Lives & Letters Mailing: April 2016
Dear Colleagues,
Welcome to another Lives & Letters Mailing. This mailing contains information about:
1. Whites Writing Whiteness: Project News
Spring Clean! Re-vamped WWW website
Announcing The Archive Project!
New! ‘How To’ posts on the website
New Curiosity: Mary Moffat’s Journal
New Curiosity: A Schreiner Cabinet
From the Blog: Excuses for not writing
2. CFP: Woolf, Bloomsbury, and Biofiction (7/15/2017) Virginia Woolf Miscellany
3. CFP: Truth, Lies, and Manufacturing Memory (4/30/2016; 10/28-29/2016) Toronto, Canada
4. a/b: Auto/Biography Studies issue 31.2 (Spring 2016) now available
5. CFP: Reassessing Women Writers of the 1880s and 1890s
6. Vignettes: Episodic Tales of in the Lives of Strangers (7/1/2016) Edited Collection
7. Volume 4 of LIFEWRITING ANNUAL available
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1. Whites Writing Whiteness: Project News
There are 6 new items of project news we would like to share this month:
Spring Clean! Re-vamped WWW website
Periodically we rethink the contents and organisation of the WWW website and have just done so in celebration of spring 2016 and by taking notes of usage of the different sets of pages on it. There is a whole new feature, called ‘How To…’, detailed below and which we hope users will find helpful. Some of the tabs have been moved round a bit and some pages amalgamated and others picked out and highlighted. We think the result is easier to use and hopefully more enticing. Please do email and let us know what you think.
Announcing The Archive Project!
Routledge have just released the cover design for this book, mentioned in a number of blogs over the months, which will be published in July. There was a book launch at the BSA Annual Conference in April, when all four authors were present to talk about different aspects of the book, and proof copies were available for people to look at. Liz Stanley’s chapter makes extensive use of WWW research materials, while all the other chapters are also relevant to anyone carrying out archival or documentary research.
Some detailed information about the contents, and also background ideas and views about the archive project more widely, will be found on the book’s purpose-designed website. This can be accessed at https://sites.google.com/site/thebookarchiveproject/, where a Routledge-provided code is available for pre-ordering the book at a large discount!
Please visit and also let us know if there are ways in which we could add to the website that would be useful.
New! ‘How To’ pages on the WWW website
Have you ever wanted to find out about how to tackle certain key aspects of archival research? Well, now you can! In this new and exciting area of the Whites Writing Whiteness website, foundational ‘how to’ type questions are explored in both substantive and theoretical detail. How to decide on a good research topic? How to get to grips with a lot of letters or other documents? How should a specific letter be analysed? How is the interpretation of meaning done? These and related ‘how to…’ questions are explored, around researching the WWW collections. To find out more, or browse How To pages, please visit the website: http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/how-to/
New Curiosity: Mary Moffat’s Journal
Here, discussion and analysis pertains to a component within the Mary Moffat collection in the Cory Library in Grahamstown, South Africa. It is 31 hand-written pages long. It has two separate sections. The first is concerned with the small events of her voyage to South Africa and is signed off from Latakoo on 23 May 1820. The second writes about ‘domestic concerns’ of a mainly housekeeping kind after she had arrived in Griqua Town and is dated 11 August 1820. They are curated together and assigned the single heading of being the journal of Mary Moffat.To read more about the journal and related discussion, please visit the new Curiosity page on this: http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/curiosities/marymoffatjournal/
New Curiosity: A Schreiner Cabinet
Olive Schreiner wrote in a variety of forms in addition to her 5000 letters, and many remnants of manuscripts or proofs of these writings survive as well as published versions and help flesh out the heterotopic world of her writings. In addition, along the way a variety of events and material objects have come into view and at times taken on considerable salience in thinking and writing about the Schreiner epistolarium and the wider scriptural economy this is part of. A number of these objects, these things, are both resonant and also puzzling: they are clearly deeply meaningful, they also remain curious in an ontological sense because raising issues in knowing and understanding ‘the works of Olive Schreiner’ which cannot be resolved easily, or sometimes at all. To read more about the curious aspects of the Olive Schreiner collections, please visit the new curiosity: http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/curiosities/schreinercabinet/
