Autobiographics

After the Second World War, two contrasting political movements became increasingly active in Italy - the communist and feminist movements. In this book, Walter Baroni uses autobiographical life-writing from both movements key protagonists to shed new light on the history of these movements and more broadly the similarities and differences between political activists in post-war Italy.

WINNER - Prix du livre d’Ottawa 2016 WINNER - Prix Jean-Éthier-Blais 2015 WINNER - Prix Gabrielle-Roy 2014 FINALIST - Prix littéraire Trillium 2015 From the founding of New France to the present day, Quebec women have had to negotiate societal expectations placed on their gender. Tracing the evolution of life writing by Quebec women, Patricia Smart presents a feminist analysis of women’s struggles for autonomy and agency in a society that has continually emphasized the traditional roles of wife and mother. Writing Herself into Being examines published autobiographies and autobiographical fiction, as well as the annals of religious communities, letters, and a number of published and unpublished diaries by girls and women, to reveal a greater range of women’s experiences than proscribed, generalized roles. Through close readings of these texts Smart uncovers the authors’ perspectives on events such as the 1837 Rebellion, the Montreal cholera epidemic of 1848, convent school education, the struggle for women’s rights in the early twentieth century, and the Quiet Revolution. Drawing attention to the individuality of each writer while situating her within the social and ideological context of her era, this book further explores the ways women and girls reacted to, and often rebelled against, the constraints imposed on them by both Church and state. Written in a clear and compelling narrative style that brings women’s voices to life, Writing Herself into Being – the author’s own translation of her award-winning French-language book De Marie de l’Incarnation à Nelly Arcan: Se dire, se faire par l’écriture intime (Boréal, 2014) – offers a new and gendered view of various periods in Quebec history.

This book traces the developmental, social, cultural, and historical origins of the autobiographical self - the self that is made of memories of the personal past and of the family and the community. It combines rigorous research, compelling theoretical insights, sensitive survey of real memories and memory conversations, and fascinating personal anecdotes to convey a message: the autobiographical self is conditioned by one's time and culture.

The essays in Tracing the Autobiographical work with the literatures of several nations to reveal the intersections of broad agendas (for example, national ones) with the personal, the private, and the individual. Attending to ethics, exile, tyranny, and hope, the contributors listen for echoes and murmurs as well as authoritative declarations. They also watch for the appearance of auto/biography in unexpected places, tracing patterns from materials that have been left behind. Many of the essays return to the question of text or traces of text, demonstrating that the language of autobiography, as well as the textualized identities of individual persons, can be traced in multiple media and sometimes unlikely documents, each of which requires close textual examination. These “unlikely documents” include a deportation list, an art exhibit, reality TV, Web sites and chat rooms, architectural spaces, and government memos, as well as the more familiar literary genres—a play, the long poem, or the short story. Interdisciplinary in scope and contemporary in outlook, Tracing the Autobiographical is a welcome addition to autobiography scholarship, focusing on non-traditional genres and on the importance of location and place in life writing. Read the chapter “Gender, Nation, and Self-Narration: Three Generations of Dayan Women in Palestine/Israel” by Bina Freiwald on the Concordia University Library Spectrum Research Repository website.

Autobiographical memory is constituted from the integration of several memory skills, as well as the ability to narrate. This all helps in understanding our relation to self, family contexts, culture, brain development, and traumatic experiences. The present volume discusses contemporary approaches to childhood memories and examines cutting-edge research on the development of autobiographical memory. The chapters in this book written by a group of leading authors, each make a unique contribution by describing a specific developmental domain. In providing a multinational and multicultural perspective on autobiographical memory development—and by covering a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches, this state-of-the-book is essential reading on the autobiographical memory system for memory researchers and graduate students. It is also of interest to scholars and students working more broadly in the fields of cognitive, developmental, and social psychology, and to academics who are conducting interdisciplinary research on neuroscience, family relationships, narrative methods, culture, and oral history.

Originally published in 1960. Is there an art of autobiography? What are its origins and how has it come to acquire the form we know today? For what does the autobiographer seek, and why should it be so popular? This study suggests some of the answers to these questions. It takes the view that autobiography is one of the dominant and characteristic forms of literary self-expression and deserves examination for its own sake. This book outlines a definition of the form and traces its historical origins and development, analyses its ‘truth’ and talks about what sort of self-knowledge it investigates.

This book by one of Latin America’s leading cultural theorists examines the place of the subject and the role of biographical and autobiographical genres in contemporary culture. Arfuch argues that the on-going proliferation of private and intimate stories – what she calls the ‘biographical space’ – can be seen as symptomatic of the impersonalizing dynamics of contemporary times. Autobiographical genres, however, harbour an intersubjective dimension. The ‘I’ who speaks wants to be heard by another, and the other who listens discovers in autobiography possible points of identification. Autobiographical genres, including those that border on fiction, therefore become spaces in which the singularity of experience opens onto the collective and its historicity in ways that allow us to reflect on the ethical, political, and aesthetic dimensions not only of self-representation but also of life itself. Opening up debate through juxtaposition and dialogue, Arfuch’s own poetic writing moves freely from the Holocaust to Argentina’s last dictatorship and its traumatic memories, and then to the troubled borderlands between Mexico and the United States to show how artists rescue shards of memory that would otherwise be relegated to the dustbin of history. In so doing, she makes us see not only how challenging it is to represent past traumas and violence but also how vitally necessary it is to do so as a political strategy for combating the tides of forgetting and for finding ways of being in common.