Search results for "Life writing"

Living autobiographically: Concepts of aging and artistic expression in painting and modern dance.

2016

This article discusses the ways in which artists have incorporated or failed to incorporate the aging process of their bodies into their art. Using Russian ballet dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov and the French painter Claude Monet as cases in point, we explore situations in which physical changes brought about by aging compromises artists' ability to engage with their artistic medium. Connecting Monet's oeuvre and Baryshnikov's dance performances to life writing accounts, we draw on John Paul Eakin's concept of "living autobiographically": In this vein, life writing research does not only have to take into account concepts of identity as they emerge from life writing narratives, but it also need…

Kult św. Barbary na Górnym Śląsku na tle europejskim

2019

Social Commentary as Biographical Work: Post-Communist Autobiographies in Latvia

2010

(2010). Social Commentary as Biographical Work: Post-Communist Autobiographies in Latvia. a/b: Auto/Biography Studies: Vol. 25, The Work of Life Writing, pp. 249-263.

Life Writing in and beyond the Anglophone World

2017

Life writing and life-writing studies today seem to be closely connected to people and institutions in Anglophone countries, more specifically in the classical countries of immigration: America, Ca...

Autobiographical Ecocritical Practices and Academic Environmental Life Writing: John Elder, Ian Marshall, and Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands

2011

As ecocriticism emerged as a distinct discourse in literary and cultural studies in North America and in Great Britain in the late 1980s and early 1990s, many scholars working in this burgeoning field were compelled to reconsider the viability of contemporary critical and theoretical frameworks and tried to establish new analytical paradigms that would be appropriate for ‘the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment’ (Glotfelty xviii). In a 1994 proposal for the future direction of the increasingly interdisciplinary and institutionalized field, influential first-generation ecocritic Scott Slovic urged his peers to practice narrative scholarship, that is, to …

Let the countdown begin — Aging experiences of young adults in countdown blogs

2012

Abstract This paper examines a particular blog phenomenon that has not yet received much attention: Countdown blogs which are written before a significant birthday (in this paper, it is the thirtieth birthday). The bloggers fill the remaining time, often a year, with the accomplishment of particular tasks, reflections on their lives or photo projects. In their blogs, the young adults demonstrate an age awareness that is often overlooked in aging studies. The paper argues that young adults use countdown blogs to cope with their aging experiences and, in doing so, they apply a particular economic rhetoric and emerge as entrepreneurs of themselves – an identity concept that Foucault presented …

Diversity and Life Writing in the Transnational Classroom

2018

For this chapter, Alfred Hornung locates the origin of Germany’s diversity studies in the postwar era, during which Germany experienced gradual transculturation, especially due to the presence of African American soldiers, but also due to the appearance of American cultures in the media, the introduction of American studies in German universities, and the teaching of multi-ethnic authors in American literature courses. On the basis of international pedagogical experience, Hornung demonstrates that life writing lends itself particularly well to the representation and recognition of diversity and suggests how inclusion can be furthered. The focus of this chapter’s transnational classroom comp…

Return Visits: The European Background of Transcultural Life Writing

2013

In this article I read autobiographies by East Europeans who immigrated to Canada in connection with the Second World War as examples of transcultural life writing. My focus on the representation of return visits of these loyal Canadian citizens to their country of origin after 1989 reveals the underlying intention of relating the experience of life in a multicultural democratic society to the emergence of a new political consciousness in Eastern Europe. In my analysis I distinguish four types of concerns which try to bridge the past of their childhood experiences with the formation of a transcultural life in the 21st century: 1. Anna Porter’s return visit to Hungary for family reunion and …

“How Did Child of Light Save Me?” Engagement with a Children’s Multimodal Game Narrative as Adult Play and Self-Therapy

2021

This chapter investigates the online reception of the Canadian video game Child of Light (Ubisoft, Child of Light. Montreal: Ubisoft Studios. Video Game, 2014) as a space of encounter between imaginary childhoods and experienced adulthoods. Child of Light is a well-selling video game involving a conventional fairy-tale narrative about a young princess Aurora battling against darkness with a party of companions. The game contains narrative elements typical of children’s stories but has been popular among adult players. The focus of this chapter is on a specific case study: an adult male professional game reviewer and his publicly shared online life narrative, in which he discusses his real-l…

"Lo specchio della terra": Down Below e le visioni fantasmagoriche di Leonora Carrington

2020

This article focuses on the phantasmagorical vision that can be observed in Leonora Carrington’s memoir Down Below, a work which mingles autobiography with some elements of fiction to tell about the author’s experience of mental disorder during World War II. The work is disseminated with hermetic messages animated by animal transfigurations of human beings and symbolic descriptions of space which are analysed here with the aim to restore literary value to the conscious phantasmagorical representation of this life experience. The memoir is here considered as an admirable surrealist narration of the young artist’s resistance towards family and social constraints. The rich visual language used…