self.
Cheryl Suzack is Assistant Professor of Native literatures in the
Department of English at the University of Alberta. She has edited the
critical edition of In Search of April Raintree and is at work on a
teaching edition of Maria Campbell's Halfbreed. Her paper in this
collection represents a longer project that explores the relationship
between law and literature and the representation of Aboriginal/indigenous
peoples as juridical subjects. Suzack's essay, "Law Stories as Life
Stories: Jeanette Lavell, Yvonne Bédard, and Halfbreed", begins by
discussing the problematics of representation for Aboriginal women who have
sought access to legal intervention through the courts. It explores how
court cases assert a raced subjectivity for Aboriginal peoples that informs
the logic of the court's decision-making process. Next, it analyzes how
this legal context impinges on literary/critical debates about the politics
of Aboriginal womens writing to illustrate how literature critiques
state-imposed categories of race and gender subjectivity so as to assert
cross-cultural community affiliations. The essay focuses on the
reinstatement claims of Jeannette Lavell and Yvonne Bedard to offer an
alternative social narrative of Aboriginal women's agency in relation to
the politics of gender identity articulated through Maria Campbell's
Halfbreed.
Linda Warley is Associate Professor in the Department of English Language
and Literature at the University of Waterloo. She has published widely on
Canadian, Native, and postcolonial autobiographies and is currently writing
a book about twentieth-century autobiographical works, in print and
Internet genres, created by "ordinary" Canadians. In "Reading the
Autobiographical in Personal Home Pages" Linda Warley brings the methods of
literary studies and new media studies together in order to conduct a close
analysis of one academic's personal home page. She examines how particular
design choices shape a "self" that at times conforms to familiar modes of
self-representation and sometimes challenges them. The essay models one
approach to analyzing multimodal autobiographical texts that are published
online.