Suchergebnisse

Ideas of freedom in post-apartheid South Africa cannot be understood in isolation from the lived experiences of the people we often consider as the future of South Africa. Freedom is a time-bound value whose meaning keeps changing as time goes by, and our understanding of freedom before 1994 cannot be the same as today. With close reference to the selected life writings of South African born-frees, this study examines ideas of freedom as expressed in these texts written from the perspectives of ordinary young black people in post-apartheid South Africa. It unpacks the youth's rejection of the tag 'born-free' by bringing out the difficulties of their upbringing in poverty and inequality. This work argues that poverty, inequality, unemployment, and dilapidated infrastructure in public schools are still very much a feature of post-apartheid South Africa, and that the government is yet to fully transform the lives of ordinary black people who much as they try to do so themselves, are still faced with structural inequalities, physical and symbolic violence. Through decolonial theory, the selected texts are analysed to trace the legacies of colonialism and apartheid and how notions of freedom have changed over time. Key Words: Born-Frees, freedom, autobiography, biography, apartheid, colonialism, ; Thesis (MA) -- Faculty of Humanities, Social Sciences and Law, 2021

This article examines some of Greta Thunberg's life writing as an example of the creativity and ingenuity with which some young people engage with the identity category of 'youth' in their life writing. It argues that Thunberg's activism uses personal testimony in order to amplify expertise testimony as an epistemic source that demands action on climate change. This strategic use of life writing produces a paradoxical, but seemingly effective, form of life writing in which Thunberg provides personal testimony to the future. The article analyses how this paradoxical form of testimony is produced by situating Thunberg's life writing in the context of the social and political investment in youth as an identity genre central to understanding of the human life course, and to how political responsibility is figured in contemporary western democracies. Drawing on theories of new media as an affective site in which life unfolds, rather than being represented, the paper concludes by reflecting on how Wendy Chun's argument that networks involve the twinning of habituation and crisis mirrors Thunberg's argument that action on climate change demands that habitual ways of living and acting must be rethought in response to the climate crisis.

This article examines some of Greta Thunberg's life writing as an example of the creativity and ingenuity with which some young people engage with the identity category of 'youth' in their life writing. It argues that Thunberg's activism uses personal testimony in order to amplify expertise testimony as an epistemic source that demands action on climate change. This strategic use of life writing produces a paradoxical, but seemingly effective, form of life writing in which Thunberg provides personal testimony to the future. The article analyses how this paradoxical form of testimony is produced by situating Thunberg's life writing in the context of the social and political investment in youth as an identity genre central to understanding of the human life course, and to how political responsibility is figured in contemporary western democracies. Drawing on theories of new media as an affective site in which life unfolds, rather than being represented, the paper concludes by reflecting on how Wendy Chun's argument that networks involve the twinning of habituation and crisis mirrors Thunberg's argument that action on climate change demands that habitual ways of living and acting must be rethought in response to the climate crisis.

Martin Luis Guzman was many things throughout his career in twentieth-century Mexico: a soldier in Pancho Villa's revolutionary army, a journalist-in-exile, one of the most esteemed novelists and scholars of the revolutionary era, and an elder statesman and politician. In The Man Who Wrote Pancho Villa, we see the famous author as he really was: a careful craftsman of his own image and legacy. His five-volume biography of Villa propelled him to the heights of Mexican cultural life, and thus began his true life's work. Nicholas Cifuentes-Goodbody shapes this study of Guzman through the lens of "life writing" and uncovers a tireless effort by Guzman to shape his public image. The Man Who Wrote Pancho Villa places Guzman's work in a biographical context, shedding light on the immediate motivations behind his writing in a given moment and the subsequent ways in which he rewrote or repackaged the material. Despite his efforts to establish a definitive reading of his life and literature, Guzman was unable to control that interpretation as audiences became less tolerant of the glaring omissions in his self-portrait.

Much of the focus on truth in critical responses to the novel has surrounded the use of archival evidence and the access to truth provided by the graphic medium. This article will explore these issues as well as the relationship to truth established by the text's metafictional devices and interactions with genre, particularly the genre of the Bildungsroman. This article will analyse the commentary the text provides not just on its own relationship to truth, but the role of truth in autobiographical texts in general, and in women's and other marginalised groups' autobiographical texts in particular. In the context of a critical landscape in which the veracity of autobiographical work by women is often subject to skeptical criticism, this article will argue that Fun Home acts, not as an exception to the genre of autobiography, but as a commentary on gap between the presumed autobiographical pact and the historical, political, and aesthetic reality of autobiographical works.

