{"title":"Ina Batzke, Lea Spinoza Garrido and Linda M. Hess (eds.), Life Writing in the Posthuman Anthropocene","authors":"Inés García","doi":"10.21827/ejlw.12.41393","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21827/ejlw.12.41393","url":null,"abstract":"Life Writing in the Posthuman Anthropocene (2022) belongs to the Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, an interdisciplinary series edited by Clare Brant and Max Saunders that engages life writing with critical thinking across disciplines. Situated within the environmental humanities, this volume examines a variety of life writing in the context of the Anthropocene. It builds the argument that life writing has a critical role in contesting human self-centredness which has caused the ecological damage that continues to define the Anthropocene. As such, the book rests on a paradox: how can a genre defined by the figure of a ‘human self’ contribute to dismantling power structures, such as speciesism, without perpetuating these damaging structures of domination? Seven chapters and one interview emphasise that the Anthropocene has been a discursively produced narrative of fatal material consequences; for this reason, minimising and hopefully restoring some ecological damage requires that we find more equal and responsible ways of relating to non-human life forms and the environment in language.","PeriodicalId":106040,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Life Writing","volume":" 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138994733","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Sleep ‘self help’ books: autobiographical evaluations and personal entanglements with reading professional advice books on young children’s sleep. An exploration of the journey through early parenting and managing sleep through two mothers-as-researchers perspectives.","authors":"Lexie Scherer, A. Norman","doi":"10.21827/ejlw.12.38836","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21827/ejlw.12.38836","url":null,"abstract":"This article reports on two researchers’ experiences of navigating children’s night-time sleep, in relation to reading best-selling parenting books, published by professionals in the UK in the last 20 years. We felt we were ‘getting it wrong’ where we so badly wanted to ‘get it right’ for our children, because they did not sleep like the books described: silent, solitary, separate and for 12 uninterrupted night-time hours. It was also not possible to ‘read’ the advice without owning our own positionality: in particular our classed, professional identities. Perhaps this is always the case in research, and we should ‘treat our bias as a resource’ as seminal life history work urges. We found we could not but take the advice personally, which tended to focus on behaviour-orientated strategies within the routines and rituals around night-time sleep. We harness an under-studied approach within Early Childhood research, Reader-Response theory, which argues reading is a transaction; the reader brings personal context to the text at the same time as gleaning information from it. Seeing reading as a transaction helps us understand how our identities feed into our reading: our readings shape, but also are shaped by our contexts.","PeriodicalId":106040,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Life Writing","volume":"108 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131464399","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Dan P. McAdams, The Strange Case of Donald J. Trump. A Psychological Reckoning","authors":"S. Moenandar","doi":"10.21827/ejlw.12.41043","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21827/ejlw.12.41043","url":null,"abstract":"On 21 November 2022, to nobody’s surprise, Donald J. Trump announced he would seek to become the Republican candidate for the 2024 US Presidential elections – and, both among those who have officially announced to be doing the same, as well as those who are likely to do so, his chances of securing the nomination are significant. The current legal investigations have done nothing to change that. Given that he is then expected to run against incumbent Democratic president Joe Biden, whose popularity has been diminished over the past few years, Trump stands a real chance to be elected president of the United States of America a second time. Thus, Dan P. McAdams’s The Strange Case of Donald J. Trump, written and published in the context of the 2020 presidential elections as an attempt to offer, as the book’s subtitle phrases it, ‘a psychological reckoning’ with the highly controversial 45th US president, remains highly relevant.","PeriodicalId":106040,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Life Writing","volume":"25 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115523751","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Li Gerhalter, Tagebücher als Quellen: Forschungsfelder und Sammlungen seit 1800","authors":"V. Depkat","doi":"10.21827/ejlw.12.41105","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21827/ejlw.12.41105","url":null,"abstract":"Focusing on Germany and Austria from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, this erudite and thorough study aims at historicizing the use of diaries as scholarly evidence and historical sources in the academic disciplines of pedagogy and early childhood research, youth psychology, and the new cultural history emerging in the 1980s. For each of these disciplines, Li Gerhalter, the long-time curator and now director of the ‘Sammlung Frauennachlässe’ at the University of Vienna (https://sfn.univie.ac.at/hauptmenue/bestand/), traces whose diaries were collected, when, by whom, for which scholarly purposes, and to what effect for the formation and transformation of the respective academic discipline under scrutiny. In addition, the individual chapters shed light on the donors of diaries, the culture and practices of diary writing, and the different communicative and epistemological functions that diaries had for their writers and researchers.","PeriodicalId":106040,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Life Writing","volume":"1990 