Lives & Letters Mailing: September 2015
Dear Colleagues,
Welcome to another Lives & Letters Mailing. This mailing contains information about:
1. Whites Writing Whiteness: Project news
New section – ‘Traces Remaining’
Trace – Forbes Diary
Blog – Letterness and Wills
Blog – Pringling
2. Generations and Memory: Continuity and Change
3. Worktown: The astonishing story of the project that launched Mass Observation
4. Writing Lives Together: Romantic and Victorian Biography
5. Announcing New Biofiction listserv
6. Contemporary African Diaspora Travel Narratives
7. Biography 38.1 (Winter 2015): Auto/Biography in Transit.
8. Extended Abstracts Deadline: The tenth IABA World conference, “Excavating Lives,”
9. Life Writing, Volume 12, Issue 3, September 2015 is now available at Taylor & Francis Online.
10. Call for Papers: BSA Auto/Biography one-day Christmas Conference, 18th December
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1. Whites Writing Whiteness: Project news
Some items of project news to share are:
New section – Traces Remaining
We have added a new section to the Whites Writing Whiteness website developing the idea ‘the trace’. This is influenced by the work of Collingwood, Bloch and Derrida, and uses it regarding the flotsam and jetsam that survive of the past beyond living memory. The new section discusses particularly interesting traces we’ve come across. Keep an eye on the ‘Traces Remaining’ section in the coming weeks, and also check out what traces have been discussed so far: http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/traces/
Forbes Diary
A farm diary entry written by David Forbes Snr. on 24 May 1904, like other entries, describes the day’s happenings. This particular entry raises matters of race, gender among the ordinariness of the day’s events. To read the transcribed diary entry and discussion, please visit Traces Remaining: http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/traces/forbes-diary-24may04/
Letterness and Wills
Wills are very interesting documents, but are they also letters? Two key factors need thinking about. Firstly, with a Will there is (usually? invariably?) no direct address to a named person or persons. Secondly, a Will is non-dialogical, as a statement or testament read in the context of the final and absolute absence of its author. To read more on Wills, please visit the blog: http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/blog/where-theres-a-will/ – and a Trace concerned with two Wills will appear this coming week.
Pringling
For the last two weeks or so it’s been all hands to the decks in getting the medium-sized Pringle collection data in good enough order. The collection has around 1200 letters and other documents in it, some extremely long, with the largest being 166 pp. To read more about the process, please visit the blog: http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/blog/pringling/
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2. Generations and Memory: Continuity and Change
A special issue of Oral History Forum d’histoire orale
Deadlines:
- October 1, 2015 – Abstracts (one to two pages) and CVs
- February 1, 2016 – Complete draft submissions due
In oral history and memory research, the transmission of memories from one generation to another has been understood to be a key mechanism of continuity in families, communities, nations, and diasporas. At the same time, sharp divides between generations and their memories and understandings of the past have been understood to reflect and drive social change. This special issue focuses on how generations act as sites of both continuity and change — a question that itself invites interrogation of how the concept of generation in variously understood and constructed inside and outside academe.
- The scope of our interests is thus wide. We invite empirical, methodological, and theoretical research papers (7000-8000 words) that can be rich in photos or audio/video recordings, as well as reviews of recent exhibitions or films (1500 words), that address:
- Continuities in the oral transmission of memory (and forgetting) across generations, for example, through families’ everyday communicative memory practices, or via community-based initiatives to maintain oral traditions
- Divides and changes in the memories of generations, for example, in conjunction with the emergence of new cultural memory media and practices or changes in political configurations
- The interplay of continuity and change, such as in transnational projects in which the memories or memory practices of one generation are recontextualized elsewhere
- How oral history distinctively illuminates and problematizes the concept of generation, for instance, in terms of whether “generations” are best understood as the products of opportunity structures or formative events, or as discursive resources for understanding social continuities and changes
Oral History Forum d’histoire orale is the open-access journal of the Canadian Oral History Association. It serves as the online meeting place for scholars, community activists, librarians, archivists, and others who use oral history to explore the past.
