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This review aims to analyse Magnus Brechtken (Eds.), Life Writing and Political. Memoir- Lebenszeugnisse und Politische Memoiren.For anyone interested in political memoirs the question of their value and influence is intriguing. Of course, few will now believe that politicians' memoirs and autobiographies should be taken as objective stories people can rely on. But how far can we go in indeed believing them? In other words, do politicians in general write the truth about themselves or is any political memoir whatsoever by definition an unreliable piece?

Without seeking to be exhaustive, this paper offers an overview of the different ways in which workers' autobiographies have been analysed in France in the human sciences. In the first phase, a social and political approach was dominant. Through workers' autobiographies written in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, researchers have attempted to grasp the relationship to politics, and especially in the twentieth century the acceptance or rejection of the communist model in the reconstruction of their political and trade union trajectories. At the same time, in a cultural approach, they have tried to understand the educational and literary influences which marked these self-taught workers who, unusually in the workers' world, crossed over from practices of reading to practices of writing. Over the last ten years, workers' autobiographies have become sources particularly used in the framework of labour history and workers' history. Indeed they make it possible to grasp how men and women articulate their working conditions: the atmosphere in the workshop, gestures in work and relations between the body and the work, perception of noises and smells, relationships with hierarchy and trade-unions. These autobiographies can be considered as constituting real "political acts" which contribute to class struggle. Finally, at the intersection of anthropological researches about "ordinary writings" and literary studies about the writing of work and writing at work, they pose a question about the means and the meaning of writing experiences by paying more attention to the form of the writings and to the workers' literary ambitions, which are often revealed in interviews.

I, III, V. Autobiographical & political.--II, IV, VI. Critical & literary. ; Mode of access: Internet.

Through a comparison of Chinese and Chinese American (auto)biographical accounts, this article facilitates a transpacific literary exchange that tracks cultural persistence and diffusion, offers a transnational perspective on the alleged absence of indigenous Chinese autobiography and the controversial use of fake "Orientalist" material in Chinese American life-writing, and highlights the need for bicultural literacy in grappling with this literature. Contesting Frank Chin's categorical condemnation of autobiography (as a Western Christian contraption laden with self-hatred), I trace its manifestations in transpacific texts and the convergences in those texts: melding of autobiography and biography, salience of maternal legacies, and interdependent self-formation. Unlike the Chinese authors who lavish compliments on their forebears, however, the Chinese American authors do not scruple to disclose unseemly family secrets or to defy the boundaries between history and fiction—practices that some Asian American critics find vexing. I demonstrate that the critical qualms about Chinese American life-writing have to do with the politics of representation and that bicultural literacy can obviate cultural misreading.

In May 2011, the second IABA Europe conference, entitled "Trajectories of(Be)longing: Europe in Life Writing", took place at Tallinn University, Estonia. The conference discussed questions regarding the possibility and productivity of specifically European modes and practices of life writing. Conference sessions focused on spatial mappings and sites of story-telling about Europe in life writing and their temporal dynamics with respectto major historical ruptures and transformations. The lines of inquiry focused, on the one hand, on how the modes and practices of auto/biographical representation were structured around a sense of belonging toor longing for Europe and, and on the other, on contestation, rejection and transgression of such modes of identification. Addressing the conceptual frame of Europe as a geographical, political, social and cultural entity, the conference papers explored the ways in which "life-mapping" constructs, confirms, contradicts, and erases borders within and in relation to Europe, also raising the question of Europe (and its possible Europeanness) within a larger and more fluid global framework.

Mass Observation (MO) was formed in Britain in 1937 as an innovative research project, to develop new methods for accurately gauging public opinion, thereby contributing to a more democratic form of politics and public policy formation. The archive of its first phase (1937-49) was transferred to the University of Sussex in 1970. In 1981 it was revived as the Mass Observation Project (MOP), which continues to the present. The documentation which MO and MOP together generated includes a significant body of life writings. The purpose of this cluster of articles is to introduce the ways in which the interaction between the aims and approaches of MO's founders and its later MOP refounders, and the responses of its contributors, produced specific forms of life writing; and to explore aspects of the 'afterlife' of these texts – their contextualisation, publication, and interpretation. This introduction situates the original, multifaceted and idiosyncratic, MO project within wider political and cultural trends of the 1930s, and then examines MO's methods, which aimed at 'the observation by everyone of everyone, including themselves'.

