Search results for "life writing"
showing 3 items of 13 documents
Last Letters
2008
This collection of essays is devoted to last letters: letters sent - or not - to sever a relationship, to mark the end of a phase in one's life, or letters written by people about to be executed or commit suicide just before their deaths. Conversely, some of the letters analysed are fictional, and still other forms of texts, such as poems, are considered ultimate messages by the authors of the articles. By focussing on various forms of last letters, the contributors aim to define the influence of the epistolary context on endings and to provide an original approach to closure.
Writing Oneself into Someone Else’s Story – Experiments With Identity And Speculative Life Writing in Twilight Fan Fiction
2015
Fan fiction offers rich data to explore readers’ understanding of gendered discourses informing the narrative construction of fictional and real-life identities. This paper focuses on gender identity construction in self-insertion fan fiction texts – stories that involve avatars of fan writers – based on Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight novels. Self-insertion fan fiction stories can be considered a form of life writing where authors play with their identity in a virtual context in texts that mix documentary elements and fiction; a combination that is here termed as speculative life writing. While earlier studies have discussed self-insertion fan fiction as a potentially empowering form of resista…
Illness Narrative and Self-Help Culture – Self-Help Writing on Age-Related Infertility
2014
Both self-help books and illness narratives are motivated by an impulse to overcome a crisis and, simultaneously, to help others who suffer from similar conditions. In doing so, authors of self-help and illness narratives move in between polar opposites: they have both individual and collective motives, they have a desire to overcome uncertainty and achieve control and they negotiate the authority of experience versus the authority of expertise. This paper has two objectives: (1) It describes the intersections of illness life writing and self-help culture and traces the thematic, cultural and historical similarities. (2) It analyzes a selection of four autobiographical, U.S.-American self-h…