Throughout the review process, authors can communicate with the editors in their choice of Chinese, Japanese, French, or English. - Authors may submit their abstracts and CVs in any of these languages
- If your abstract is selected, your draft submission, preferably written in French or English, will be subject to the normal peer review process of the journal.
- All authors will be required to submit the final version of an accepted article in French or English (the journal’s official languages). In addition, if an author also wishes to provide the final version in another language, we would be delighted to publish it in that language as well.
We aspire for this special issue to reach as wide an audience as possible, and to serve to introduce readers to diverse academic cultures’ approaches to the questions of generation in oral history. We hope that all the final papers will be ready for the issue to be published by mid to late 2016.
Please email queries, abstracts, and CVs to both of the issue’s Guest Editors: - Katherine Bischoping, Department of Sociology, York University, Toronto, Canada (kbischop@yorku.ca)
- Yumi Ishii, Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia, The University of Tokyo (yumi@ioc.u-tokyo.ac.jp)
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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. Worktown: The astonishing story of the project that launched Mass Observation
In the late 1930s the Lancashire town of Bolton witnessed a ground-breaking social experiment. Over three years, a team of ninety observers recorded, in painstaking detail, the everyday lives of ordinary working people at work and play – in the pub, dance hall, factory and on holiday. Their aim was to create an ‘anthropology of ourselves’. The first of its kind, it later grew into the Mass Observation movement that proved so crucial to our understanding of public opinion in future generations.
The project attracted a cast of larger-than-life characters, not least its founders, the charismatic and unconventional anthropologist Tom Harrisson and the surrealist intellectuals Charles Madge and Humphrey Jennings. They were joined by a disparate band of men and women – students, artists, writers and photographers, unemployed workers and local volunteers – who worked tirelessly to turn the idle pleasure of people-watching into a science.
Drawing on their vivid reports, photographs and first-hand sources, David Hall relates the extraordinary story of this eccentric, short-lived, but hugely influential project. Along the way, he creates a richly detailed, fascinating portrait of a lost chapter of British social history, and of the life of an industrial northern town before the world changed for ever.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Worktown-Astonishing-Project-launched-Observation/dp/0297871684/
Jessica Scantlebury
The Mass Observation Archive
The Keep
Woollards Way
Brighton
BN1 9BP
j.c.scantlebury@sussex.ac.uk
+441273 337515
www.massobs.org.uk
www.thekeep.info
twitter.com/MassObsArchive
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4. Writing Lives Together: Romantic and Victorian Biography
REGISTER NOW!
A Conference at the University of Leicester, 18th September 2015
Supported by the British Association for Victorian Studies (BAVS): www.bavsuk.org and the British Association for Romantic Studies (BARS): www.bars.ac.uk
Keynote speakers:
Prof. David Amigoni (Keele), ‘Writing Lives Together in the Darwin family, 1804-1876: gender, heredity and authority’
Dr. Daisy Hay (Exeter), ‘Adventures of an Unromantic Biographer’
Recent biographical criticism and biographies of the Romantics and Victorians have moved away from a focus on the single life to encompass different creative relationships: the friendship circle; the literary family; the local or religious community. In so doing they are returning to the practices of Romantic and Victorian biographers who often ‘wrote Lives together’, both in the sense of focusing on multiple subjects and in adopting collaborative modes of authorship. Our conference will reflect on these and other kinds of ‘writing together’, in Romantic and Victorian life-writing – for instance how life-writing might bring together Romantic and Victorian subjects/authors; or different disciplines, materials or media. Panels will include ‘Women Writing Together’, ‘Religious Interactions’, ‘Intellectual Families’, ‘Literary Communities’, ‘Creative and Digital Projects’, ‘Collaborative Suppressions and Experiments’, and individual authors including Dickens and the Brontë sisters. Full programme now available on the website:
http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/english/news/life-writing-conference
The registration fee is £35 or £20 concessions, including lunch:
http://shop.le.ac.uk/browse/extra_info.asp?compid=1&modid=1&deptid=7&catid=812&prodvarid=522
For more details please contact Dr Julian North (jrn8@le.ac.uk) or Dr Felicity James (fj21@le.ac.uk)