From the Weekly Blog: Excuses for not writing
In the process of re-reading Mary Moffat’s letters, an intriguing pattern has become apparent: she continues to make rather interesting excuses for having not written in almost all of her extant letters. This might not seem very notable. However, sometimes the delays are of a year or two years or on occasion even three years. And even when shorter, a delay sometimes involves her missing writing a birthday letter to her daughters at school in Britain by anything up to six or eight months. To excuse this by, for instance, having been busy or having a bad headache, might seem very cavalier. But there is more to it than this! To read more about Mary Moffat’s letters and excuses for not writing, please visit the blog: http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/blog/reasons-and-excuses-for-not-writing-letters/
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2. CFP–Woolf, Bloomsbury, and Biofiction (7/15/2017) Virginia Woolf Miscellany
Virginia Woolf Miscellany CFP
Biofiction, literature that names its protagonist after an actual historical figure, has become a dominant literary form in recent years. Margaret Atwood, J.M. Coetzee, Joyce Carol Oates, Colum McCann, Colm Tóibín, Peter Carey, and Hilary Mantel are just a few luminaries who have authored spectacular biographical novels and won major awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Man Booker Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pen/Faulkner Award, and the National Book Award. With regard to the rise and legitimization of biofiction, Michael Cunningham’s The Hours is a crucial text not just because it won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction but also because it features Virginia Woolf as a character. Since the publication of The Hours in 1998, there have been numerous biographical novels about Woolf, including Gillian Freeman’s But Nobody Lives in Bloomsbury (2006), Susan Sellers’ Vanessa and Virginia (2009), Priya Parmar’s Vanessa and her Sister (2015), Norah Vincent’s Adeline (2015), and Maggie Gee’s Virginia Woolf in Manhattan (2015). While there have been multiple novels about other historical figures, such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Emily Dickinson, Nat Turner, Eliza Lynch, Friedrich Nietzsche, Henry James, and Katherine Mansfield, it appears that Woolf has inspired the most and some of the best biographical novels.
This is ironic, because while Woolf is known for bending and blending genres, she was never able to imagine her way to the biographical novel—she certainly came close in Orlando, which is not a biographical novel because she does not name the protagonist Vita, and Flush, which fits the definition of a classical historical novel rather than a biographical novel. However, Woolf’s theoretical approach to imaginative biography (voiced especially in her essays “The New Biography” [1927] and “The Art of Biography” [1939], prompted by Harold Nicolson’s and Lytton Strachey’s contemporary biographical productions), encouraged writers to push the Victorian limits of the genre and explore new (“odd”) possibilities. Her discussions on the new directions and liberties that biography took at the beginning of the twentieth century has certainly paved the way for the current postmodernist literary genre of biofiction.
The Virginia Woolf Miscellany seeks submissions about Woolf, Bloomsbury, and biofiction. Questions to consider include: To what degree has Woolf’s work inspired aesthetic developments that led to the rise and legitimization of contemporary biofiction? What in Woolf’s life makes her particularly suited as a protagonist of biofiction? How does contemporary biofiction give us new access to Woolf, her family and friends, and Bloomsbury? How do contemporary biofictions challenge and reimagine traditional ways of thinking about Woolf’s life and works? How is Woolf’s work and life used in biofiction to advance ways of thinking that even Woolf could not have imagined? Is it ethical to use Woolf’s life in a contemporary novel? Can an author simply make things up about an actual historical figure such as Woolf? And is it ethical for an author to alter facts about a person’s life in order to communicate what is considered a more important “truth”? These are just a few questions the rise of biofictions about Woolf raise. Please feel free to generate and answer your own set of questions.
Submissions should be no longer than 2500 words. Send inquiries and submissions to Michael Lackey (lacke010@morris.umn.edu) or Todd Avery (Todd_Avery@uml.edu) by July 15, 2017. Publication is slated for the Spring/Summer 2018 issue.
