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Making a Narrative of Repetition: Diachronicity and the Second-Person Address in YouTube's Routine Videos Life Writing Pub Date : 2024-03-13 Veera Valta
This article seeks to explain the tellability of routine videos on YouTube. It examines two videos by two motivational videobloggers, Kalyn Nicholson and Aileen Xu, whose channels include several v...
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Handling Hazardous Biographical Materials: Dealing with Questionable Character Traits through Poetic Biography Life Writing Pub Date : 2024-03-06 Jessica L. Wilkinson
As a (poetic) biographer who has dedicated considerable time to wading through archives and other research materials, I have often found myself wanting my biographical subjects to reveal themselves...
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The Life and Death, and Life of William Mackay Life Writing Pub Date : 2024-03-06 Michael Titlestad
This essay traces my dedication, over two decades, to reconstructing the life of Captain William Mackay of the (English) East India Company. Mackay was second officer on an unseaworthy country ship...
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The Book, the Camera, and the Concept of Dust in Life Writing by Patti Smith Life Writing Pub Date : 2024-02-26 Teresa Bruś
This article maps out the relationship between language and objects in life writing by Patti Smith. It examines anchoring effects of books, images, and nameless small things and foregrounds how the...
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Imagining Gender in Biographical Fiction Life Writing Pub Date : 2024-02-19 Gay Lynch
Published in Life Writing (Ahead of Print, 2024)
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Field Culture in Unprecedented Times: Writing the Unexpected, Narrating the Future at a Virtual Conference Life Writing Pub Date : 2024-01-28 Kate Douglas, Kylie Cardell, Marina Deller, Emma Maguire, Shannon Sandford
We are colleagues and collaborators working in the field of English Literary Studies, broadly defined. This paper reflects on our collective encounters working as Life Writing scholars within the I...
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Traversing the (In)Visible Territory of Schizophrenia in HOAX Psychosis Blues: An Intersection of Life Writing and Graphic Medicine in Comics Life Writing Pub Date : 2024-01-03 Shefali, Preeti Puri
By closely reading Ravi Thornton’s graphic memoir, HOAX Psychosis Blues, as a testament to her brother Rob’s decade-long battle with schizophrenia, this article dwells on the intersection of life w...
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Our Bodies, Ourselves Translated into Brazilian Portuguese: A Study of the Impacts on the Translators Life Writing Pub Date : 2023-12-28 Érica Lima, Janine Pimentel
This paper aims to present the collaborative and volunteer translation project of the book Our Bodies, Ourselves into Brazilian Portuguese and to analyse the translators´ ontological narratives (Ba...
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Mathematics of Translation: Encounters with Literature’s Excess Interpretive Potential Life Writing Pub Date : 2023-12-28 Erin Nickalls
This article considers literary translators’ use of mathematical imagery to reject notions of discrete language systems in favour of a proliferative view of language variety. Drawing on research by...
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The Translation Memoir: An Introduction Life Writing Pub Date : 2023-12-28 Delphine Grass, Lily Robert-Foley
This introduction presents the frame and contents of this volume devoted to the translation memoir. The translation memoir is formed at the intersection of life writing and translation studies, in ...
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Inhospitable Conditions: Hospitality, Kinship and Complaint in Maureen Freely's Angry in Piraeus and Mireille Gansel's Translation as Transhumance (tr. Ros Schwartz) Life Writing Pub Date : 2023-12-28 Jen Calleja
This article examines hybrid life writing by literary translators that focuses on the interpersonal relationships between translators and other agents including authors and collaborators. Through a...
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Reading (Like) a Translator: The Sensory Life and Travel Writing of Danish Literary Translator Anne Marie Bjerg Life Writing Pub Date : 2023-12-28 Ida Klitgård
The hermeneutic similarities between translation and travelling have been widely debated in translation studies and travel writing, with scholars such as Cronin, Polezzi, Italiano, Simon and Bassne...
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Neutrality Affected: Negotiating the Promise of Empathy in Interpreters’ Memoirs Life Writing Pub Date : 2023-12-28 Yan Wu
As embodied agents of interlocuters in communicative encounters, professional interpreters use the narrated ‘I’ to tell the stories of others, while the narrating ‘I’, that is the interpreter’s per...
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Deux étés (1997): The (Auto)fiction of the French Translation of Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada or Ardor (1969) Life Writing Pub Date : 2023-12-28 Elsa Court
Focusing on a little-known autobiographical novel about the French translation of Vladimir Nabokov’s multilingual magnum opus, Ada or Ardor (1969), this paper discusses the use of autofiction as a ...