Dr. Felicity James, Lecturer in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Literature School of English University of Leicester University Road, Leicester, LE1 7RH UK
Dr. Julian North, Senior Lecturer in 19th-Century Literature School of English University of Leicester Leicester LE1 7RH UK
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5. Announcing New Biofiction listserv
Biofiction, literature that names its protagonist after an actual biographical figure, has become a dominant literary form in recent years. Before the 1980s, there were only a handful of well-regarded biographical novelists, but since the 1980s, writers such as Gore Vidal, Bruce Duffy, Joanna Scott, J.M. Coetzee, Margaret Atwood, Julia Alvarez, Michael Cunningham, Joyce Carol Oates, Russell Banks, Lily Tuck, Jay Parini, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Colum McCann, David Ebershoff, Anne Enright, and Hilary Mantel, to name only a notable few, authored important biographical novels that garnered much critical acclaim. But the scholarship about biofiction is only recently starting to gain traction, and there is as of yet no formal place where scholars can share their work with each other, promote the study and teaching of biofiction, and organize events about it.
Therefore, to promote scholarly work about biofiction, I have set up a listserv with the following objectives: 1) to organize conference panels on the topic of biofiction—hopefully, we can host an annual panel at the MLA convention, 2) to announce new publications about biofiction, 3) to issue CFPs about biofiction to the most suitable scholars, 4) to encourage and engage in conversations about biofiction, 5) and to share strategies for teaching biofiction.
Let me explain why this is the time to create such a venue. As I mentioned above, many prominent writers have authored stellar biographical novels. But with regard to scholarship, the field has witnessed some exciting developments in the past twenty-five years: recent scholars such as Ina Schabert, Alain Buisine, Stephanie Bird, Mark C. Carnes, John Keener, Martin Middeke, Werner Huber, Monica Latham, Sandra Mayer, Julia Novak, Lucia Boldrini, Cora Kaplan, Marie-Luise Kohlke, Beverley Southgate, and David Lodge have authored works that have advanced the conversation about biofiction. It was the pioneering work of all these scholars that led me to author Truthful Fictions: Conversations with American Biographical Novelists (2014), which consists of interviews with sixteen authors of biofiction. In doing this project, many scholars and authors told me that there is a need for a venue to bring together those who have an interest in promoting and advancing scholarship about the genre. Hence the creation of this listserv.
But there is an additional reason why this is the time for such a listserv. Bloomsbury will publish an anthology about biofiction in November 2016, which contains authors’ prefaces, afterwords, statements, lectures, interviews, and essays about biofiction as well as scholarly studies of the genre. So committed to biofiction is Bloomsbury that its academic division is currently considering starting a new series devoted exclusively to the aesthetic form. There is clearly a growing market for scholarly studies about biofiction.
To subscribe, send a message to Michael Lackey (lacke010@morris.umn.edu) with Biofiction in the subject line.
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6. Contemporary African Diaspora Travel Narratives
full name / name of organization: Kajsa K. Henry/College Language Association
contact email: kkhenry@english.umass.edu
CLA Call for Paper–Proposed Panel
The 76th Annual CLA Convention will be hosted by Texas Southern University in Houston, Texas, April 6-9, 2016. The Conference theme is “Dialogues between Africa and African Diaspora in Languages, Literatures and Films.”
Within the last decade, a number of established African diaspora writers have published what I am calling contemporary forms of the black Atlantic travel narrative. We can include Sadiyia Hartman’s _Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Trade Route_ (2007), Jamaica Kincaid’s _A Small Place_ (2000), John Edgar Wideman’s _The Island: Martinique_ (2003), Edwidge Danticat’s _After the Dance: A Walk Through Carnival in Jacmel, Haiti_ (2002), Caryl Phillips’s _Atlantic Sound_ (2000), and most recently, Paule Marshall’s _Triangular Road: A Memoir_ (2010) within this category. These texts mark the return to the travel narrative as a genre that allows these authors to raise questions about their own personal struggles with identity as connected to place while also marking the emergence of a variant of an African diasporic sensibility. This sensibility is not structured around themes of nostalgia for a past that once was, but a longing for a feeling of relation through a shared loss that maintains a sense of community across time and borders. While these narratives address the remains of slavery, they focus more so on the symbolic loss of a diasporic identity.