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IABA-L: A LIST FOR LIFE WRITING
International Auto/Biography Association
sites.google.com/a/ualberta.ca/iaba/home
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3. CFP: Truth, Lies, and Manufacturing Memory (4/30/2016; 10/28-29/2016) Toronto, Canada
A conference that may be of interest to life writing scholars:
CALL FOR PROPOSALS:
“Truth, Lies, and Manufacturing Memory”
Toronto, October 28-29, 2016.
*Keynote Speaker: Chris Hedges, Pulitzer-prize winning journalist, best
selling author*
Humber College’s School of Liberal Arts and Sciences of Toronto, Canada in
association with the International Festival of Authors (IFOA) will be
presenting its third annual interdisciplinary conference “Truth, Lies, and
Manufacturing Memory.” The International Festival of Authors (IFOA), one
of the most celebrated literary festivals in the world, is located at the
Harbourfront Centre, one of downtown Toronto’s major cultural and artistic
venues.
The conference aims to facilitate cross-disciplinary discussion among
scholars and researchers who study topics on the themes of truth and lies.
Some emergent themes to be explored include, but are not limited to:
• contested meaning
• testimony studies
• trauma
• victimhood
• distortion
• “lies that tell the truth”
• revisionism
• repressed truth
• selective memory
• gas-lighting
Proposals for individual papers and panels can be submitted here:
https://www.humber.ca/liberalarts-ifoa/call-proposals
For further information, contact: daniel.hambly@humber.ca
Sonja Boon, PhD
Associate Professor
Department of Gender Studies
Science Building, SN4080
Memorial University of Newfoundland
St. John’s, NL Canada A1C 5S7
phone: 709.864.2551
fax: 709.864.2067
web: http://sonjaboon.wordpress.com
research blog: saltwaterstories.net
NEW BOOK!
Telling the Flesh: Life Writing, Citizenship, and the Body in the Letters to Samuel
Auguste Tissot
http://www.mqup.ca/telling-the-flesh-products-9780773546394.php?page_id=73&
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IABA-L: A LIST FOR LIFE WRITING
International Auto/Biography Association
sites.google.com/a/ualberta.ca/iaba/home
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4. a/b: Auto/Biography Studies issue 31.2 (Spring 2016) now available
The editors of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies are pleased to share that issue 31.2 (Spring 2016) is now available online at www.tandfonline.com/raut. Print copies to follow. Please see the Table of Contents pasted below.
a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 31.2
Dedication to Chuck Bowie
The Process
A Complement of Collaborators: Bringing Private Memoirs to Public Life
Lynn Z. Bloom, University of Connecticut [lynn.bloom@uconn.edu]
This essay focuses on the genesis, growth, development, editing, and publication process of memoirs in their life context. It demonstrates how the efforts of a full complement of collaborators, from editors to web designers, some conspicuous, others unobtrusive, but all significant, are necessary in bringing an autobiographical work to autonomous existence.
Essays
“What If I Don’t Wanna Be White?” Black Authenticity and White Privilege in Margaret Seltzer’s Fake Memoir
Heidi E. Bollinger, Hostos Community College [hebollinger@hostos.cuny.edu]
This essay examines the discourse of black authenticity in Margaret Seltzer’s fake memoir Love and Consequences (2008) and the author’s fraudulent public performance as her narrator as a function of white privilege. Seltzer’s hoax exploits stereotypes to appeal to a white middlebrow readership, demonstrating the continuing market value of black trauma.
Reciprocity and the “Real” Author: Willa Cather as S. S. McClure’s Ghostwriter
Matthew J. Lavin, University of Pittsburgh [lavin@pitt.edu]
This essay examines Willa Cather’s role ghostwriting S. S. McClure’s My Autobiography (1914). That Cather was ghostwriter is not in dispute, but critics have questioned the degree to which her authorship conforms to ghostwriting conventions, as well as whether any clear signs of her voice can be detected in the final text. Making connections to autobiography theory and the development of ghostwriting in the history of authorship as a profession, “Reciprocity and the ‘Real’ Author argues that the collaboration between Cather and McClure is best understood as one link in a chain of embedded exchanges. Since these exchanges involved both economic and symbolic capital, efforts to repay created additional layers of indebtedness. Further, these systems of exchange take form as narrative elements on the pages of McClure’s autobiography.