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Echolation as Modulation: A Case Study of Chus Pato and Erín Moure’s Secession/Insecession, Accompanied by a Fan Fiction of Moure’s Work More Generally Life Writing Pub Date : 2023-12-28 Lily Robert-Foley
This article takes a creative-critical approach to reading Erín Moure’s Secession/Insecession, a translation and echolation of Chus Pato Secesión, originally written in Galician. It subversively ad...
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Jhumpa Lahiri and the Translation Memoir: To Write and Exist Beyond the Mother Tongue Life Writing Pub Date : 2023-12-28 Benedetta Cutolo
In 2016, following the publication of her memoir, In Other Words, Pulitzer Prize author Jhumpa Lahiri announced her intention to abandon English to solely write in Italian. Six years later, having ...
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‘Expand’: From Sur les bouts de la langue and Traduire en féministe/s by Noémie Grunenwald Life Writing Pub Date : 2023-12-28 Translated by Lily Robert-Foley
The following text is an excerpted chapter from Noémie Grunenwald’s book Sur les bouts de la langue and Traduire en féministe/s, a translation memoir written in French and devoted to Grunenwald's r...
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Radical Realism, Autofictional Narratives and the Reinvention of the Novel Life Writing Pub Date : 2023-12-21 Tijana Przulj
Published in Life Writing (Ahead of Print, 2023)
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My Diary Diary Life Writing Pub Date : 2023-12-14 Laura Bissell
This project uses diary writing as a methodology for undertaking research into 11 diaries of women writers. Part autoethnography, part critical discussion, my diary diary charts a month of reading ...
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Wounded Poetry Hands: The Poetics of Agha Shahid Ali Life Writing Pub Date : 2023-12-05 Junaid Shah Shabir
This article traces how Agha Shahid Ali undergoes a paradigmatic shift from a postcolonial Indian poet to an (anti-colonial) Kashmiri-American poet. It opens with a detailed critical introduction t...
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Narrating Sexual Blackmail in Lebanon: A Present-Day Pathography Life Writing Pub Date : 2023-09-27 Sleiman El Hajj
An ongoing economic and financial meltdown, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the August 4, 2020 explosion of Beirut Port—since 2019, Lebanon has been assailed by a spiralling confluence of mutually exace...
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Theorising Lebano-Pathography: A Biographical Exploration of Medical-Cultural Pathologies Life Writing Pub Date : 2023-09-27 Sleiman El Hajj
To introduce the special issue on illness writing in Lebanon, I theorise Lebano-pathography as a dual, potentially adaptable and reusable, (i) narrative intervention (form/method) that does not dep...
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The Myth of ‘Wound’ Writing: The Multiple Surfaces of Jessica Au’s Cold Enough for Snow Life Writing Pub Date : 2023-09-18 Gretchen Shirm
The idea of writing from the wound is a pervasive concept in the discourse of writing, yet the relationship between language and trauma is a contradictory one. Writing ‘from’ the wound suggests a c...
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‘An Awakening of the Senses’: Reading Julia Child's My Life in France as Gastrography Life Writing Pub Date : 2023-09-05 Lucy O’Connor
ABSTRACT This paper explores the generic boundaries of Julia Child's My Life in France, and argues for its inclusion in non-fiction narrative food writing forms—variously termed food memoir, gastrography, and culinary autobiography, to name a few—typified by gastronomic literature. Food writing has been underpinned by a gendered philosophical framework that pits the (female-coded) domestic cookbook
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Couples: A Collective Life Life Writing Pub Date : 2023-09-03 Joe Moran
This creative-critical essay tells the collective life story of couples, by drawing together memoir and other texts (film, art, photography, biographical fragments) and social observation. It is in...
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Reflecting on Memory, Imagination and Place: Reading Janet Frame’s The Envoy from Mirror City Through a Cognitive Literary Lens Life Writing Pub Date : 2023-08-30 Merril Howie
Although Janet Frame’s oeuvre has attracted sustained critical attention, her autobiographical writing has sometimes been characterised as inferior to her ‘innovative, sophisticated, post-modern fi...
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A History of African American Autobiography Life Writing Pub Date : 2023-08-15 Heather Ostman
Published in Life Writing (Ahead of Print, 2023)
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True Lies and Short Takes: Assorted Life Writing Essays Life Writing Pub Date : 2023-07-20 Roger Porter
Published in Life Writing (Ahead of Print, 2023)
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The Man in the Mirror: Reflections on Dementia Caregiving in Lebanon Life Writing Pub Date : 2023-07-04 Nayiri Baboudjian Bouchakjian
In this article, I study the different expressions of grief that I experienced while taking care of my Father who lived with Alzheimer’s for over a decade, in Beirut, Lebanon. As his primary caregi...
