Lives & Letters Mailing: April 2018
Dear Colleagues,
Welcome to another Lives & Letters Mailing. This month’s mailing contains information about:
1.Whites Writing Whiteness: Project News
– From the Blog: Between the sheets
– From the Blog: The Epistolarium and South African Letters
– From the Blog: Take a letter
– From the Blog: New Olive Schreiner letters!
– From the Blog: Here it ends with my pen, but not my heart
2. Biography 40:4—Annotated Critical Bibliography and International Year in Review Now Available
3. History and Autobiography – Special Edition of ‘Life Writing’ (6/1/2018)
4. 8th ESRC Research Methods Festival – booking now open!
5. ‘Speculating upon Biography’ (5/30/2018; 10/25–26/2018) Noosa, Queensland, Australia
6. CFP: Special Issue of Auto/Fiction
7. Case Study Course at ECPR Summer School 2018, Budapest
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1. Whites Writing Whiteness: Project News
There are five new items of project news we would like to share:
From the Blog: Between the sheets
This blog concerns an Olive Schreiner letter, which is part of the collection of a World War 1 organisation called the ‘War Emergency: Workers National Committee’, formed from across the labour movement in Britain. To read more, please visit the blog: http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/blog/between-the-sheets/
From the Blog: The Epistolarium and South African Letters
The concept of the epistolarium was developed in order to theorise the shape, but to an extent also the content, of remaining sets of letters. This work has discussed many letters, but done so using individual sets of correspondence, like the letters of Olive Schreiner to many people, Robert White’s letters to his uncle Robert Godlonton, or the many but finite number of letter-writers in the Forbes letters. In a sense this is the best choice, for how an epistolarium shapes up is a product of those who contribute to do it and their interrelationships, and so will differ for different sets of connected letter-writers. But issues arise, for it is not quite so simple. To read more, please visit the blog: http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/blog/the-epistolarium-and-south-african-letters/
From the Blog: Take a letter
In the last couple of weeks there has been much project work regarding Olive Schreiner’s letters. A book of her unpublished writings on war, peace and pacifism is in the making and one of its sections will be a compilation of her letters written during and about the Great War and its aftermath. To read more, please visit the blog: http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/blog/take-a-letter/
From the Blog: New Olive Schreiner letters!
Some new Schreiner letters have just been posted to the Olive Schreiner Letters Online website. Inconsequential in themselves, they point to wider matters (women’s wartime work, publication, the Bolshevik revolution) and add small pieces to the jigsaw-puzzle picture of her life, involvements and networks. To read more, please visit the blog: http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/blog/new-olive-schreiner-letters/
From the Blog: Here it ends with my pen, but not my heart
At the end of June 1902, Olive Schreiner wrote to her sister-in-law Fan a letter which concluded with “Good bye. “Hier eind it met mijn pen, maar niet mijn hart.” [“Here it ends with my pen, but not my heart.”] (OS to Fan Schreiner, 30 June 1902). This is an ending which is not an ending – Schreiner’s pen stopped on the paper, but what produced the letter, which was her and Fan’s loving friendship, continued. To read more, please visit the blog: http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/blog/here-it-ends/
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2. Biography 40:4–Annotated Critical Bibliography and International Year in Review Now Available
biography
an interdisciplinary quarterly
vol. 40, no. 4 • Fall 2017
Full Issue available on Project Muse at http://muse.jhu.edu/issue/38085
Editors’ Note
International Year in Review
The International Year in Review is a collection of short, site-specific essays by scholars from around the world on the year’s most influential publications in life writing in the countries, regions, and languages in which they specialize. This year’s International Year in Review includes entries from Australia, Brazil, Burkina Faso, Canada, China, Colombia, Curaçao, Finland, France, Iceland, India, Italy, Korea, México, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, South Africa, Spain, and the UK, along with two essays from the US, one on biography and one on memoir.