The Fictional Selves of A Moveable Feast
Tony Fong, University of Toronto [tony.fong@utoronto.ca]
This paper examines the ways Hemingway’s memoir responds to, ventriloquizes, and finally revises Stein’s Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. A Moveable Feast, much like Autobiography, dramatizes its author’s contradictory impulses for both self-promotion and self-effacement. Feast is in this way a kind of pentimento, where the “I” is both obscured by and visible through layers of otherness.
Really Melanctha: Nesting Subjects in Gertrude Stein’s Intertexts
Shannon Finck, University of West Georgia [sfinck@westga.edu]
“Really Melanctha” examines two early works, “Melanctha,” and Q.E.D., alongside Stein’s more recognizably radical late prose experiments with autobiography. Resituating the early writing within a career-long life-writing project, this essay recovers “Melanctha” from a harsh reception history and reimagines it as a nascent form of the subjective play lauded in the later works. By putting Stein’s interests in writing the self in direct conversation with key contemporary theorizations of the subject, such as Rei Terada’s “self-differential self,” this essay argues that what has previously been read as a coding or masking of queer concerns within race can, instead, be read as a demonstration (q.e.d.) of play with subjective boundaries, cultural identities, and empathetic responses to difference.
“It Isn’t Their Language in Which I Speak Their Stories”: Language, Memory and “Unforgetting” in Susan Rubin Suleiman’s Budapest Diary: In Search of the Motherbook and Anca Vlasopolos’s No Return Address: A Memoir of Displacement
Szidonia Haragos, Zayed University [szidonh@yahoo.com]
In my article, I look at two representative post-communist autobiographical narratives, Susan Rubin Suleiman’s Budapest Diary: In Search of the Motherbook (1996) and Anca Vlasopolos’s No Return Address: A Memoir of Displacement (2000). I consider the linguistic aspects of accessing a traumatic past and the possibility of successful returns, via another language (English), to the site of memory. I posit that both narratives aim at restorative gestures of reconstructing the national past along the lines of minority presences and discourses in Hungary and Romania, respectively. Their contributions to the larger post-communist memory work in these two countries become significant through the mediation, from outside the national borders, of alternative memories that challenge a finite, conclusive narrative of the history of communisms in East-Central Europe. By employing English for the articulation of their particular truths, they highlight the new functionality of English as current lingua franca in a geopolitical space marked by its historical absence.
The Slippery Simultaneities of Remembering and Forgetting: Memory, Autobiographical Narrative, and The Case of Nathalie Sarraute’s Enfance
David Lewkowich, University of Alberta [lewkowic@ualberta.ca]
Considering the question of how to represent the concealments and disintegrations of forgetting, this article theorizes the inextricable play of memory in Nathalie Sarraute’s Enfance, whose fragmented descriptions of childhood experience work to emphasize the problems of representation in relation to narrative acts of autobiographical remembering.
Paul Ricoeur and the “Particular” Case of Autobiography
Helga Lénárt-Cheng, Saint Mary’s College of California [hl4@stmarys-ca.edu]
This essay explores the relation between Paul Ricoeur’s concept of narrative identity and the genre of autobiography. A logical fallacy committed by Ricoeur has contributed to the polarization of the debate. His ambiguous references misled critics to treat autobiography either as a “model case” or a “limit case” of narrative identity.
Virtual Selves, Virtual Communities: Self-Narration and Social Relations in Multi-User Virtual Environments
Stephanie Butler, Newcastle University [Stephaniebutler.d@gmail.com]
Using case studies, the author analyzes how people with Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome construct their subjectivities in the Multi-User Virtual Environment (MUVE), Second Life. The findings of the study reveal people’s anxieties about identity and belonging, especially where interlocking disadvantages such as economic class, gender, mental health, disability, and chronic illness influence who is accepted as a member of the support groups held in-world.