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Fantasy and Dissimulation in the Memoirs of Getzel Zelikovits (1855–1926) Life Writing Pub Date : 2023-07-04 Rachel Mairs
The Yiddish-language memoirs of the journalist Getzel Zelikovits (1855–1926), published in New York in 1919–1920, present a version of his life that deviates considerably from the version one might...
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Intercultural Mediation in the Translation of the Self in Travel Writing: A Case Study of Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper Life Writing Pub Date : 2023-06-25 Pan Xie, Xiaoxiao Xin
Travel writing narrates travellers’ psychological development through mediation in the complex interplay between otherness and identity. Based on the notion that translation embraces personal exper...
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Ludwig Wittgenstein and Georg Henrik von Wright: An Unexpected Friendship Life Writing Pub Date : 2023-06-21 Päivi Kaipainen
Over a decade ago, when I studied in my dissertation the lives of three world-renowned philosophers, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Georg Henrik von Wright, my main sources were their p...
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The Photographer as Autobiographer Life Writing Pub Date : 2023-06-19 Merril Howie
Published in Life Writing (Ahead of Print, 2023)
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Writing Pretty: On Self-Cannibalism and Disfigured Tongues Life Writing Pub Date : 2023-06-14 Natacha Yazbeck
This essay brings to the fore a condition that afflicts the tongues of those of us attempting to speak: through bearing witness so that history will not forget us, we consume ourselves beyond recog...
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Individualism, Collectivism, and Identity Politics in Palestinian Life Writing Life Writing Pub Date : 2023-06-07 Eman Alasah
This article examines the tensions, (dis)continuities, and precariousness of postcolonial identities in the autobiographical writings of Palestinian authors Ghada Karmi and Raja Shehadeh. The quest...
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Metaphor in Illness Writing: Fight and Battle Reused Life Writing Pub Date : 2023-05-18 Richard Freadman
Published in Life Writing (Vol. 21, No. 2, 2024)
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I Want to Become: My (Own) Reference List Life Writing Pub Date : 2023-05-16 Dave Yan
Embarking upon my PhD journey as the Other at the age of 37, I soon became emotionally involved in dealing with the process of not knowing my becoming. Reading and writing, then, create the possibi...
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‘A Stranger in the City’: Selfhood, Community and Modes of (Un)belonging in Muhammad Iqbal’s Self-Portraitures Life Writing Pub Date : 2023-05-12 Saliha Shah
This paper examines Muhammad Iqbal’s self-portraiture as a stranger and shows how he frees the notion of strangerhood from its association with exile, migration, alienation or withdrawal from a com...
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No Longer a ‘Guy’, But a ‘Flaming-Hot Mess of a Queen’: The Role of Language in Contemporary Nonbinary Autobiographical Life Writing Life Writing Pub Date : 2023-05-12 Karolína Zlámalová
This article discusses the employment and role of language in selected contemporary Anglophone nonbinary life-writing narratives. Initially, it contextualises these works within the present-day non...
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Memoir and Respectable Femininity: Shirani A. Bandaranayake's Hold Me in Contempt Life Writing Pub Date : 2023-04-19 Kanchanakesi Warnapala
This paper is an exploration of Hold Me in Contempt: A Memoir by Shirani A. Bandaranayake, the first and only woman so far to have held the position of Chief justice in Sri Lanka, who was impeached...
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Survivor Memory and Rape Memoir: Chanel Miller’s Know My Name Life Writing Pub Date : 2023-04-05 Marta Fernández-Morales
The life-writing genre, and more specifically the memoir subgenre, are fertile ground for survivors of sexual violence wanting to share their plight and/or to raise awareness about rape. Chanel Mil...
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Life as Prime Minister: A Genre Study of Speeches Made by Australian Prime Ministers Following Leadership Spills Life Writing Pub Date : 2023-03-12 Rosemary Williamson, Lili Pâquet
ABSTRACT Between 2010 and 2018, four Australian prime ministers were removed from office outside of a federal election, by leadership spills initiated by their party colleagues. Each of the prime ministers—Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard, Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull—delivered a televised speech shortly after the leadership spill. The speeches provided an early opportunity, long before the preparation
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As Told by Herself: Women’s Childhood Autobiography, 1845–1969 Life Writing Pub Date : 2023-02-19 Valerie Sanders
Published in Life Writing (Vol. 21, No. 2, 2024)
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The Aesthetic of an Orphaned Memory: Journeying Across the ‘Lit-Up Stage’ of Hisham Matar's Siena Life Writing Pub Date : 2023-02-02 Norbert Bugeja
ABSTRACT This article discusses Hisham Matar's second work of memoir, A Month in Siena in terms of its complex, longer engagement with the disappearance of Matar's dissident father, its aftermath, and the son's own relation to his father's ultimate fate. Attempting to articulate what may be an unrealisable form of grief, Matar seeks to elicit from the spaces of the medieval Sienese Republic an aesthetic
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Writing Life Writing: Narrative, History, Autobiography Life Writing Pub Date : 2023-01-27 Jeremy D. Popkin
Published in Life Writing (Vol. 21, No. 2, 2024)
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Sickness of Separation: Reflections on Expatriation, Repatriation, and Motherhood Life Writing Pub Date : 2023-01-15 Nancy Falco Chedid
In this lived narrative, I revisit my youngest son’s dramatic departure from Lebanon to the US, hours before the Beirut Port explosion on 4 August 2020. Against the backdrop of the calamitous year ...
