Writing the Self ENGLISH STUDIES 5 Giulia Grillo Mikrut Mikrut Shands Grillo by Pattanaik W Giulia Edited R
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Writing the Self Writing Recent discussions of autobiographical writing have led to a new terminology (autographies, autre-biographies, nou- velle autobiographie, autofi ction, faction, égolittérature, cir- confession), and current approaches to autobiography and autofi ction suggest that this literary fi eld off ers a re- newal and even a revolution of life-writing. Exploring autobiographical expression from diff erent perspectives, the thirty essays in this book were presented at an inter- national conference held at Södertörn University in 2014. Shands, Grillo Mikrut, Pattanaik & Ferreira-Meyers (eds.) & Ferreira-Meyers Pattanaik Mikrut, Grillo Shands, As the essays in this anthology suggest, literary critics and authors alike are rethinking autobiographical writing and its defi nitions. Th rough the variety of papers, this Writing anthology off ers a thought-provoking overview of diff erent approaches to autobiography and autofi ction. the Self Essays on Autobiography and Autofi ction Edited by Kerstin W Shands Giulia Grillo Mikrut Dipti R. Pattanaik Karen Ferreira-Meyers Distribution: ENGLISH STUDIES 5 Södertörns högskola Library www.sh.se/publications SE-141 89 Huddinge [email protected] Writing the Self Essays on Autobiography and Autofi ction Edited by Kerstin W Shands Giulia Grillo Mikrut Dipti R. Pattanaik Karen Ferreira-Meyers ENGLISH STUDIES 5 Södertörns högskola 2015 © 2015 Kerstin W. Shands and Södertörns högskola. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Cover artwork: Beyond the Face by Mimo Listerfelt Cover photo: Kerstin W. Shands Cover design: Jonathan Robson Layout: Kerstin W. Shands, Per Lindblom & Jonathan Robson First published in 2015 Printed in Sweden by Elanders English Studies 5 ISSN: 1651-4165 ISBN: 978-91-87843-21-1 Contents Introduction 7 When I Think About Myself: Identity Building Processes in Maya Angelou’s Autobiographical Sequel Alice Godfrey 29 The ‘Absent Presence’ and the Art of Autobiography: Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father Aparajita Nanda 39 Expressing Nonsuicidal Self-Injury: Using Creative Writing and Autobiographical Fiction as Self-Care Belinda Hilton 51 Memory, Trauma, and Resilience: The Autobiographies of Winnie Madikizela Mandela Ben Lebdai 61 Autobiography and the Scene of Speech in Gertrude Stein’s Everybody’s Autobiography Christine Savinel 71 When Worlds Collide: (Auto-)Biography, Truth, Identity, and Normalcy in the Case of Elias Canetti Claude Desmarais 81 ‘It’s Our Shared Memories… The Stories We Tell…’: Politics and Identity in Two Memoirs by Hungarian-Canadians Dagmara Drewniak 93 From Autobiography to Storytelling: The Works of C.S. Lewis Daniel Warzecha 103 Avoiding Self-Centered Fairytales: Autobiographies by Female Singer-Songwriters Daniela Chana 113 Four Moments of Self-Recovery: Postcoloniality, Odia Identity and Autobiography Dipti R. Pattanaik 123 Writing Me, Raising Me, Beating the Drums Louder: Fictional Autobiography as a Feminist Tool for Expression in African and Diaspora Women’s Writing Ebere Nnenna Agugbue Nweze 137 Maternity and Writing: An Expedition into the Ojibwe Land of Letters with Louise Erdrich Elisabeth Bouzonviller 147 “My Mother Composed Me as I Now Compose Her”: Catharsis and Cathexis in Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother? Eva-Sabine Zehelein 163 Like Father Like Daughter? Autobiography as Defacement in Leslie Stephen’s Mausoleum Book and Virginia Woolf’s Memoirs Floriane Reviron-Piégay 173 What’s Wrong with Me? A Cautionary Tale of Using Contemporary ‘Damage Narratives’ in Autobiographical Life Writing Jo Woodiwiss 183 Trans-Autobiographies as Sites for Decolonization John C. Hawley 193 Autobiography and Autofiction: No Need to Fight for a Place in the Limelight, There is Space Enough for Both of these Concepts Karen Ferreira-Meyers 203 The Ordeal of the Soul: Ordinary People’s Autobiographies of Mental Illness in Finland 1870–1935 Kirsi Tuohela 219 Motions and Emotions in Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother Lamia Mokrane 231 “No Shadows Under Us”: Fictional Freedoms and Real Violations in Louise Erdrich’s Shadow Tag Laura Castor 239 “My Own Face as Personal Vanishing Point”: Writing the Body in Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face Laure de Nervaux-Gavoty 257 Female Autobiography and Otherness in The Grand Piano: An Experiment in Collective Autobiography Manuel Brito 269 “Memoir as Well as Biography”: Generic Indeterminacy in Vikram Seth’s Two Lives Mélanie Heydari 279 The (Un)making of a Novelist’s Self: ‘Late Style’ in Günter Grass’ and J. M. Coetzee’s Autobiographical Writing Melissa Schuh 287 Eve Unchained: Christina Stead’s Recasting of the Christian