Lives & Letters Mailing: May & June 2020
Dear Colleagues,
Welcome to another Lives & Letters Mailing. This month’s mailing ‘in the time of the coronavirus pandemic’ contains information about:
1. Whites Writing Whiteness: Project News
– From the Blog: Wise words: epistolary ethics and letter-writing
– From the Blog: Letter-writing in the age of digital reproduction
– From the Blog: Connection
– From the Blog: How to read a letter
– From the Blog: The simulacra of co-presence
2. Heroines of the Holocaust: Frameworks of Resistance (8/15/2020; 6/2-3/2021) Wagner College Holocaust Center USA
3. [FQS] 21(2) “Challenging Times — Qualitative Methods and Methodological Approaches to Research on Time”
4. Call for Papers AUTOFICTION AND HUMOUR Special Issue of Life Writing (Autumn 2021) 6/20/2020
5. The Selfless Ego part 1- – Life Writing, Volume 17, Issue 2, June 2020 is now available on Taylor & Francis Online.
6. Maps, atlasses, and plans. A survey of digital resources
7. Women in French Panel at SAMLA Conference (7/15/2020; 11/13-15/2020) Jacksonville, Florida, USA
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1. Whites Writing Whiteness: Project News
There are five items of project news to report on]
From the Blog: Wise words: epistolary ethics and letter-writing
Lewis Carroll’s 1890 pamphlet Eight or Nine Wise Words about Letter-Writing is less concerned with the conventional rules of letter-writing than the ethics of correspondence as civilised exchanges between connected people. Mostly the ‘wise words’ from the author of the Alice in Wonderland books are more general considerations of how to write letters in a friendly and civilised way, and they also apply to the use of email and social media for communicative acts that parallel letter-writing. To read more thoughts about this, please visit the blog: https://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/blog/wise-words/
From the Blog: Letter-writing in the age of digital reproduction
This blog reflects on a hand-written letter received from a friend, which starts with being unable to make full sense of because of its handwriting. The handwriting is distinctive, and distinctively difficult to read as well. If it had been an email, or a letter typed on a computer and printed out on paper, it would have been read in a few minutes, but also would have left is the feeling that something almost exactly the same might have been sent to someone else. To read on, please visit the blog: https://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/blog/letter-writing-in-the-age-of-digital-reproduction/
From the Blog: Connection
Receiving more letters than usual during the UK experience of the Covid-19 pandemic and lockdown has continued, rather than decreased. According to a local postman, this is discernible across the quite large area that the local postal depot covers. But why might this be so? To find out more, please visit the blog: https://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/blog/connection/
From the Blog: How to read a letter
Homage to Virginia Woolf, whose ‘How does one read a book?’ essay has recently appeared as a (very) short book. This is offers a more practical bunch of thoughts about reading a letter than her philosophical reflections. This blog details the process and steps involved in reading a letter: https://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/blog/how-to-read-a-letter/
From the Blog: The simulacra of co-presence
We are accustomed to debates about ‘the end of the letter’, to the effect that letter-writing has been demolished by the almost instantaneous communications permitted by email, Skype/Zoom/Teams and social media of different kinds. It is often claimed to that rather than the parameters set by paper and postal communications, now time and distance and being apart mean something different when the other person/s can be seen and heard almost as they actually are and in the moment. To read more, including criticisms of this simulacra of co-presence view, please visit the blog: https://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/blog/the-simulacra-of-co-presence/
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2. Heroines of the Holocaust: Frameworks of Resistance (8/15/2020; 6/2-3/2021) Wagner College Holocaust Center USA
CALL FOR PAPERS
Heroines of the Holocaust: Frameworks of Resistance
Wagner College Holocaust Center
June 2-3, 2021
Deadline for Submissions, August 15, 2020
“Nobody taught us how to fight or to perform our duties. We learned by ourselves not only how to clean and use a gun, but how to conduct ourselves in combat and battle, how to blow up a bridge or a train, how to cut communication lines and how to stand on guard.”