http://muse.jhu.edu/article/687590
Gillian Whitlock
Keloid Geography: The Year in Australia
http://muse.jhu.edu/article/687591
Sergio da Silva Barcellos
The Second Generation of Autobiographical Narratives of Dictatorship: The Year in Brazil
http://muse.jhu.edu/article/687592
Edgard Sankara
Hybrid and Practical Life Narratives: The Year in Burkina Faso
http://muse.jhu.edu/article/687593
Alana Bell
Lives of the Aging: The Year in Canada
http://muse.jhu.edu/article/687594
Chen Shen
Family Memoir, to Memorialize and to Inherit: The Year in China
http://muse.jhu.edu/article/687595
Gabriel Jaime Murillo-Arango
Memorias de Guerra y Paz: El Año en Colombia
http://muse.jhu.edu/article/687596
Rose Mary Allen and Jeroen Heuvel
The Autobiography of Antoine J. Maduro: The Year in Curaçao
http://muse.jhu.edu/article/687597
Maarit Leskelä-Kärki
Women in the Margins, or Not?: The Year in Finland
http://muse.jhu.edu/article/687598
Joanny Moulin
Nouvelle Biographie, Pulp Nonfiction, and National Crisis: The Year in France
http://muse.jhu.edu/article/687599
Gunnthorunn Gudmundsdottir
Writers on Writing: The Year in Iceland
http://muse.jhu.edu/article/687600
Pramod K. Nayar
Biopics: The Year in India
http://muse.jhu.edu/article/687601
Ilaria Serra
The Lives of Saints, Sinners, and Everyone in Between: The Year in Italy
http://muse.jhu.edu/article/687602
Heui-Yung Park
Life Writing in the Making: The Year in Korea
http://muse.jhu.edu/article/687603
Graciela de Garay y Gerardo Necoechea
Disputas por la Memoria: El Año en México
http://muse.jhu.edu/article/687604
Hans Renders and David Veltman
Outsiders’ Perspectives in Dutch Biography: The Year in the Netherlands
http://muse.jhu.edu/article/687605
Paweł Rodak, translated by Alessandro Nicola Malusà
The Memory of Private and Family Archives: The Year in Poland
http://muse.jhu.edu/article/687606
Ioana Luca
Exemplary Lives, Contemporary Lives: The Year in Romania
http://muse.jhu.edu/article/687607
Nick Mdika Tembo
Publicizing Private Lives in a Rainbow Nation: The Year in South Africa
http://muse.jhu.edu/article/687608
Jaume Aurell
Biography and Autobiography between Tradition and Innovation: The Year in Spain
http://muse.jhu.edu/article/687609
Tom Overton
Identity Politics: The Year in the UK
http://muse.jhu.edu/article/687610
Leigh Gilmore
Reckoning with History, Form, and Sexual Violence in American Memoir: The Year in the US
http://muse.jhu.edu/article/687611
Carl Rollyson
Biography and the Subject: The Year in the US
http://muse.jhu.edu/article/687612
Sam Ikehara and Aiko Yamashiro
Annual Bibliography of Works about Life Writing, 2016–2017
http://muse.jhu.edu/article/687613
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IABA-L: A LIST FOR LIFE WRITING
International Auto/Biography Association
https://sites.google.com/ualberta.ca/iaba/home
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3. History and Autobiography – Special Edition of ‘Life Writing’ (6/1/2018)
Call for Papers for a special edition of Life Writing: History and Autobiography
Papers are sought for a special issue of Life Writing on “History and Autobiography”, edited by Jaume Aurell and Rocío G. Davis.