Chosen papers for this proposed panel should attempt to answer four preliminary questions: (1) When discussing members of the African Diaspora’s ideas of home and a “transnational” identity, what are the theoretical and methodical connections and contentions between African American studies, diaspora studies, postcolonial studies, and black Atlantic studies?; (2) How do African disapora writers confront and represent racialized spaces, which the Caribbean and Africa are, and their interactions with them?; (3) How do these contemporary travel narratives ask us to rethink our theorizations of the black travel narrative and their relationship to past narratives?; and (4) How can we begin to rethink space (bodily, global, and textual) and the politics of location within an African Diasporic context through these travel narratives?
Interested parties should submit abstracts (of 250-300 words) briefly describing ideas for their discussion. Also open to an alternative format, such as a round-table discussion. Please include a brief CV and/or biography. Abstracts and/or questions should be emailed to Kajsa Henry @ kkhenry@english.umass.edu by September 12, 2015 with decisions made by September 14, 2015.
More information on the convention can be found here: http://www.clascholars.org/conference
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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. Biography 38.1 (Winter 2015): Auto/Biography in Transit
Ed. Jason Breiter, Orly Lael Netzer, Julie Rak, and Lucinda Rasmussen
Jason Breiter, Orly Lael Netzer, Julie Rak, and Lucinda Rasmussen, “Introduction: Auto/Biography in Transit” v–xii
The essays in this special issue engage with a range of issues relating to Auto/Biography in Transit, the title of the 2014 International Auto/Biography Association (IABA) conference held in Banff, from which the issue emerged. The essays have been divided into two areas of inquiry: Documents and Displacements. Those in the first section address the status of the document as a technology of the self, or think about how cultural producers document their lives. Essays in the second section explore critical approaches and texts that signify how both the study of life writing and its objects of inquiry are themselves in transit, and have the potential to change our ideas about the field itself.
Documents
Candida Rifkind, “The Seeing Eye of Scientific Graphic Biography” 1–22
This article examines two graphic biographies about Robert Oppenheimer that use visual strategies to overcome some of the narrative problems of prose scientific biography. I argue that we consider scientific graphic biography as a specific genre that installs a biographical eye (as opposed to the auto/biographical I) to explore the complex relationship between empirical knowledge and affective experience that shapes lives caught between science and politics.
Terri Tomsky, “The Guantánamo Lawyers: Life Writing for the ‘Courts of Public Opinion’ 23–40
This article explores the strategic deployment of the life narrative genre by the lawyers of designated enemy combatants as part of the human rights activism against the unlawful detainment of prisoners at the US military prison in Guantánamo.
Ella Ophir, “The Diary and the Commonplace Book: Self-Inscription in The Note Books of a Woman Alone” 41–55
The Note Books of a Woman Alone (1935), the posthumously published notebooks of an impoverished London clerk, provokes reconsideration of what counts as an individual voice. More than half the text is comprised of quotations and extracts; Evelyn Wilson’s textual collecting, however, was deeply enmeshed with her diary writing. Blurring transcription and expression, her practice of self-inscription lays bare the intersubjective nature of self-definition and the composite nature of any textual voice.
Elizabeth Rodrigues, “’Contiguous But Widely Separated’ Selves: Im/Migrant Life Narrative as Data-Driven Form” 56–71
This essay proposes that an epistemological commitment to data collection creates a distinct aesthetic in life narratives, and argues that an abundance of data creates a sense of multiple, co-present identities within a given subject. Focusing on The Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans, a collection of “lifelets” edited by Hamilton Holt (1906), Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives (1909), and The Soul of an Immigrant (1921), the autobiography of Constantine Panunzio, Rodrigues shows how the identities that these subjects iterate are in flux, and thus the subjects are constantly in transit among their identities.