—Sara Ginaite, partisan, March 8, 1944 (International Woman’s Day)
The activities of women during the Holocaust have often been forgotten, erased, misunderstood, or intentionally distorted. Jewish women and those of all faiths fought with dignity, compassion and courage to save others from the murderous Nazi regime in over 30 nations. Often overlooked, women as well as men played critical roles in uprisings against the Nazis in over 50 ghettos, 18 forced labor camps and 5 concentration camps, including Auschwitz. Women were critical to the Jewish underground and other resistance networks both as armed fighters and as strategists and couriers of intelligence and false papers. Women played essential roles operating educational, cultural and humanitarian initiatives. In other genocides, women also faced horrendous atrocities, yet distinguished themselves with resilience and acts of moral courage. This symposium hopes to create a new narrative around agency in the Shoah and other genocides, which may inspire transformative activism today.
From the groundbreaking 1983 conference on “Women and the Holocaust” at Stern College to the 2018 symposium on “Women, the Holocaust and Genocide” at Seton Hill University, research on gender issues has grown exponentially. Innumerable books, conferences, panels, films, journal special issues, and groups such as Remember the Women Institute, now document the inspiring lives of female participants. Yet, there remain many untold stories of women fighting back against the Nazis with pistol or pen. The leadership strategies, networks of defiance and testimony of better-known activists, such as Vitka Kempner-Kovner, Zivia Lubetkin, Vladka Meed, Sara Fortis, Gisi Fleishman, Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, Nadezhda Popova, Haviva Reik, Edith Bruck, Friedl Dicker-Brandeis and Roza Robota, among others, still merit far more attention; their lives, too, should become part of the canon of Holocaust study. How is our understanding of the Shoah– and the central question of how it happened– impacted and re-conceptualized by knowing about the activities of female resisters and rescuers? This symposium will bring together international scholars working on this topic to share new approaches, projects and information on well-known women, as well as those whose stories remain shrouded in obscurity.
We seek papers exploring women as rescuers and resisters of the Holocaust and genocide. Topics include, but are not limited to:
Leadership Lessons of Women in Resistance Networks
Women and Resistance in the Concentration Camps
Women Rescuers and Resisters in the Ghettos
Female Partisans in World War II
The Psychology of Rescue and Resistance
Women Doctors, Nurses and Social Workers
Female Artists as Resisters
The Power of a Photo of Women Resisters
The Role of Women in Zionist and other youth groups
Women as Resisters and Rescuers in Genocide
Resilient Bonds: Mother/Sister/Aunt/Daughter/Grandmother
Beyond Anne Frank: Women’s Journals, Memoirs and Archives
Films and Music of Women and Human Rights
Limits and Possibilities of Collection of Women’s Oral Testimony and Archives
Post-Holocaust Life of Female Resisters and Rescuers
Historiography of Jewish and non-Jewish Resisters and Rescuers
Illiberal Memory Politics and Selective Forgetting of Women
Teaching about Women, Resistance and Rescue
Please submit abstracts of 300 to 500 words outlining the focus and approach of your paper. Abstracts must include full name and title, institutional affiliation and email address. Please also attach a copy of your CV
Subject line should be: LAST NAME Abstract Heroines
Submit to both Conference Organizers:
Laura Morowitz, Professor of Art History, Wagner College lmorowit@wagner.edu
And Lori Weintrob, Professor of History and Director, Wagner College Holocaust Center holocaust.center@wagner.edu.
Important Dates:
August 15, 2020: Deadline for submission of Abstracts
October 1, 2020: Notification of Acceptance
The two-day symposium on the campus of Wagner College, in Staten Island, New York, is sponsored by the Wagner College Holocaust Center. The Museum of Jewish Heritage in Manhattan will host a private visit for participants. Details on accommodations and travel will be sent following acceptance of paper. We will open up the conference on the second day to NY/NJ teachers and a general audience ensuring an even greater circulation of these ideas.
Contact Info:
Professor Laura Morowitz, Wagner College
Professor Lori Weintrob, Wagner College
Contact Email: lmorowit@wagner.edu
International Auto/Biography Association Worldwide
https://sites.google.com/ualberta.ca/iaba/home
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3. [FQS] 21(2) “Challenging Times — Qualitative Methods and Methodological Approaches to Research on Time”
Dear All,
we would like to inform you that FQS 21(2) is available online (see http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/issue/view/67 for the current issue and http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/issue/archive for former issues).
“Challenging Times — Qualitative Methods and Methodological Approaches to Research on Time” has been edited by Elisabeth Schilling and Alexandra Koenig. Additionally, a collection of single contributions as well as articles, belonging to FQS Conferences and to FQS Reviews are part of FQS 21(1). All in all, 62 authors from 13 countries contributed to FQS 21(2).
Enjoy reading!