11","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"113966370","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"War Triptych","authors":"Gabriele M. Linke","doi":"10.2307/j.ctv2n7qd7.11","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv2n7qd7.11","url":null,"abstract":"This three-part collection of personal memories was inspired by Otto Dix's triptych ‘The War’ (1929-1932). The horrors of war and presence of death Dix exposed in his painting form the implicit point of reference for three short stories of reconciliation in and after the Second World War. The three auto/biographical memories by and ‘as told to’ the author celebrate forgiveness and humaneness among ordinary people in and after times of war as the one way to survive and continue life after the pain and losses caused by war, which are not part of the stories. The condensed form of the triptych recalls Dix's painting as well as the sacredness of suffering and reconciliation as symbolized by conventional Crucifixion triptychs.","PeriodicalId":106040,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Life Writing","volume":"212 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123066223","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Future Imperfect: Memoir and the Family Photograph","authors":"Petra Rau","doi":"10.21827/ejlw.12.40987","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21827/ejlw.12.40987","url":null,"abstract":"In ‘The Future Imperfect’ Petra Rau reflects on the meaning of her mother’s narrowly averted attempt to discard the family photo albums, and on the function of the photo album as a retroactive personal narrative. The difficulty of reading family photographs that precede one’s own experience and recollection is the subject of the second part, an excerpt from the as yet unpublished family memoir Hinterland.","PeriodicalId":106040,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Life Writing","volume":"4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126832393","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Reflexive Autoethnographic Fragment: Epiphany in a Milkfloat","authors":"David Turner","doi":"10.21827/ejlw.12.39260","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21827/ejlw.12.39260","url":null,"abstract":"In 'A Reflexive Autoethnographic Fragment: Epiphany in a Milk Float', David Turner uses autoethnographic writing to begin to reflexively consider how his life history might have led him to an interest in a particular topic of study that he was about to embark on as part of research on the development of expertise in sports coaching, associated with a Professional Doctorate in Education course.","PeriodicalId":106040,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Life Writing","volume":"8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123375185","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Interstitial Living: Fragments towards an Ethics","authors":"Eric Daffron","doi":"10.21827/ejlw.11.37967","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21827/ejlw.11.37967","url":null,"abstract":"This work in autotheory documents my adoption of an interstitial lifestyle in 2021. I derived my project’s guiding concepts from Roland Barthes. After a foreword, which elucidates the project’s context, concepts, and genre, this piece turns to a series of fragments arranged by topic. Most of the fragments record my interstitial experiences or reflect on interstitial topics. In the margin are Barthes citations that inspired the project, a structural device borrowed from A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments and autotheory.","PeriodicalId":106040,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Life Writing","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129069130","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Remembering the American Queen: Aretha Franklin (1942-2018)","authors":"J. Watson","doi":"10.21827/ejlw.11.39594","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21827/ejlw.11.39594","url":null,"abstract":"In this relational vignette Watson recalls growing up in and around Detroit as Aretha Franklin and other great local singers, many with Motown, rose to prominence. Franklin’s style was informed not only by her childhood singing gospel songs in her father’s church but also by her musical passion and activist politics. Unable to attend any of the informal tributes in Detroit around Franklin’s memorial service because she was out of the country, Watson relates how a Berlin gathering became a spontaneous memorial to Franklin’s musical genius.","PeriodicalId":106040,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Life Writing","volume":"119 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114642063","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Marina Warner, Inventory of a Life Mislaid: An Unreliable Memoir","authors":"Souhir Zekri Masson","doi":"10.21827/ejlw.11.39337","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21827/ejlw.11.39337","url":null,"abstract":"In The Encyclopedia of Life Writing, Francis Russell Hart is quoted as having written that ‘[m]emoirs personalize history and historicize the personal … memoirs are about individuals,’ but they can reflect ‘an event, an era, an institution, a class identity’ (qtd. in Buss 595). This fits in perfectly with Marina Warner’s Inventory of A Life Mislaid: An Unreliable Memoir, her latest publication and most openly autobiographical one. On the one hand, crucial historical moments are personalized such as post-World-War II British neo-colonialism or ‘soft power’ in Egypt and the ensuing 1952 Cairo riots whose circumstances and consequences her parents, Emilia Terzulli and Esmond Warner, went through. On the other hand, Warner’s personal past, or rather her parents’ first meeting, wedding and various trips which transported them from Bari to London, then to a cosmopolitan post-war Cairo where the father opened a WH Smith bookshop, are historicized.","PeriodicalId":106040,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Life Writing","volume":"157 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122302730","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}