{"title":"Disability and Life Writing in Post-Independence Ireland by Elizabeth Grubgeld (review)","authors":"Muireann Leech","doi":"10.1353/bio.2021.0039","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/bio.2021.0039","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45158,"journal":{"name":"BIOGRAPHY-AN INTERDISCIPLINARY QUARTERLY","volume":"44 1","pages":"638 - 642"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-06-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44283849","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Remembering Migration: Oral Histories and Heritage in Australia ed. by Kate Darian-Smith and Paula Hamilton (review)","authors":"Mary Tomsic","doi":"10.1353/bio.2021.0033","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/bio.2021.0033","url":null,"abstract":"Astrid Rasch is Associate Professor of English at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Her research examines memory culture at the end of the British Empire with a particular focus on memoirs from Zimbabwe, Australia, and the Caribbean, and postimperial memory politics in contemporary Britain. She is editor of the anthologies Life Writing After Empire (Routledge, 2017), Embers of Empire in Brexit Britain (with Stuart Ward, Bloomsbury, 2019), and a special issue of Journal of Southern African Studies called “Writing Repression in Zimbabwe” (with Minna Niemi and Jocelyn Alexander, 2021). She heads the initiative Literatures of Change: Culture and Politics in Southern Africa and the interdisciplinary social media project Trondheim Analytica. Her recent publications appear in History & Memory, Journal of Postcolonial and Commonwealth Studies, Journal of Southern African Studies, and Life Writing. She is currently working on a book project on post-imperial autobiographies with the working title Autobiography After Empire: Individual and Cultural Memory in Dialogue.","PeriodicalId":45158,"journal":{"name":"BIOGRAPHY-AN INTERDISCIPLINARY QUARTERLY","volume":"44 1","pages":"661 - 664"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-06-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42238770","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Auto/Biography across the Americas: Transnational Themes in Life Writing ed. by Ricia Anne Chansky (review)","authors":"Theresa A. Kulbaga","doi":"10.1353/bio.2021.0032","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/bio.2021.0032","url":null,"abstract":"The 2012 season of the popular reality television show Canada Reads—a competition that purports to select one book that all Canadians should read—featured three memoirs. The series follows a typical competition format: books are nominated by viewers, and their merits are subsequently debated on the show by celebrities, with one book per episode voted off until the “winner” remains. The 2012 competition erupted into a particularly heated debate over two of the three finalists, when Anne-France Goldwater suggested that Marina Nemat’s Prisoner of Tehran was not strictly true and that Carmen Aguirre—author of the memoir Something Fierce, which eventually won the competition—was a terrorist. As Julie Rak argues in her contribution to the edited volume Auto/Biography Across the Americas: Transnational Themes in Life Writing, “Canada Reads stopped being a game-show about nationalist forms of reading and became the focus of a serious discussion about memoir, nationalism, and ethics,” ultimately highlighting “the status of memoir as a transnational product” (54, 57). Something fierce, indeed. The controversy tested readers’ and viewers’ assumptions about truth in memoir, the autobiographical pact, and corresponding legalistic readings of authenticity and witness, what should or can be said in public, and what kind of literature counts as Canadian literature. The controversy involves entangled questions about nation, identity, migration, belonging, and who has the cultural authority to decide what constitutes truth—issues central to Ricia Anne Chansky’s edited volume about “transnational themes in life writing.” In Auto/Biography Across the Americas, Chansky has collected twelve thought-provoking essays focusing on “points of connectivity” (4), linking life writing across the Americas. Chansky argues that these narratives are characterized broadly by two key themes: movement and belonging. More generally, she argues that auto/biography studies would benefit from centering theories, narratives, and disciplinary perspectives that destabilize nationalist frameworks for understanding literature and identity. As Chansky puts it,","PeriodicalId":45158,"journal":{"name":"BIOGRAPHY-AN INTERDISCIPLINARY QUARTERLY","volume":"44 1","pages":"652 - 655"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-06-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47848043","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"How to Read a Diary: Critical Contexts and Interpretive Strategies for 21st-Century Readers by Desirée Henderson (review)","authors":"Kathryn Carter","doi":"10.1353/bio.2021.0042","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/bio.2021.0042","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45158,"journal":{"name":"BIOGRAPHY-AN INTERDISCIPLINARY QUARTERLY","volume":"44 1","pages":"619 - 621"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-06-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44548602","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Transgenerational