Routledge Auto/Biography Studies: Call for Submissions

Journal of Education Culture and Society

This article is a proposal of identity research through its process and narrative character. As a starting point I present a definition of identity understood as the whole life process of finding identification. Next I present my own model of auto/biography-narrative research inspired by hermeneutic and phenomenological traditions of thinking about experiencing reality. I treat auto/biography-narrative research as a means of exploratory conduct, based on the narrator’s biography data, also considering the researcher’s autobiographical thought. In the final part of the article I focus on showing the narrative structure of identity and autobiography. I emphasise this relation in definitions qualifying autobiography as written life narration and identity as a narration of autobiography.

Journal of Communication, 1994

The emergence of a critical and theoretical literature about autobiography as an object of literary analysis (eg, Ulney, 1980) and as a reference point for comprehending the formation of personal and cultural identities (eg, Bruner, 1990) is a relatively recent scholarly ...

Revista de Letras Série II N.º 11, 2011

Positoning myself in a critical agenda that reads autobiography not as the life of its authors, but rather as texts of that life, I consider that we can analyze these texts as a geography of the possible or as knowable community, in Elspeth Probyn’s and Raymond Williams’s words, respectively. Autobiographies are maps of possibilities of the self, landscapes of the self, where authors, simultaneously subjects and objects of their own discourse and representation, create conditions of possibility for their individual, social and political existence.

2016

This paper is focused on the reconsideration of the limits and advances of the genre of autobiography. Given the recent boom in autobiography and personal narratives this timely topic poses a great challenge to current literary and cultural studies. Autobiography frequently takes the form of a disturbance, upsetting the expectations and classifications of both general public and literary critics. What presuppositions does the genre of autobiography build upon, and how should we respond when more strictly literary genres integrate autobiographical elements? This paper will explore selected, representative examples of how autobiography and autobiographically inclined literary works have challenged pervading norms over the last two centuries. The use of autobiographical elements in literature has repeatedly been part of an estranging revitalization of more or less settled literary forms, in addition to contributing to the reimagining of nationality through the example of representative or marginal identities, such as in the case of W. B. Yeats. The examples will span from the Romanticism of William Wordsworth and Lord Byron, via the 19th century call for uncompromising “sincerity” and the ensuing experiments of Modernism, to more recent instances of confessionalism in writers such as Robert Lowell and Karl-Ove Knausgård. The borders and dialogue between life and writing will be in focus in this paper, and the degree to which critical terms text, context and paratext help us understand and clarify their complex interaction will be subject to discussion.

Cairo Studies in English, 2020

Women's Studies International Forum, 2010

In Cavarero's (2000) philosophical conceptualization of the narratable self, narration, both biographical and autobiographical, is a political act in its capacity to expose the fragile uniqueness of the self in its constitutive relation with others. Drawing on the notions of the narratable self and the ...

Biography, 2014

2015

Recent discussions of autobiographical writing have led to a new terminology (autographies, autre-biographies, nouvelle autobiographie, autofiction, faction, egolitterature, circonfession), and cur ...

European Journal of Life Writing, 2019

This article reviews the past three decades of autobiography studies in the context of the expansion of the autobiographic corpus. After distinguishing two interpretations of the omnipresence of autobiography, it moves on to describe through a couple of examples how scholarly discourse has addressed the proliferation of self-narratives and the problem of the exemplariness of the lives narrated. Beside autobiography studies, a field rooted in literary scholarship, it also renders the influential criticism of the interpenetration of the intimate and the public, an argument suggesting that the cultural significance of autobiography has been utterly shaken. In the end the article quotes Laurent Berlant's concept of "intimate publics," and argues that this notion has been inspiring for autobiography studies because it offers a complex framework for the interpretation of the current obsession with self-narratives.