Katja Mruck & Florian Muhle
Ps: FQS is an open-access journal, so all articles are available free of charge. This newsletter is sent to 21.834 registered readers.
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FQS – Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung
/ Forum: Qualitative Social Research (ISSN 1438-5627)
http://www.qualitative-research.net/
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4. Call for Papers AUTOFICTION AND HUMOUR Special Issue of Life Writing (Autumn 2021)6/20/2020
AUTOFICTION AND HUMOUR
Special Issue of Life Writing (Autumn 2021)
Deadline for proposals 20 June 2020
One of the main features of autofictional literature is its so-called ability to “sit on the fence” (Lejeune) and be simultaneously fictional and referential. Throughout the theoretical discussions on autofiction this has overshadowed some of its other features. This special issue explores one of them, namely the as-of-yet rarely addressed humorous dimension of autofictional writing, including the aesthetic, narrative and social function(s) of humour in autofictional literature. In 1996, Marie Darrieussecq, a French scholar who almost overnight became a literary celebrity with the publication of Pig Tales (Truismes), published an article entitled “Autofiction, a non-serious Genre” (“L’Autofiction, un genre pas sérieux”) in which she ironically lauded autobiography only to better support autofiction’s creativity and its noncommittal attitude toward reality. Even if Darrieussecq meant “non-serious” to denote a less respected, frowned-upon subcategory of autobiographical discourse, now almost 50 years after Doubrovsky first coined the term, it’s worth considering if indeed autofiction is a non-serious mode of writing, although along a different understanding of the non-serious than Darrieusecq’s.
Freud defined humour as a defence mechanism, a way of keeping reality at bay while still focusing on it. This could also describe the way autofiction relates to autobiographical practices and their attempt to describe somebody’s reality. Judging for example by the grandiloquent buffoonery of Bret Easton Ellis’s Lunar Park, the wry self-deprecating tone of Ben Lerner’s 10:04, and by how J.M. Coetzee pokes fun at his alter-ego in Scenes from Provincial Life, at times verging on self-parody, it seems high time to consider autofiction’s humorous dimension.
One of the comic features of autofiction lies in its capacity to mock the seriousness of the genre it seemingly belongs to and, taking Darrieussecq’s rhetorical twist as a perfect example, seems to sneer at autobiography’s desperate dependence on facts and memory knowing that both have been shown to be fluctuating and labile (see for instance Mark Rowlands’s Memory and the Self: Phenomenology, Science and Autobiography, 2017). Even if a writer such as Mary Karr scathingly pointed out in The Art of Memoir (2015) that this aspect has often been regarded as carte blanche by some memoirists to publish blatant lies, she also rightfully reminded us that this inherent fallibility of our memory doesn’t call into question the validity of autobiography as long as it’s aware of this flaw. Another comic feature stems from an amused, sometimes ironic outlook on life and on those who try to put it on paper. In other words, autofiction often generates “ironic signals with regard to the reality of reported facts” (“signaux ironiques quant à la réalité des faits rapportés,” Colonna). Of course, this doesn’t imply that autofictional literature foregoes all claims to narrate any form of reality, but it frequently does so through tongue-in-cheek humour. As noted by Yves Baudelle, even in more serious autofictions such as Chloé Delaume’s or Camille Laurens’s, often conjuring up ghosts and the general theme of Thanatos, this “phantasmagoria is only tolerated in a humorous mode, which bestows upon it both its specificity and its function” (“cette fantasmagorie n’est tolérée que sur le mode humoristique, ce qui lui confère à la fois sa spécificité et sa fonction”). Thus, autofiction’s very referential logic could be described as “apotropaic.” In Ariadne’s Thread, J. Hillis Miller, focusing on realistic fiction’s essential flaw, wonders why “this dissolution of its own fundamental fiction [is] as constant a feature of realistic fiction as the creation of the fiction of character in the first place,” suggesting that “the function is apotropaic. It is a throwing away of what is already thrown away in order to save it.” Is autofiction trying to save autobiography and simultaneously make a joke out of it? This might be the very core of its ironical nature.
We encourage cross-disciplinary and comparative approaches and papers discussing primary texts in any language. Proposed articles may consider the humorous dimension(s) of autofictional literature through themes like, but not limited to, those listed above.
Practicalities and schedule:
Deadline for proposals (300 words): 20 June 2020
Authors will be notified if their proposal can be accepted for peer review by the end of July.