Emma Maguire, “Self-Branding, Hotness, and Girlhood in the Video Blogs of Jenna Marbles” 72–86
This essay explores the significance of online celebrity and self-branding through the case study of popular YouTube video blogger Jenna Marbles. I ask how the forces of commoditized web spaces shape self-representation, and explore how Marbles negotiates the demand for feminine “hotness” in this competitive, networked media landscape. Central to this essay is how girls use self-mediation to negotiate a system that insists on consuming them as objects, while maintaining their autonomy as subjects.
Displacements
Rocío G. Davis, Fictional Transits and Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being” 87–103
Focusing on Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being, this essay engages the transits between the fictional and the autobiographical by deploying notions from narratology, including a proposal regarding the difference between “fiction” and “the fictive,” reflections on metatextual performance, and the idea of the implied author.
Leigh Gilmore, “Covering Pain: Pain Memoirs and Sequential Reading as an Ethical Practice” 104–117
Book design—including the elements of cover image and author photo—offer conceptual matter from which meanings of authorship and identity emerge. In the case of memoirs about chronic pain, these peritexts also employ a complicated visual iconography of disability that may rely on assumptions about agency and ability that pain memoirs themselves challenge within their covers. This essay explores how readers might bear witness to chronic pain memoirs by leveraging insights gained through the sequential reading of comics toward an ethical practice.
Lucinda Rasmussen, “The (De)Evolution of a Genre: Postfeminism’s (Dis)Empowered
Narrator of the Breast Cancer Narrative” 118–34
This article traces how postfeminism, an ideology that celebrates consumerism and disavows feminism, has influenced the evolution of the breast cancer memoir. Paratexts surrounding three twenty-first century breast cancer memoirs are discussed to show how retailers and corporate cause marketers have in some instances impeded the delivery of feminist messages in some of these works.
Ricia Anne Chansky, “Between Selves: An Intertextual Approach to Jamaica Kincaid’s Among Flowers” 135–51
Jamaica Kincaid’s second travel narrative, Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya, remains an underexplored text due to the conflicted, diasporic subjectivity that readers encounter within the book. This essay argues for a reading strategy that positions Among Flowers in conversation with A Small Place to reveal a more nuanced understanding of Kincaid’s diasporic status.
Contributors 152–54
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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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8. Extended Abstracts Deadline: The tenth IABA World conference, “Excavating Lives,”
Please note EXTENDED DEADLINE for abstracts is October 31st, 2015.
Please distribute widely. Apologies for cross-posting.
Excavating Lives:
International Association for Biography and Autobiography – WORLD
University of Cyprus – May 26-29, 2016
Call for papers
The tenth IABA World conference, “Excavating Lives,” will be held at the University of Cyprus.
The conference organisers welcome proposals on any topic related to discovery and the absent, hidden or veiled life. In what ways do life writers unearth the past? How are lives layered, erased, replaced, and/or preserved? And how has life writing changed over time, creating possibilities for new definitions?
In Nicosia, the only divided capital in the world, and on an island with a cultural landscape marked by numerous open as well as unexcavated archaeological sites, we consider life writing within the context of liminal spaces, borders, and hidden places.
Join us in Cyprus as we consider lives in an archaeological context, across political, cultural, and social divides, on an island whose rich history has been shaped by conflict and resolution, trauma and healing, forgetting and remembering.
We welcome abstracts from all fields across the humanities as well as papers and presentations from creative writers / arts practitioners.
“Lightning rounds” on specific one-word concepts or topics, with six participants, may also be proposed; each presentation should not exceed five-seven minutes.
Please note: Panels will be organised in “Streams.” Please include your preferred stream name and number when submitting your abstract. For example, subject line should read “IABA 2016 Abstract Submission – Stream 2: Recorded Lives.”