The article explores Dubravka Ugrešić's ongoing project of interrogating and challenging different constructions of Europe from the perspective of "minor transnationalism", focusing on the relationship between European minority cultures and the West. She has developed a hybrid form of political life writing that I call the autobiographical fragment, which mixes autobiography, personal essay, cultural criticism, travel writing, autoethnography, epistolarity, and diary. I argue that the autobiographical fragment is uniquely suited to address the discontinuities and ruptures of history, experience, and memory that have accompaniedEurope's post-communist transformations. In the texts that I examine, including "Have a Nice Day: From the Balkan War to the American Dream", "The Culture of Lies", "Thank You For Not Reading", and "Nobody's Home", she confronts the trauma of ethnic and gendered violence and integrates the personal and the "global", linking the former Yugoslavia, present-day Croatia, the European Union, the United States, and the globalized cultural marketplace.

Novelist, short story writer and poet Christina Liddell (née Fraser Tytler) (1848-1927) is one of the many neglected non-canonical women writers of the nineteenth century. Despite her fame during her day and her familial and professional connections to Victorian celebrities, including Julia Margaret Cameron, she is now relatively unknown and no study of her currently exists. She is herself a silence in the archive. It was Christina who introduced her artistic younger sister Mary to 'England's Michelangelo' George Frederic Watts, facilitating and remaining at the heart of one of Victorian Britain's most famous conjugal creative partnerships. Indeed, George called for Christina on his deathbed, and she is now buried beside the couple. This article explores their unconventional triangular relationship and analyses evidence of their eroticised interfamilial creative partnership, which reconfigured hegemonic family structures and represented a progressive if not radical approach to gender and marital politics. Through a reading of Mary's private diaries alongside her published biography or quasi-hagiography of her husband, this article investigates censorship, suppression and silence in the form of textual subtexts, ambiguous intimacy, dying words and hallucinations, secret parentage, missing diary pages and posthumous interventions. It addresses omissions in auto/biography and in the archive, bringing previously unseen material to light and illuminating institutional silence. Combining literary, art historical and theoretical perspectives, it analyses neglected diaries, auto/biography and letters alongside poetry, paintings and photographs in order to offer insight into the untold complexities of Victorian familial relationships and sexualities. This article uses Victorian women's life writing to explore the complex interconnections of married couples, adult sisters and sibling-in-laws, offering a broader understanding of filial bonds, conjugal arrangements and eroticised relationships in the long nineteenth century.

This article explores American visual artist Mary Kelly's autobiographical work Post-partum document in reference to the politics of life writing. Resorting to Lacanian psychoanalysis, a pastiche of scientific narratives and other (auto-)narrative strategies, in her work Kelly documented the first five years of her son's life from his weaning from the breast until the day when he wrote his name. By documenting her child's development, the artist also recorded the process of her own formation as a maternal subject, a formation gradually worked out through an evolving relationship with her son. In her work, the artist made vivid the incompatibility and limitations of various narrative frameworks in retelling a fundamentally relational experience that verges on the mental and bodily, and which is necessarily mediated by the patriarchal ideology. This article analyses Kelly's conflicting narrative strategies that fail to successfully represent the mother-child formative relationship and which demonstrate the mother's ideological alienation. It reads Kelly's work politically, exploring the ways in which Post-partum document's (auto-)narrative voices address questions and dilemmas of the feminine/maternal subject, the subject's formation, and the limits of its (self-) representation within patriarchy. The article argues that Kelly challenges the traditional autobiographic genre by attending to her lived experience as a mother and the culturally repressed maternal desire.

It is nowadays evident that the West's civilising, eugenic zeal have had a devastating impact on all aspects of the Indigenous-Australian community tissue, not least the lasting trauma of the Stolen Generations. The latter was the result of the institutionalisation, adoption, fostering, virtual slavery and sexual abuse of thousands of mixed-descent children, who were separated at great physical and emotional distances from their Indigenous kin, often never to see them again. The object of State and Federal policies of removal and mainstream absorption and assimilation between 1930 and 1970, these lost children only saw their plight officially recognised in 1997, when the Bringing Them Home report was published by the Federal government. The victims of forced separation and migration, they have suffered serious trans-generational problems of adaptation and alienation in Australian society, which have been not only documented from the outside in the aforementioned report but also given shape from the inside of and to Indigenous-Australian literature over the last three decades. The following addresses four Indigenous Western-Australian writers within the context of the Stolen Generations, and deals particularly with the semi-biographical fiction by the Nyoongar author Kim Scott, which shows how a very liminal hybrid identity can be firmly written in place yet. Un-writing past policies of physical and 'epistemic' violence on the Indigenous Australian population, his fiction addresses a way of approaching Australianness from an Indigenous perspective as inclusive, embracing transculturality within the nation-space.