Spiritual Autobiography Michael Ackland 295 Retouching the Past: Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory as Fictive Autobiography Mikołaj Wiśniewski 307 “Life Has Got Awfully Dramatic All of a Sudden, Hasn’t It? Just Like a Fiction”: The Art of Writing Life in Donna Tartt’s novels Pamela J. Rader 315 Sexual Fingerprint: Queer Diaries and Autobiography Piotr Sobolczyk 329 “Glad Rags, Feather-Dusted Spiders and Horse-Drawn Harvesters”: Gender, Truth, and Imagination in Three Approaches to Autobiography/Autoethnography at an Elder Care Home in Bristol Seana Kozar 345 Rewriting Cure: Autobiography as Therapy and Discursive Practice Tanja Reiffenrath 359 Introduction The present avalanche of autobiographical writing indicates that our time has a great interest in questions of self and identity. The culture pages in our national newspapers testify to a critical interest in autobiography. At our universities, new courses on autobiography and life-writing are being developed. Part of an expanding and complex genre, autobiographical texts increasingly attract critical attention, and work on autobiography from a number of perspectives has become a vital area of research, engaging in questions about what is private and public along with notions of truth and fiction, identity and authenticity, as well as in discussions of what consti- tutes experience and narration, and theories concerning the very bound- aries and limits of the genre. New critical methods have been applied to areas such as the new media and reality television as performative genres, and the contemporary study of autobiography encompasses a broad variety of research perspectives. Coming from the Greek αὐτός-autos self, βίος-bios life, and γράφειν- graphein write, the term autobiography may seem straightforward. But as James Olney asks in “Autobiography and the Cultural Moment: A Thematic, Historical, and Bibliographical Introduction”: “What do we mean by the self, or himself (autos)? What do we mean by life (bios)? What significance do we impute to the act of writing (graphe)—what is the signi- ficance and the effect of transforming a life into a text?” (6). In Olney’s view, “the subject of autobiography produces more questions than answers” (5). Not only do questions about the three aspects of the term arise but, more importantly, as Bruce Hindmarsh puts it, they intricately concern “the relationship between myself as author, myself as subject, and myself as portrayed in a literary text” (5). Blurred and porous, the notion of genre raises many practical and theoretical controversies all the way to its perceived uselessness, according to Ernstpeter Ruhe, because it leads to “nullity, as it is neither this nor that” (qtd Garcia 151). According to Vincent Colonna, further, “virtually all good genre 7 WRITING THE SELF names are imprecise, ambiguous or polysemic, even malformed, yet effective and popular generic tools” (399). While gender as taxonomy enables profes- sionals, critics, academic researchers to classify literary works, the purpose of the concept of genre, its theoretical relevance in a way, is essentially to provide a guide for the reader to decode a literary text, to “operate as a pattern of reception, a skill of the reader, confirmed and/or challenged by any new text in a dynamic process” (Compagnon 185). Genre is a discursive convention brought back to the scene of literary studies, by several means, after a refusal on the part of formalist literary theory that dominated the twentieth century, from Russian formalism to structuralism, for which genre was irrelevant since only text and literariness counted. Today, the aesthetic of reception has shifted the emphasis of the theory of the text to its reading. Indeed, we need to return to the notion of reception, a key concept for understanding the rise of autofiction in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Suffice it to remember that genre becomes, through reception, a category of reading akin to what Hans Robert Jauss, in Ästhetische Erfahrung und literarische Hermeneutik, calls a horizon of expectations, a set of shared assumptions that can be attributed to a generation of readers. Annie Ernaux, responding to a question from the journalist of Le Monde, Raphaelle Rérole, stresses the importance of reception. Autofiction follows the autobiographical novel, but transposed to our times in different ways partly because readers’ text reception changed. In general, the reader makes an assumption about the type of text while reading. This hypothesis guides the reading; the reader will correct it if the text contradicts the assumption; in the reader’s mind the thoughts that arise might be: no, this is not a non-fiction text, no, it is not an autobiography, etc. To classify a work, it must be read by making assumptions about its generic affiliation and revising