This book aims to reflect on the experiential side of writing political lives in the Pacific region. The collection touches on aspects of the life writing art that are particularly pertinent to political figures: public perception and ideology; identifying important political successes and policy initiatives; grappling with issues like corruption and age-old political science questions about leadership and 'dirty hands'. These are general themes but they take on a particular significance in the Pacific context and so the contributions explore these themes in relation to patterns of colonisation and the memory of independence; issues elliptically captured by terms like 'culture' and 'tradition'; the nature of 'self' presented in Pacific life writing; and the tendency for many of these texts to be written by 'outsiders', or at least the increasingly contested nature of what that term means.

This article begins by considering current English as second language (EL2) teaching in Norwegian professional military education (PME) and reflecting on how reading narrative life-writing texts written by former military personnel supports interdisciplinary learning and contributes to the development of English language skills. It then shows how, by building on this current practice, narrative may be developed into a method of critical reading and communication for junior officers. Situating the use of life-writing texts in the context of military interest in narrative in the twenty-first century, and building on insights from life-writing and literacy research, the article argues that the reading of life-writing texts in military EL2 classes should be accompanied by teaching material and reading approaches designed to develop knowledge of narrative structures and techniques and awareness of how the text seeks to affect the reader. It further argues that this knowledge is a transferable skill of use to the military as a flexible communication tool: a narrative method.

Based on "The life and writings of Joseph Mazzini [compiled by Madame Venturi]" London. 1864-70. 6 v. cf. Advertisement. ; Frontispiece is a mounted photograph. ; Mode of access: Internet.

The first two decades of the twenty-first century have seen a plethora of writers, who have challenged and expanded previous notions of feminist life writing. In Contemporary Feminist Life-Writing: The New Audacity, Jennifer Cooke identifies works by thirteen contemporary writers as examples of what she refers to as a new audacity in life writing. Several of these writers are young, early in their careers, and already connected with each other through reviewers or publishers. Defining audacity as a 'public challenge to conventions, characterized by a disregard for decorum, protocol, or moral restraints,' Cooke refers to the thirteen writers as feminists, even when they do not directly engage with politics. Unlike their predecessors, she clarifies further, these writers are writing in the wake of queer, gender and trauma theory, and post-structural critiques of binary thinking. They view identity as social constructions manifested both materially and bodily. Through the perspectives that these writers offer on their lives and the experimental form their writing takes, Cooke argues, they are reshaping feminism and its concerns.

In this article I read autobiographies by East Europeans who immigrated to Canada in connection with the Second World War as examples of transcultural life writing. My focus on the representation of return visits of these loyal Canadian citizens to their country of origin after 1989 reveals the underlying intention of relating the experience of life in a multicultural democratic society to the emergence of a new political consciousness in Eastern Europe. In my analysis I distinguish four types of concerns which try to bridge the past of their childhood experiences with the formation of a transcultural life in the 21st century: 1. Anna Porter's return visit to Hungary for family reunion and an encounter with history in The Storyteller; 2. Modris Eksteins's political motivation in Walking Since Daybreak as a historian who revisits his birthplace in Latvia as well as the stages of his displacement in German refugee camps for research on the history of the war years; 3. Janice Kulyk Keefer's private driving tour of the Ukraine and Poland and the discovery of new political realities in Honey and Ashes; 4. Lisa Appignanesi's search for the traces of the Holocaust in her native Poland in Losing the Dead. These reconnections with an earlier life from the Canadian perspective in transcultural life writings can be likened to the recent discussions of the constitution of transnational societies in a cosmopolitan world.