The issue aims to examine the intersection of the representation of the past with different forms of self-representation. Though historians have traditionally mistrusted personal narratives as critical documents, some historians have, over the past few decades, experimented with diverse forms of autobiography, suggesting that autobiographical narratives may contribute to an understanding of the past and the processes of accessing the past. Some of these historians write autobiographies as an introspective exercise that helps them acquire knowledge of their identity and the context in which they lived (Gerda Lerner’s No Farewell [1955], Annie Kriegel’s Ce que j’ai cru comprendre 1991], Eric Hobsbawm’s Interesting Years [2002], Richard Pipes’ Vixi [2003], Sheila Fitzpatrick’s A Spy in the Archives [2013]). Others have used sub-genres of ego-histoire and interventional autobiography as unconventional academic approaches to the personal and public past (Georges Duby’s L’histoire continue [1991], Geoff Eley’s A Crooked Line [2005], John H. Elliott’s History in the Making [2012]). A few of these texts have become best-sellers, showing the literary potential of historians’ autobiographies, such as Jill K. Conway’s The Road from Coorain (1991), Carlos Eire’s Waiting for Snow in Havana (2003). Finally, a smaller but influential group has turned to life-writing simply to say things that they feel they cannot say within the framework of academic discourse, notably, Carolyn Steedman’s Landscape for a Good Woman (1986) and Robert A. Rosenstone’s Adventures of a Postmodern Historian (2016).
The essays in this special issue should explore the ways autobiography serves historical understanding and writing, and the theoretical and practical consequences of this relationship. We are not only interested in contributions that address the crossroads of history and autobiography, which has been done by scholars such as Jeremy D. Popkin, History, Historians & Autobiography (Chicago, 2005) and Jaume Aurell, Theoretical Perspectives on Historians’ Autobiographies (New York, 2016) but also in essays which might themselves experiment with diverse forms of autobiographical writing in order to illuminate the historical record – i.e. personal narratives by the contributors themselves.
Topics may focus on, but are not limited to:
– autobiography as historiography
– the uses of autobiography among historians
– historians or critics writing autobiography for this issue
– historians’ autobiography as metahistorical or meta-autobiographical artifacts
– autobiography as historiographical intervention
Please send 500-word abstracts and a short bio before June 1, 2018, to Jaume Aurell (saurell@unav.es). The authors will know that their proposals have been accepted before July 31. Final papers will be due on February 1, 2019.
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IABA-L: A LIST FOR LIFE WRITING
International Auto/Biography Association
https://sites.google.com/ualberta.ca/iaba/home
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4. 8th ESRC Research Methods Festival – booking now open!
Dear all,
In 2018 NCRM will host the eighth biennial Festival. The Festival will be held 3 – 5th July 2018 at the University of Bath. Early bird booking open until 20th April!
The programme includes 58 methodological sessions consisting of over 200 individual presentations, activities and lively discussions. See the programme and book your place! <https://www.ncrm.ac.uk/RMF2018/home.php>
We look forward to seeing you at #RMF18
NCRM team
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5. ‘Speculating upon Biography’ (5/30/2018; 10/25–26/2018) Noosa, Queensland, Australia
Call for abstracts:
‘Speculating upon Biography’:
An International Symposium dedicated to exploring the boundaries of biography
25-26 October 2018, Noosa Queensland Australia
The etymology of biography comes from the Greek βίος (bíos, “life”) plus γράφω (gráphō, “write”), which explains why most definitions describe this genre as a narrative of a life, that is written by someone else with the intention of offering an historically-accurate account of this person. Despite this emphasis upon veracity, biography has long been a vibrant site for experimentation. Over forty years ago, esteemed biographer Leon Edel acknowledged that ‘there’s a great deal of speculation in [all] biography’ because biographers ‘can never know everything … most readers understand that there will be a degree of ‘informed speculation’ (qtd. In McCullough 1985, online).