The interventional life writings of second generation life writers (young, black, middleclass South Africans) in post-apartheid South Africa have not attracted much academic debate in spite of the burgeoning of such writings recently. The intersection of race, class and gender in post-apartheid South Africa remains a problem and a rich site of research, hence this research's reading of four selected life writings by young, black, middle-class South Africans living in post-apartheid South Africa: Fred Khumalo's Touch My Blood: The Early Years (2006), Malaika Wa Azania's Memoires of a Born Free: Reflections on the Rainbow Nation (2014), Khaya Dlanga's To Quote Myself (2015) and Tumi Morake's And Then Mama Said… Words That Set My Life Alight (2018). Using the intersectional approach, the study explores the lives narrated by second generation South Africans, in a manner similar to the grand narratives because of their historical and social context. The study focalises life/self-writers who have experienced post-apartheid trauma of being racialized, gendered and classed in a democratic country. This is a shift from the staple analysis of lives of political struggle against apartheid, narrated by historical legends such as Nelson Mandela. The study then, by focusing on 'small voices' closes a critical gap created by over-attention paid to grand narratives in South African life writing. Self-narrations by young, black, middle-class South Africans emerge not only as a way of narrating history but also as a means of making history. Through the deployment of the intersectional approach (the interconnectedness of inequalities) to analyse the systems of oppression associated with democratic South Africa, the four selected interventional life writers reveal how their experiences and identities are an outcome of constantly renegotiating power relations. ; Thesis (MA) -- Faculty of Humanities, Social Sciences and Law, 2020

This article seeks to broaden literary and historical approaches to poetry written by Charles d'Orléans (circa 1433–1440) and Théophile de Viau (1623–1626) by focussing on their respective achievements as prison poets in dialogue with the outside world; it examines the precise impact of each writer's verse epistles in terms of rhetorical strategies associated with the figure of the prisoner for targeted and pragmatic purposes; it defines and analyzes each writer's affective means of rhetorical persuasion in evoking the consolations of memory and friendship to mitigate suffering and, most importantly, in addressing specific recipients and readers of his verse. In these ways both poets insist on an underlying truth to life in one of the most artificial, yet neglected, forms of life writing: verse epistles read as instrumental forms of political lobbying and self defence. The artistic quality of their work has ensured that both poets are still known and read. What has not so far been made apparent is how both poets secured their freedom by appealing as prisoners to specific readers of their verse epistles. Their choice of genre and the external evidence of the earliest witnesses to their texts make these prisoners' poems invaluable case studies for life writing.

This thesis analyzes of three US Presidents' understandings of self and power as reflected in their life writing. The scope of this thesis is limited to the period between the years 1989-2009, during which George H. W. Bush (1989-1993), Bill Clinton (1993-2001), and George W. Bush (2001-2009) served respectively. Now defined as the post-Cold War era, during these presidents' administrations, "hostility against communism" gave way to the "War on Terror." Acknowledging that current American politics and foreign policies were shaped during these two decades, this thesis examines the notion of power in relation to the subject position of the president. In their autobiographical works, All the Best: My Life in Letters and Other Writings (2013), My Life (2004), and Decision Points (2010) George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush attempt to reassert their power, which ended with their presidency and was diminished by media images and criticisms. In doing so, they revere the ideology of values such as individualism, democracy, freedom, and religious morality, which are identified with national and international American policies. Chapter I offers a close reading of these three works as presidential life writing and analyzes the self in relation to a nationalist American identity. Chapter II further studies the core nature of presidents' power in relation to America as a superpower. The power invested in presidents is often used in a way that exposes efforts of maintaining a public image (or self) and agreeing with preconceived practices; public opinion and American values are instrumental in making decisions regarding interactions with Middle Eastern countries, and presidential actions often show compliance with former presidential actions. Thus, such power requires justification. These presidents' exercise of power in their authorship reflects an attempt to influence historical perceptions, and contend and rationalize their former power. ; Bu tez, üç ABD Başkanı'nın özyaşam öykülerinde yansıtılan öz benlik ve güç anlayışlarının bir analizidir. Bu tezin kapsamı, sırasıyla George H. W. Bush (1989- 1993), Bill Clinton (1993-2001) ve George W. Bush'un (2001-2009) Amerikan başkanlığını yaptıkları 1989-2009 yılları arasındaki süre ile sınırlıdır. Soğuk Savaş sonrası dönem olarak tanımlanan bu başkanların yönetimleri sırasındaki dönemde, "komünizme karşı düşmanlık" yerini "teröre karşı savaş" kavramına bıraktı. Günümüz Amerikan iç ve dış politikalarının bu yirmi yıl boyunca şekillendiğini göz önünde bulundurarak, bu tez güç kavramını Amerikan başkanı öznesine ilişkin olarak inceler. All the Best: My Life in Letters and Other Writings (2013), My Life (2004), ve Decision Points (2010) adlı otobiyografik çalışmalarında, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton ve George W. Bush'un başkanlıklarıyla sona eren ve medya imgeleri ve eleştirileriyle azalan güçlerini yeniden kazanmaya çalıştıkları savunulmaktadır. Bunu yaparken de ulusal ve uluslararası boyutta Amerikan politikalarıyla özdeşleşen bireycilik, demokrasi, özgürlük, ve dine dayalı ahlak gibi değerlerin ideolojisini kutsamaktadırlar. Birinci bölümde bu üç eser başkanların özyaşam öyküsü olarak incelenmektedir ve benlik milliyetçi bir Amerikan kimliği ile ilişkili olarak analiz edilmektedir. İkinci bölümde ise başkanların gücünün temel niteliği Amerika'nın bir süper güç olması ile ilişkili olarak analiz edilmektedir. Başkanlara verilen güç, genellikle toplumdaki imajını (veya benliğini) koruma ve önceki uygulamalara ters düşmeme çabalarını gösterecek şekilde kullanılır; kamuoyu ve Amerikan değerleri Orta Doğu ülkeleriyle ilişkiler konusundaki kararlarda etkilidir ve başkanlık faaliyetleri genellikle eski başkanlık eylemleriyle uyum gösterir. Dolayısıyla, böyle bir güç gerekçelendirme gerektirir. Başkanların yazar olarak otonom güçlerini kullanmaları, tarihsel algıları etkileme ve eski güçlerini savunma ve rasyonelleştirme girişimlerini yansıtmaktadır.