Deadline for sending in first drafts of papers: 1 November 2020
Peer-review process and corrections: January-March 2021
Final publication: Autumn 2021
All submissions need to be sent with a brief bio, which includes title, institutional affiliation and e-mail address.
Below is the link to the journal’s instructions for authors:
https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorSubmission?show=instructions&journalCode=rlwr20
Please submit to: Alexandra Effe (alexandra.effe@wolfson.ox.ac.uk), Marie Lindskov Hansen (marie.lindskov.hansen@fu-berlin.de), Arnaud Schmitt (arnaud.schmitt@u-bordeaux.fr)
International Auto/Biography Association Worldwide
https://sites.google.com/ualberta.ca/iaba/home
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5. The Selfless Ego part 1- – Life Writing, Volume 17, Issue 2, June 2020 is now available on Taylor & Francis Online.
Life Writing, Volume 17, Issue 2, June 2020 is now available online on Taylor & Francis Online.
The Selfless Ego part 1
This new issue contains the following articles:
Editorial
The Selfless Ego I. Memory and Imagination in Tibetan Hagiographical Writing
Lucia Galli & Franz Xaver Erhard
Pages: 153-159 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2020.1728069
Articles
Between Self-Expression and Convention: Tibetan Reflections on Autobiographical Writing
Ulrike Roesler
Pages: 163-186 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2019.1620581
Nested Autobiography: Life Writing Within Larger Works
David Templeman
Pages: 187-203 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2019.1621443
From Song to Biography and from Biography to Song: The Use of gur in Marpa’s namthar
Cécile Ducher
Pages: 205-219 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2019.1621444
Reincarnation and Personal Identity in The Lives of Tibetan Masters: Linking the Revelations of Three Lamas of the Dudjom Tradition
Cathy Cantwell
Pages: 239-257 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2019.1622392
Traces of Female Voices and Women’s Lives in Tibetan Male Sacred Biography
Hanna Havnevik
Pages: 259-276 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2019.1622393
Forest Walking, Meditation and Sore Feet: The Southern Buddhist Biographical Tradition of Ajahn Mun and His Followers
Sarah Shaw
Pages: 277-296 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2019.1622394
International Auto/Biography Association Worldwide
https://sites.google.com/ualberta.ca/iaba/home
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6. Maps, atlasses, and plans. A survey of digital resources
Dear all,
here is the sixth episode of our census of digital collections of maps / globes / atlasses, with a few more archives across the world. We hope it to be a useful tool in these hard times, or maybe just a resource to wander and travel from your sofa.
Feel free to share with your colleagues & students, but most of all feel free to suggest any collection that might fit: digital archives are virtually infinite and any hint would be of great help.
Best,
EF // AIR
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7. Women in French Panel at SAMLA Conference (7/15/2020; 11/13-15/2020) Jacksonville, Florida, USA
Women, Life Writing, and Scandals of Self-Revelation
This panel is one of five Women in French sessions at the 2020 South Atlantic Modern Language Association annual conference, taking place this year in
Jacksonville, Florida from November 13-15.
Presenters must be current members of Women in French and the South Atlantic Modern Language Association.
As life writing exposes purported truths about personal experience and identity, self-revelations in these accounts position these texts as potential objects of controversy as authors test the limits of telling all. Many authors have turned to life-writing practices to speak about intimate loss, family secrets, stolen childhoods, and physical, psychological, or historical trauma. In this way, autobiography, autofiction, and memoir, remain potentially perilous terrains especially regarding the implications of others on which such self-accounts unavoidably depend. This panel seeks to explore the scandals behind or beyond such self-revelation. How has scandal served as impetus for textual creation? In what ways has the publication of “scandalous” texts implicated others whether in accusation, in solidarity, or by engaging in broader controversies or social discontent? How have such texts responded to scandal? What role do legal proceedings play in (self)censoring self-accounts? Proposals on examples of women engaged with or implicated in scandalous self-revelations in literature, film, theatre, and other modes of representation from all time periods and all areas of Francophone literature are welcome. Please send 250-word proposals in English or French along with presenter’s name, academic affiliation, and email to Adrienne Angelo (ama0002@auburn.edu) by July 15, 2020.
Chair: Adrienne Angelo, Auburn University, ama0002@auburn.edu
International Auto/Biography Association Worldwide
https://sites.google.com/ualberta.ca/iaba/home
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Last updated: 12 June 2020