More recently, some writers have chosen to experiment further with biography, employing conjecture and ‘informed imagination’ to fill in the gaps and silences in the archives, and when writing the lives of those who are under-represented in sources and obscured from the historical record. Such works have come to be known as ‘speculative biography’, not only because they challenge traditional notions of authorial veracity but also because, in contrast to biographically-based fiction or historical fiction, these experimental approaches are still clearly recognizable as non-fictional attempts to explore and express the ‘truth’. And yet, despite the fact that such speculative work has significant implications for postcolonial histories globally as well as the way we construct notions of ‘truth’, little scholarly attention has been devoted to the methodological and theoretical underpinnings of this new variant of biography or to exploring key works thus produced.
This one-day multi-disciplinary event will remedy this by inviting investigation into speculative biography and exploring associated practices and processes including:
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- Definitions, models and methods for writing speculative biography
- Theoretical underpinnings of speculative biography
- Possibilities and challenges of speculative biographical writing
- Speculative biography and historical fiction: similarities and differences
- Speculative biography and questions of truth, fiction and fictionalization
- Speculative biography, lost lives and forgotten life stories
- Past and recent speculative biographies
- Ethical issues in writing speculative biography
- Speculation, gaps in the historical record and fragmentary/unreliable sources
- Beyond the violence of the archive
- Writing and publishing speculative biography
- Speculative biography for younger readers
- Speculative biographical memoir
- Speculative graphic and comic biographies
- National histories of speculative biographical production
- Implications of speculative biography for postcolonial historical enquiry
- The reception of speculative biography
- Other relevant topics and issues
Keynote Speakers
Professor Donna Lee Brien has been writing, and writing about, experimental and speculative biography since the 1990s. Recent books aligned with the topic include Recovering History Through Fact and Fiction: Forgotten Lives (with Dallas Baker and Nike Sulway, 2017) and Assisting International Students Develop and Publish Accounts of Learning Transformation Due to their Australian Experiences (with Alison Owens, 2015). Offshoot: Contemporary Life Writing Methodologies and Practice (with Quinn Eades) will be published by University of Western Australia Press in 2018. With over 250 published book chapters, journal articles, refereed conference papers and creative works, and editor of over 40 themed special issues of journals, Donna is the current co-editor of the Australasian Journal of Popular Culture and past Commissioning Editor, Special Issues, TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses.
Dr Kiera Lindsey is an award-winning historian who published a speculative biography entitled The Convict’s Daughter: The Scandal that Shocked a Colony with Australia’s largest independent publishing house, Allen & Unwin in 2016. The Convict’s Daughterreceived positive trade and scholarly reviews and is now in its 4th print run. In 2017, Kiera was awarded an ARC DECRA for a project entitled ‘Speculative Biography, Historical Craft and the Case of Adelaide Ironside’. This project, which she will complete at UTS, will reconstitute the scanty archive of Australian colonial artist Adelaide Ironside into a narrative-driven speculative biography, before critically investigating this process in a series of publications, masterclasses and public workshops aimed at encouraging others intent upon recovering lost lives for general readers. Kiera is an enthusiastic communicator who recently appeared in a four-part HISTORY Channel TV series. She is also a regular presenter on ABC’s Nightlife program.
Masterclass
To encourage discussion and explore the creative possibilities and challenges of speculative biography, this symposium includes a Masterclass workshop. Together, we will consider a host of case studies and potential methodologies useful to writers wrestling with stories and sources that resist a straightforward approach. This workshop will appeal to practitioners keen to experiment with biography and historical writing as well as theorists considering the critical and ethical implications of genre-transgression. We welcome those working in biography, history, creative writing and life writing as well as family-historians and theoretical scholars.
Publications
An edited book and/or refereed journal issue will be produced from this event.
Abstracts (250 words max) and your name, email plus brief bio note (50-100 words)
due 30 May 2018, email to Kiera.Lindsey@uts.edu.au
**Please put ‘2018 International Speculating on Biography Symposium abstract’ in the subject line of your email
Location
CQUniversity, Noosa campus
90 Goodchap Street, Noosaville Qld 4566
Contact/ all queries
Professor Donna Lee Brien
CQUniversity, Noosa campus
d.brien@cqu.edu.au
We look forward to welcoming you to beautiful Noosa!