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Drink the Sea: Twenty Years of Walking and Falling in Beirut Life Writing Pub Date : 2023-01-05 Jehan Bseiso
In this autobiographical essay, I examine the layers of solace and disruption I experienced in 20 years of walking in Beirut, and also falling all over the city. I explore how my regular walks on t...
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How I Lost My Mother: A Story of Life, Care and Dying Life Writing Pub Date : 2023-01-04 Joan C. Tronto
Published in Life Writing (Vol. 21, No. 2, 2024)
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‘To You, Who May Find Yourself in This Story’: What a Baker’s Memoir Taught an Emerging Education Scholar Life Writing Pub Date : 2023-01-04 Amber Moore
This paper explores the ways in which pleasure-reading a Jackie Kai Ellis’ memoir, The Measure of my Powers: A Memoir of Food, Misery, and Paris turned into an intense exercise of critical reflecti...
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The Oxford History of Life Writing Vol VII: Postwar to Contemporary, 1945–2020 Life Writing Pub Date : 2022-12-16 Max Saunders
Published in Life Writing (Vol. 21, No. 1, 2024)
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Lives Beyond Borders: US Immigrant Women’s Life Writing, Nationality and Social Justice Life Writing Pub Date : 2022-12-15 Xuesheng Yuan
Published in Life Writing (Vol. 21, No. 1, 2024)
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Playing Tennis in Beirut: Sisterhood and Transnational Aches Life Writing Pub Date : 2022-12-11 Yasmine Shamma
Drawing on sibling literature and theory, this essay spotlights the aches of being a Lebanese expat, missing playing tennis with my sister in Beirut, and (literally) falling to a sports injury in E...
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Authenticity and Gender: Public Responses to Great War Memoirs by Nurses and Frontline Soldiers in Britain, France and Germany Life Writing Pub Date : 2022-12-11 Jerry Palmer
ABSTRACT Great War memoirs by both soldiers and nurses emphasise the role of eye-witness in establishing the authority of the account. This authority is acknowledged in the public response to these texts, which crosses both national and gender boundaries. However, the response is asymmetric between genders: soldiers were often blamed for insisting on the primacy of personal experience in their accounts
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Family History and Life Writing Life Writing Pub Date : 2022-12-07 Tanya Evans, Marian Lorrison
Published in Life Writing (Vol. 20, No. 1, 2023)
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Theodor Adorno and Life Writing in the Anthropocene Life Writing Pub Date : 2022-11-27 D. L. LeMahieu
ABSTRACT This essay argues for the relevance of Theodor Adorno to life writing in the Anthropocene. His view of instrumental reason predicted the despoliation of the earth. His own memoir, Minima Moralia, radically decentred the individual voice by proclaiming its hopeless entanglement in exchange values. His negative dialectics reconceived Cartesian Dualism and destabilised relational models of life
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Japan, the Ambiguous, and My Fragile, Complex and Evolving Self Life Writing Pub Date : 2022-11-16 Linus Hagström
ABSTRACT This essay takes literature laureate Kenzaburo Oe’s Nobel lecture from 1994, Japan, the Ambiguous, and Myself, as a point of departure for thinking about Japan, the ambiguous and how the already fragile and complex narrator that is I has evolved ambiguously over time in relation to a similarly ambiguous and changing imagination of Japan. Based on aikido practice—the narrator’s gateway to Japan—the
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Truman in Beirut: Journeying Through Fear and Immobility Life Writing Pub Date : 2022-11-11 Pia Maria Bou Doleh
After an incident at home leads to a ruptured tendon and forces me into immobility for four months – a period extended by the negligence and indifference of a starved medical system in Lebanon – I ...
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Scarred Skin and Wiggling Worms: What I Learned from my Eating Disorder Life Writing Pub Date : 2022-11-11 Jinane El Khoury
I was 36 years old when I was diagnosed with binge eating disorder, which was a shock. I was sitting in my dietician’s office, holding my newborn in my arms, expecting to receive the regular recomm...
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Fleeing Father Life Writing Pub Date : 2022-10-23 Roger Woods
Published in Life Writing (Vol. 20, No. 3, 2023)