Reviews
Rev. of Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online. Eds. Anna Poletti and Julie Rak. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2014. 300 pp.
Matthew Halse, University of Western Ontario [ed@accmontreal.org]
Rev. of Autobiography in Black & Brown: Ethnic Identity in Richard Wright and Richard Rodriguez. By Michael Nieto Garcia. Albuquerque: University of Mexico Press, 2014. 215 pp.
Crystal Roxana Pérez, University of California at San Diego [crp004@ucsd.edu]
Rev. of Women Writers in Postsocialist China. Ed. Kay Schaffer and Xianlin Song. New York: Routledge: 2014. 191 pp.
Yu Min Claire Chen, Saint Mary’s College of Maryland [clairemicat@hotmail.com]
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Ricia Anne Chansky, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez
Editor, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies
www.tandfonline.com/raut
www.iaba-americas.org
https://www.amazon.com/author/riciachansky
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IABA-L: A LIST FOR LIFE WRITING
International Auto/Biography Association
sites.google.com/a/ualberta.ca/iaba/home
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5. Reassessing Women Writers of the 1880s and 1890s (3/31/2016; 7/25-26) Canterbury, UK
Monday 25th and Tuesday 26th July 2016
Confirmed keynote speakers: Professor Ann Heilmann (University of Cardiff) and Dr Catherine Pope (Victorian Secrets)
The ICVWW’s five-year project From Brontë to Bloomsbury: Realism, Sensation and the New in Women’s Writing from the 1840s to the 1930s aims to trace and reassess, decade by decade, how women’s writing develops in the cultural context of the 1840s to the 1930s: a transformative period in women’s private, public and literary lives. Including the work of canonical authors such as Charlotte Brontë and Virginia Woolf, the project is also significantly concerned with rediscovering and repositioning the lives and work of neglected female authors.
Now in its third year, the project aims to build on the success of conferences in 2014 and 2015 on women’s writing from the 1840s to the 1870s. This cfp therefore seeks proposals for papers that explore the range and vitality of British women’s writing from 1880-1899. Particularly welcome are papers which encourage new perspectives on literary genre, the critical reception of women writers, or canon formation. The 1880s and 1890s marked a shift in women’s writing with the death of George Eliot in 1880 and the emergence of politically engaged New Woman writers such as Sarah Grand and Mona Caird as well as bestselling popular authors such as Marie Corelli. These decades brought a new generation into conflict with more conservative writers including Ouida and Eliza Lynn Linton, both of whom had made their name in the 1860s. With the collapse of the three decker in the last years of the century, women writers were able to refashion the traditional form of fiction for their own uses.
Topics may include but are not limited to:
• The New Woman and her opponents
• Succès de scandale e.g. Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins
• Female aesthetes
• The short story as a feminine mode
• Journalism and periodical writing
• Letters, diaries and memoirs
• Children’s literature
• Women and scientific literature
• Lesser known women writers such as Annie E. Holdsworth and Netta Syrett
• The last best-sellers of the century e.g. Mary Cholmondeley’s Red Pottage, Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler’s A Double Thread
300 word abstracts and a 100-150 word biographical note should be sent to the organising committee (Dr Susan Civale, Professor Adrienne Gavin, Alyson Hunt and Professor Carolyn Oulton) at ICVWW@canterbury.ac.uk by 31 March 2016.
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IABA-L: A LIST FOR LIFE WRITING
International Auto/Biography Association
sites.google.com/a/ualberta.ca/iaba/home
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6. Vignettes: Episodic Tales of in the Lives of Strangers (7/1/2016) Edited Collection
Vignettes: Episodic Tales of in the Lives of Strangers
Farris Lee Francis and Sylvia C. McPherson seek contributors for their first collection of essays centred on the struggles, pain, love, despair, and destruction which creates the human experience. The editors have extensive background in social science, women and gender studies, and African American studies.