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IABA-L: A LIST FOR LIFE WRITING
International Auto/Biography Association
https://sites.google.com/ualberta.ca/iaba/home
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6. CFP: Special Issue of Auto/Fiction
Call for proposals
for a Special Issue of Auto/Fiction
on Serge Doubrovsky
Guest Editor: Pierre-Alexandre Sicart
Submission of full essays due December 31, 2018
Autobiography? Fiction? Autofiction. This portmanteau word, coined by Serge Doubrovsky to describe his own literary production, was borrowed by Jacques Lecarme to classify the works of other authors, such as Alain Robbe-Grillet (who accepted it nonchalantly) or François Nourissier (who rejected it violently). Since then, it has spread from the academic world to the mass media, and from literature to other arts (cinematography, painting, even music), though its exact definition is still a topic of fiery debate.
Auto/Fiction is a print and online publication and the only journal devoted to research on autofiction. For this special issue, however, we will gladly consider any paper on Doubrovsky—who, before he won awards as an author, was better known for his scholarly work on, notably, Corneille, Proust, Sartre, and psychocriticism.
The proposals submitted for this special issue are not required to even mention autofiction. A Corneille scholar, for instance, could choose to look back at Corneille et la dialectique du héros: Is this work still relevant today? Is it still read, and if so, how, and by whom? In retrospect, how much of it reflects Corneille, how much Doubrovsky, and how much a certain chapter in the history of literary criticism?
Even scholars more interested in Doubrovsky’s autofictions should not feel compelled to make autofiction the topic of their article. Other aspects of Doubrovsky’s literary work can and should be explored, such as how he represents (his relationship with) women, masculinity, aging, or death.
Finally, we would be interested in reading articles on the last book published under Doubrovsky’s name. Between 1970 and 1977, Doubrovsky typed around 9,000 pages of a “novel” that Grasset rejected until successive cuts left us with the 460 pages of Fils. Thirty-seven years later, thanks to Isabelle Grell, the original typescript was published as Le Monstre, but to this day, few scholars have dared wrangle with it.
How does Le Monstre differ from Fils? What did Fils lose and gain from the cuts? Is there a pattern as to which passages were removed? Do those passages shed new light on Fils? on Doubrovsky’s whole creative production? Do they foreshadow the autofictions that followed Fils? Conversely, do they sketch stories or initiate themes the author never touched again? Is this huge book the one that “says it all” about its author?
Proposals/abstracts of around 200 words should be sent to autofiction@hotmail.com before 1 July 2018. Once a proposal is selected, by 1 August 2018, its author will have until 31 December 2018 to submit an article of up to 10,000 words, notes included. (No lower limit.) All contributions must be in English, must adhere to the MLA style sheet (8th edition), and must be saved as .doc or .docx.
For more information, please visit our website (autofiction.org.in) or contact the journal (autofiction@hotmail.com).
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7. Case Study Course at ECPR Summer School 2018, Budapest
Dear list subscribers,
I am offering a course on *case studies and process tracing* at the next ECPR Summer School on Methods and Techniques 2018 at CEU Budapest. The 2-week course takes a comprehensive perspective and covers all parts of empirical research using case studies and process tracing.
The outline is available here:
https://ecpr.eu/Events/PanelDetails.aspx?PanelID=7492&EventID=125
The course runs from *July 30 to August 10*. Registration opened today and is open until May 31. You get an early bird discount if you register by April 21.
Please get back at me if you have any questions on the course.
Regards
Ingo Rohlfing
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Ingo Rohlfing, PhD
Professor for Methods of Comparative Political Research
Cologne Center for Comparative Politics
University of Cologne
mail / office: Herbert-Lewin-Str. 2, room 313.c
phone: +4922147089973
fax: +492214702889 http://ingorohlfing.wordpress.com
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Last updated: 6 April 2018
