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This open access book offers innovative and wide-ranging responses to the continuously flourishing literary phenomenon of autofiction. The book shows the insights that are gained in the shift from the genre descriptor to the adjective, and from a broad application of “the autofictional” as a theoretical lens and aesthetic strategy. In three sections on “Approaches,” “Affordances,” and “Forms,” the volume proposes new theoretical approaches for the study of autofiction and the autofictional, offers fresh perspectives on many of the prominent authors in the discussion, draws them into a dialogue with autofictional practice from across the globe, and brings into view texts, forms, and media that have not traditionally been considered for their autofictional dimensions. The book, in sum, expands the parameters of research on autofiction to date to allow new voices and viewpoints to emerge.
This book is about the metanarrative and metafictional elements of J. M. Coetzee’s novels. It draws together authorship, readership, ethics, and formal analysis into one overarching argument about how narratives work the boundary between art and life. On the basis of Coetzee’s writing, it reconsiders the concept of metalepsis, challenges common understandings of self-reflexive discourse, and invites us to rethink our practice as critics and readers. This study analyzes Coetzee’s novels in three chapters organized thematically around the author’s relation with character, reader, and self. Author and character are discussed on the basis of Foe, Slow Man, and Coetzee’s Nobel lecture, 'He and His Man'. Stories featuring the character Elizabeth Costello, or the figuration Elizabeth Curren, serve to elaborate the relation of author and reader. The study ends on a reading of Summertime, Diary of a Bad Year, and Dusklands as Coetzee’s engagement with autobiographical writing, analyzing the relation of author and self. It will appeal to readers with an interest in literary and narrative theory as much as to Coetzee scholars and advanced students.
This book asks how a selection of South African writers have responded to the period since the end of apartheid.
Autofiction is often associated with humour, irony, and play. Moreover, authors of autofictional texts are frequently criticised for a lack of seriousness or for failing to straightforwardly and in their own voice engage with a given topic. Yet very few autofictional texts are exclusively, or even primarily, playful. Many employ humour and irony to address very serious subject matter. This volume explores how these seemingly opposed characteristics of autofictional texts in fact work together. The contributions in this volume show that autofictional texts often make use of humour and play in a productive and meaningful way, tackling issues such as human rights violations, historical and coll...
This is the first book that reads Coetzee's novels in light of research into his archive of manuscripts and drafts.
Autofiction and Cultural Memory breaks new ground in autofiction research by showing how it gives postcolonial writers a means of bearing witness to past cultural or political struggles, and hence of contributing to new forms of cultural memory. Most discussion of autofiction has treated it as an individualistic form, dealing with the personal growth of its authors. In doing so, it privileges narratives of private development over those of social commitment and accords with Western concepts of ownership and authorship. By contrast, Hywel Dix shows how a variety of writers outside the Western world have used the techniques of autofiction in a different way, placing themselves on the side line...
It is broadly accepted that “terrorizing” images are often instrumentalized in periods of conflict to serve political interests. This volume proposes that paying attention to how images of trauma and conflict are described in literary texts, i.e. to the rhetorical practice known as “ekphrasis”, is crucial to our understanding of how such images work. The volume’s contributors discuss verbal images of trauma and terror in literary texts both from a contemporary perspective and as historical artefacts in order to illuminate the many different functions of ekphrasis in literature. The articles in this volume reflect the vast developments in the field of trauma studies since the 1990s, a field that has recently broadened to include genres beyond the memoir and testimony and that lends itself well to new postcolonial, feminist, and multimedia approaches. By expanding the scholarly understanding of how images of trauma are described, interpreted, and acted out in literary texts, this collected volume makes a significant contribution to both trauma and memory studies, as well as more broadly to cultural studies.
This book explores 21st-century uses of the second- and third-person perspective in Anglophone autobiographical narratives by canonical male writers. Through detailed readings of contemporary autobiographical works by Paul Auster, Julian Barnes, J.M. Coetzee, and Salman Rushdie, the study demonstrates the multiple aesthetic, rhetorical, and un/ethical implications of the choice of narrative perspective as well as the uncommon step of articulating the self from a perspective which is not I. Drawing on (rhetorical) narratology and autobiography theory, the book engages with questions and tensions of subjectivity and relationality, the interplay of distance and proximity resulting from the narr...
Women in Rock Memoirs vindicates the role of women in rock music. The chapters examine memoirs written by women in rock from 2010 onwards to explore how the artists narrate their life experiences and difficulties they had to overcome, not only as musicians but as women. The book includes memoirs written by both well-known and lesser-known artists and artists from both inside and outside of the Anglo-American sphere. The essays by scholars from different research areas and countries around the world are divided into three parts according to the overall themes: Memory, Trauma, and Writing; Authenticity, Sexuality, and Sexism; and Aging, Performance, and the Image. They explore the dynamics of memoir as a genre by discussing the similarities and differences between the women in rock and the choices they have made when writing their books. As a whole, they help form a better understanding of today's possibilities and future challenges for women in rock music.
Autoethnography in the 21st Century offers interpretive, analytic, interactive, performative, experiential, and embodied forms of autoethnography from around the globe. Volume I, Colonialism, Immigration, Embodiment, Belonging examines forms of autoethnography as a decolonizing and dehegemonizing practice in the allegedly post-racial, post-colonial, and post-(hetero)sexist twenty-first century. Contributors use autoethnographic methods and practices to interrogate the dominant cultural practices and political exigencies that have shaped their lives, their arts, and their academic work on bicultural, queer, gender-subordinated, or post-colonial experience. It features autobiographical and anthropological poetics, autotheory, and fieldwork grounded in Africa, Argentina, Australia, Canada, China, and the United States. The book will be of interest to students and researchers in the fields of critical autoethnography, communication, cultural and gender studies, and other related disciplines. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Life Writing.