Their book is entitled Vignettes: Episodic Tales in the Lives of Strangers. The collection of essays will focus on the true stories of total dejection and anguish as well as stories of survival and redemption. This collection aims to draw on the connectivity of people and the importance of memories (good and bad). The editors are interested in essays focusing on various aspects of the human struggle and resurrection—such an analysis would provide readers, among others, with a snapshot into the human experience as a case study.
Additional themes and topics may include:
• True love; true love deferred; unrequited love
• Transitions: Gender and/or sexual reassignment; coming out/staying in satire; pop culture
• Short stories
• Ethnography
• Biographical/autobiographical works
Complete essays of approximately 20-25 double-spaced pages or proposals of approximately 350 words must be submitted before July 2, 2016, but acceptance into the collection will be based on completed essays submitted by September 5, 2016. Include contact information and academic affiliation, if any. Please title the e-mail subject line of the proposal “Vignettes” when e-mailing the attachment.
CFP Released: March 21, 2016
Notification will be no later than July 3, 2016
First Complete Draft due: September 5, 2016
The editors plan to submit the complete manuscript by January 11, 2017.
Estimated publication date: August 2017
Prospective contributors may send proposals or complete essays to:
leefrancis12@gmail.com
Farris Lee Francis M.A.
Maj. Sylvia C. McPherson Ed.M (Ret)
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IABA-L: A LIST FOR LIFE WRITING
International Auto/Biography Association
sites.google.com/a/ualberta.ca/iaba/home
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7. Volume 4 of LIFEWRITING ANNUAL available
Lifewriting Annual: Biographical and Autobiographical Studies announces publication of volume 4 by AMS Press, Inc., of New York. The book was co-edited by Thomas R. Smith and Carol DeBoer-Langworthy.
Copies may be ordered from: http://www.amspressinc.com/order.html
Contents include:
Essays
David Bahr, “Labile Lines: Art Spiegelman, Darryl Cunningham, and The Comics of Mental Illness.”
Deanna Reder, “Native American Autobiography: Connecting Separate Critical Conversations.”
Matthew V. Wells, “Seeing is Believing: Faith, Doubt and Self-Presentation in Ge Hong’s The Master Embracing Simplicity.”
Carolyn W. de la L. Oulton, “‘see if I don’t you poor old book’: Repositioning the Reader in Mary Cholmondeley’s Diaries.”
Kaitlin Briggs, “Caught in the ‘Language Forest'”: Dorothy Smith Dushkin’s Diary (1919-1988) and The Glassy Interval Manuscript.”
Alexandra Wagner, “‘Let that be known’: Knowledge and Narrative Order in Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes.”
Magdalena Ozarska, “Present v. Absent Addressees and Frances Burney’s Journalistic Modes.”
Katja Lee, “An Ethics of Literary Care for Morrie Schwarz.”
Marijke Huisman, “Selves in Numbers: A Book-Historical Perspective on Nineteenth-Century Autobiography in The Netherlands.”
Crossings
Rachel Cope, “Discovering a Pilgrim’s Progress.”
Holly Welker, “Anti-Apostrophe in the ‘Terriblew Sonnets’ of Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Life of One Mormon.”
Book reviews
John Gatt-Rutter on Felice Piemontese’s Dottore In Niente (2001).
Phillip Howerton on Evelyn J. Funda’s Weeds: A Farm Daughter’s Lament (2013).
Editorial staff
Robert P. Ward, Book Reviews Editor
Sylvia A. Rolloff, Assistant Editor
Kate Holguin, Copy Editor
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Carol DeBoer-Langworthy, Ph.D.
Nonfiction Writing Program
Editor, Lifewriting Annual
Box 1852
Department of English
Brown University
Providence, RI 02912 USA
CDBL@Brown.edu
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IABA-L: A LIST FOR LIFE WRITING
International Auto/Biography Association
sites.google.com/a/ualberta.ca/iaba/home
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Last updated: 15 April 2016