Streams:
Stream 1: Lives (Dis)closed/Revealed
Stream 2: Recorded Lives (Biography and Memoir)
Stream 3: Personal and Public Lives
Stream 4: Remembered Lives
Stream 5: Lives in Crisis
Steam 6: Multimediated/Digital Lives
Stream 7: Lives on the Border
Stream 8: Ecological Lives
Stream 9: Pedagogical Lives
Stream 10: Postcolonial Lives
Stream 11: Queer Lives
Stream 12: Other – Please specify
Abstracts of no more than 300 words should be sent as email attachments to amypro@ucy.ac.cy by October 31, 2015.
Confirmed Keynotes:
Julie Rak (University of Alberta)
Bart Moore-Gilbert (Goldsmiths, University of London)
More info and conference website coming soon. . . .
Conference organisers:
Stephanos Stephanides, University of Cyprus
Amy-Katerini Prodromou, University of Cyprus
Stavros Karayanni, European University of Cyprus
Polina Mackay, University of Nicosia
Please distribute widely.
Conference poster and flyer by Q1tic Design: http://www.q1ticdesign.com/
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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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9. Life Writing, Volume 12, Issue 3, September 2015 is now available at Taylor & Francis Online.
This new issue contains the following articles:
Interviews
Conan Doyle and the Life of Writing: An Interview with Michael Dirda
Tom Ue
‘A Life in Research’ with J. M. Coetzee: An Interview with David Attwell
Michela Borzaga
Articles
Celebrity, Confession, and Performance in Pentti Saarikoski’s I Look Out Over Stalin’s Head
Anna Hollsten
‘Do Not Let Anyone See This Ugly Scrawling’: Literacy Practices and the Women’s Household at Hallfreðarstaðir 1817–1829
Erla Hulda Halldórsdóttir
A Genre for Justice: Life Writing and Undocumented Migration in Rosalina Rosay’s Journey of Hope
Ina C. Seethaler
Letters and Other Gifts: On a Nineteenth-Century Italian-Australian Epistolary Network
John J. Kinder
Reflections
Uncomfortable Realities: Drs. Erich Petschauer (1907–1977), Gerhard Bast (1911–1947), and Kurt Waldheim (1918–2007)
Peter W. Petschauer
Living in-between: A Narrative Inquiry into the Identity Work of a Chinese Student in Australia
Bin Ai
Book Review
Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online, edited by Anna Poletti and Julie Rak
Reviewed by Tahneer Oksman
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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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10. Call for Papers: BSA Auto/Biography one-day Christmas Conference, 18th December
Dear Friend,
Greetings.
This year’s BSA Auto/Biography one-day Christmas Conference will be held at the British Library on Friday 18th December.
Details below.
BSA AUTO/BIOGRAPHY STUDY GROUP
CENTRE FOR BIOGRAPHY AND EDUCATION,
University of Southampton
CALL FOR PAPERS
One-Day Christmas Conference
Friday 18th December 2015
The British Library
96, Euston Road, London NW1 2DB
The title of the conference is:
Examining questions of coercion and consent in the analysis of lives
As well as completed papers, work in progress is very much welcomed.
Please send title and a brief abstract by no later than 12th October to:
Gill Clarke
Auto/Biography
17 Queen Street
EMSWORTH
PO10 7BJ
UK
(email: gmclarke@virginmedia.com)
Full Details of the Conference will be sent to all members in November.
The fee for BSA Auto/Biography Study Group subscribers will be £70 & for Non-BSA Auto/Biography Study Group subscribers £85.
Conference organisers- Gill Clarke & Jeni Nicholson
Forthcoming attractions
Auto/Biography Summer Residential Silver Jubilee Conference
Wolfson College, Oxford, 15-17 July 2016
Theme: The Presentation of the Self
Keynote Speaker: Professor David Morgan
Michael Erben
Organizzatore BSA Auto/Biography SG
21 Dorchester Court
OXFORD
OX2 7DT
UK.
tel:+44(0)1865 552609
mob: +44 (0)7968958110
email: michaelerben@gmail.com
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Last updated: 4 September 2015