T.-p. to v.1 in red & black. ; Paged continuously. ; Mode of access: Internet. ; Limited ed. of 300 copies: this is no. 1. p.113-128: A political romance, written by Sterne in 1759, but for private reasons suppressed.

Life Writing and Political Memoir – Lebenszeugnisse und Politische Memoiren bietet Analysen politischer Memoiren aus dem 19. Und 20. Jahrhundert. Der Band fragt wie diese sowohl von historischen, als auch von medialen Diskursen geformt werden bzw. diese selber formen. Zehn Fallstudien von Lebenszeugnissen direkter oder indirekter politischer Akteure bilden die Grundlage für die Untersuchung nach postmodernen Gesichtspunkten. Die Autoren identifizieren diskursive Widersprüche und legen dadurch die Artifizialität und Nicht-Faktizität von solchen kulturellen Produkten offen. Durch dieses Vorgehen beleuchten die Aufsätze nicht nur vergangene methologische Mängel in der historischen Recherche, sondern beschreiben wie bewusste und unbewusste Motivationen politischer Memoirenschreiber diskursiv eine bestimmte Identität zu konstituieren helfen. ; Life Writing and Political Memoir – Lebenszeugnisse und Politische Memoiren aims at analyzing political memoirs from the 19th and 20th centuries. How is it that they both shape and are shaped by historical and media discourses? This interdisciplinary volume provides ten case studies of life writing produced by political actors through the light of a post-modernist approach. The authors identify the discursive points of contradiction that reveal the artificiality and non-factuality of such cultural products. By doing so, this edited volume sheds light not only on past methodological shortages in history research but also on the conscious or unconscious motivations of political memoir writers discursively constructing a certain identity.

This article seeks to broaden literary and historical approaches to poetry written by Charles d'Orléans (circa 1433–1440) and Théophile de Viau (1623–1626) by focussing on their respective achievements as prison poets in dialogue with the outside world; it examines the precise impact of each writer's verse epistles in terms of rhetorical strategies associated with the figure of the prisoner for targeted and pragmatic purposes; it defines and analyzes each writer's affective means of rhetorical persuasion in evoking the consolations of memory and friendship to mitigate suffering and, most importantly, in addressing specific recipients and readers of his verse. In these ways both poets insist on an underlying truth to life in one of the most artificial, yet neglected, forms of life writing: verse epistles read as instrumental forms of political lobbying and self defence. The artistic quality of their work has ensured that both poets are still known and read. What has not so far been made apparent is how both poets secured their freedom by appealing as prisoners to specific readers of their verse epistles. Their choice of genre and the external evidence of the earliest witnesses to their texts make these prisoners' poems invaluable case studies for life writing.