Memories of the Lager in Herta Müller's Autofiction","authors":"Szidonia Haragos","doi":"10.1353/bio.2021.0051","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/bio.2021.0051","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In this article, I look at contemporary German-Romanian author Herta Müller's use of autofiction from the point of view of minority memory discourse, expanding on the general critical reception of Müller's prose as the articulation of the traumas of Communist totalitarianism in Romania, and also directing attention to the multigenerational mnemonic structures of ethnic German history interrupting Müller's narratives. I trace a trajectory of Müller's interest in the officially repressed ethnic minority past and her exploration of the post-WWII deportations of ethnic Germans to labor camps in Ukraine and their forced relocation by the Romanian Communist regime to the Bărăgan Steppe, in the south of Romania. My analysis focuses on the recursive imagery of the lager (forced labor camp), of the young female inmate, and of the figure of the SS-father as the workings of postmemory. Through intermittent, direct, and oblique references, Müller articulates her own inherited past—in particular, her mother's five-year internment in the USSR. Ultimately, I situate Müller's autofiction within the broader postcommunist memorialization, signaling the absence of minority stories from the increasingly homogenized corpus of national remembering in East-Central Europe.","PeriodicalId":45158,"journal":{"name":"BIOGRAPHY-AN INTERDISCIPLINARY QUARTERLY","volume":"44 1","pages":"579 - 598"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-06-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44026954","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Writing Life Writing: Narrative, History, Autobiography by Paul John Eakin (review)","authors":"Sergio da Silva Barcellos","doi":"10.1353/bio.2021.0035","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/bio.2021.0035","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45158,"journal":{"name":"BIOGRAPHY-AN INTERDISCIPLINARY QUARTERLY","volume":"44 1","pages":"631 - 635"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-06-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42582648","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Modernism and Physical Illness: Sick Books by Peter Fifield (review)","authors":"Chloe R. Green","doi":"10.1353/bio.2021.0038","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/bio.2021.0038","url":null,"abstract":"Post-Independence Ireland on performance art open the thesis up to other arguments, suggesting other ways for scholars to investigate disability writing in Ireland. In conclusion, some rationale regarding text choice and positioning of texts within the chapters would make Grubgeld’s striking analyses stronger, but this is a minor complaint against a persuasive, passionate, and urgently needed book that combines close scholarly attention to detail with the potential activism at the heart of the project. Grubgeld outlines how Irish disability life writers’ main battle is not against the constraints of the body, but against the constraints and the mostly limited expectations imposed by society. Examining the lived experiences of disability, as outlined by the many texts examined in this monograph, demonstrates how capitalist structures cannot accommodate difference and vulnerability, instead creating and maintaining systemic inequality. As a lifewriting scholar, I found the history of disability activism fascinating. Particularly pertinent was the discussion of how having a different body could affect the style of literary engagement—this is especially so in the case of life writing, surely the most embodied form of writing.","PeriodicalId":45158,"journal":{"name":"BIOGRAPHY-AN INTERDISCIPLINARY QUARTERLY","volume":"44 1","pages":"642 - 645"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-06-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42242770","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"\"When I Accept All Changes\": Crafting, Expanding, and Exhausting the Auto/ Biographical in Sayed Kashua's Track Changes","authors":"Hiyem Cheurfa","doi":"10.1353/bio.2021.0031","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/bio.2021.0031","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article examines the interface of forms of auto/biographical writing and literary criticism, and how postcolonial life writers draw attention to the exhaustion of the formal and structural conditions of the genre as conventionally established and understood. Looking at Palestinian author Sayed Kashua's Track Changes (2020), I investigate how life writers draw attention to issues involved in writing and reading auto/biography, such as form, truth-telling, and referentiality, and I interrogate the labor involved in life writing and the subjective and shifting role of the auto/biographer in crafting, expanding, and exhausting the genre in a way that reflects political and cultural identities of postcolonial subjects.","PeriodicalId":45158,"journal":{"name":"BIOGRAPHY-AN INTERDISCIPLINARY QUARTERLY","volume":"44 1","pages":"599 - 618"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-06-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43833635","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}