This is the first book-length exploration of the thoughts and experiences expressed by dementia patients in published narratives over the last thirty years. It contrasts third-person caregiver and first-person patient accounts from different languages and a range of media, focusing on the poetical and political questions these narratives raise: what images do narrators appropriate; what narrative plot do they adapt; and how do they draw on established strategies of life-writing. It also analyses how these accounts engage with the culturally dominant Alzheimer's narrative that centres on dependence and vulnerability, and addresses how they relate to discourses of gender and aging. Linking literary scholarship to the medico-scientific understanding of dementia as a neurodegenerative condition, this book argues that, first, patients' articulations must be made central to dementia discourse; and second, committed alleviation of caregiver burden through social support systems and altered healthcare policies requires significantly altered views about aging, dementia, and Alzheimer's patients

The Baptist movement in Cromwellian Ireland displayed a number of distinctive features. Adherents of the movement regularly claimed to have heightened spiritual experiences, which in a number of cases included first-hand encounters with the Devil. This article observes the political contexts in which these claims were made, and analyses attempts by Baptist leaders to promote a more critical spirituality and to counter illegitimate claims to supernatural experience. It argues that these unusual experiences were rhetorically enabled, but more reflective of their geographical than of their denominational context, in which Baptist leaders would struggle to sustain and also contain claims to spiritual experience.

The Indian Constitution (IC) has been considered in terms of its intertextuality with preceding colonial documents such as the Government of India Act 1935. This essay relocates the IC in intertextual relationships with anti-colonial autobiographies and texts such as Gandhi's Hind Swaraj, showing the parallels between the way they dramatise self-rule and mix global, Indian and regional levels of identity. Both the IC and these texts are marked by processes of transnational and internal dialogue, and reflect transnational aspects of Indian print culture and the subject positions it gave rise to. Widening the discursive sites of the IC to include anti-colonial autobiographies raises questions about the IC as a species of autobiography itself, and it also gives us another perspective on the tensions within the IC, showing how the conflict between liberty and power is manifested in its linguistic cosmopolitanism and its approach to translation. Constitutions embody the aspirations of a nation's citizens, and the IC's verbal skills grade and structure these aspirations, plotting them along a spectrum of possible futures and grounding them in a variety of pasts. This concern with temporality has a parallel in some anti-colonial autobiographies where the consciousness of time is particularly acute. Finally, both the IC and Indian anti-colonial life writing can be seen as instances of South Asian literary modernity in terms of the style of their creative choices.

Drawing on the findings of Jeremy Rifkin`s The Empathic Civilization, Patricia Clough, et al.`s The Affective Turn (2007), Antonio Gramsci`s theorization of subaltern agency and Giles Deleuze`s idea of the ontologies of immanence, this paper intends to foreground the category of the memoir written by subalternised subjectivities across the globe as potential terrains of empathic chronicles or life writings. Such trauma ridden personalized narratives can provide new templates of human emotions associated with subjugation, coercion and resistance and can help in forming an effective pedagogic universe to make us alive to the varied intricacies of affective poignancy and empathy. This paper would attempt to demonstrate the intersection of affective turn and the narrative turn with reference to three subaltern memoirs- Gaiutra Bahadur's Collie Woman (2014), Ali Cobby Eckermann's Too Afraid to Cry (2015) and Siddalingaiah's A Word with You, World (2013) to substantiate the point that plebian life writing can inaugurate a new body of affective intensity necessary for a reformulated epistemology of the future. Gaiutra chronicles the pangs and agonized cries of the coolies, specially the women coolies, who were ferried to the British colonies across the globe as indentured labourers. Ali's story is a testament to the trauma of the 'lost generations' of Australia, who were subjected to feigned brutalities of the state that had hidden agenda of annihilating the Aboriginal people from the country through legitimate forms of legislations. Siddalingaiah's narrative enshrines the journey of the author who being a Dalit had to suffer deprivation and humiliation at every step on his way towards becoming a poet.