Search

The following article is a meditation on Ralph Waldo Emerson's intellectual genealogy as traced by Cornel West, highlighting and enacting memoir as a literary gesture central to this mode, and proposes that Norman O. Brown be included in that genealogy. The article also features original research that the author conducted at the UCSC Norman O. Brown archive, with special attention given to his lecture series, "The Challenge of Islam: The Prophetic Tradition" (1980–1981). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article challenges the consensus that silences about mental disorders are there to be broken. While silence in mental disorders can be painful, even deadly, the consensus rests on an oversimplified understanding of silence. Drawing upon accounts from depression and bipolar memoirs, this article names and analyses some salient experiences of silence in mood disorders. It does so with two goals in mind. The first is to show that mood disorders may involve several different kinds of lived experiences of silence. This is important because even though silence is considered a promising objective symptom of depression, little has been written about lived experiences of silence in disorders that involve depression. The second is to argue against the fetishisation of breaking silence and the concomitant understandings of silence as an externally imposed and inherently negative phenomenon. This is important because some silences are not experienced as external and are even felt to be valuable, meaning that efforts to break them may be counterproductive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a memoir of/for Daryl. A memoir is an historical account or biography written from personal knowledge. It provides my personal account of Daryl, the man, the physical educator, the intellectual, the teacher, and the scholar. In this account I trace Daryl's work from when I first met him in 1981 and the major conceptual ideas that drove his research and scholarship. I discuss his commitment to behaviour analysis, his integrity and his politics. I try to convey the ways in which he thought about research and the world more generally. I also give an insight into Daryl the advisor and, in particular, what he meant for his international PhD students and how, through them, his influence spread across many countries of the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This publication is a fragment of the memoirs of M.V. Neustrueva (1885–1961), written in the mid-second half of the 1950s, and opens a cycle of two articles, the first of which, “Lyosha and Manichka,” deals primarily with the first period of the memoirist’s acquaintance with the future writer A.N. Tolstoy, dating from the late 1890s to the middle of 1900s. In her memoirs, Neustrueva describes her acquaintance and meetings with Tolstoy, amateur performances in which they took part together, and several episodes dating back to the time when Tolstoy had already become a student and was returning to Samara on vacation. The publication accompanies the memoirs of Maria Neustrueva with an introductory article, which reconstructs the biography of the memoirist and the history of her work on them using available sources. Memoirs of M.V. Neustrueva are published for the first time.

The document Impressions of a Juror is analyzed as a personal account of an anonymous author, G.S.N., who recounted his experiences as a juror in legal proceedings in the Russian Empire in the late 19th century. Both external and internal criticism of the source is conducted, facilitating the establishment of the approximate place, time, and purpose of its creation. Furthemore, the socio-psychological portrait of the author is reconstructed, considering aspects such as social affiliation, level of education, place of residence, and certain psychological characteristics. The analysis acknowledges the uniqueness of Impressions of a Juror, which not being a part of mainstream historical sources, remain a distinctive work. On the other hand, it shares characteristics inherent in other personal documents from jurors of the Russian Empire in the second half of the 19th century, particularly regarding its general character, presentation style, and the scope of covered issues. It is noted that the factual value of the source under consideration is limited, as it does not allow for the comprehensive reconstruction of the judiciary and legal proceedings in the Russian Empire, nor does it facilitate a complete understanding of the criminal cases under consideration. Despite these limitations, the conclusion is drawn that Impressions of a Juror holds cognitive value due to its provision of information not found in other historical sources. The document offers details that breathe like into the specifics that were previously only studied on the basis on normative legal texts, and official statistics. Thus while the source may not provide an all-encompassing view of the legal landscate of the Russian Empire, it contributes a unique perspective that enriches the understanding of historical proceedings.

In this paper, I will draw on two twentieth-century French writers and extract from their works their ideas about memory and memoir writing. The first, the poet and philosopher Charles Péguy wrote a great deal about memory, bringing the philosophy of Henri Bergson into realms of daily life that the philosopher himself did not. Not all of Péguy’s meditations on memory are related to memoir writings, and yet they provide a possible frame for anyone who would want to engage in such a task. I will focus on some of his points about time and aging, give some examples from his projected confessions, and relate them to the writing of memoirs as he saw it. The second author, Romain Gary was a prolific novelist, whose works were among the greatest best sellers in post-War France. I will focus on his literary memoir, Promise at Dawn. Gary does not write directly about memoir writing. His ideas on it are embedded in his autobiographical narration, however, and it is these ideas that I shall extract and illustrate. Much separates these two authors’ views on memory and memoirs. Despite their differences, I would like to argue that both authors focus on the ethics of memory and memory writing. That ethics revolves not so much on telling the literal truth, the getting this or that detail correctly, but in capturing and conveying the commitments that have marked one’s life, and capturing them in such a way that they do not coincide with the current pieties about the past. Memoir writing for both authors is a way of responding to the times, a kind of critique of contemporary society.

Abstract: The article attempts to reconstruct the biographies of two prominent historical figures of the first decades of the XX century – Counts Alexander and Mstislav Tolstoy, older brothers of the writer A.N. Tolstoy. Having begun their career path in Samara and in the Samara province, where both alternately headed the Samara district nobility, they made excellent careers (one of the brothers met the 1917 revolution as governor of Vilna, and the other as vice-governor of St. Petersburg), many and productive worked for the benefit of their hometown of Samara and the country as a whole, but after the revolution they were forgotten and erased from Russian history, a slow return to which began about three decades ago, but has not yet fully taken place. This article is an attempt at such a personal return, where, on the basis of rare and unique documents from the family collections of the descendants of Count Tolstoy, memoirs, newspaper publications, etc., their biographies are restored, including both official, public, and personal, family moments. The attempted biographical reconstruction is interesting and significant both in historical and local history terms, and in historical and literary terms – as a context for the historical trilogy of the younger brother of the heroes of this article by A.N. Tolstoy – the trilogy «The Road to Calvary».

This article is a personal memoir of Salvador Bacarisse, a Spanish scholar and academic. Born in Madrid in 1923, Bacarisse and his family fled to France during the Spanish Civil War. After serving in the Spanish army, he moved to London and eventually became a lecturer at the University of St Andrews. Bacarisse made significant contributions to the field of Hispanic Studies, particularly in the areas of stylistics, ideologies, and Latin American literature. He was also involved in the publication of the journal Forum for Modern Language Studies. Bacarisse passed away in 2024, leaving behind a legacy of intellectual curiosity and dedication to his field. [Extracted from the article]

Which experiences, practices, and memories of a contemporary Argentinian publisher become part of their memoirs? How do publishers define their own trajectories? This article analyzes a relatively recent phenomenon in the field of publishing: the multiplication of books by publishers based on their own work, which is a key source for researchers of the publishing world. The present study focuses on the case of Un camino con los libros by Leandro de Sagastizábal (2023), memoirs with stories from 45 years of a career. This analysis defines two main dimensions: the ways in which the narrative is structured, and the aspects of the trajectory and of publishing that are highlighted. This article describes the style of the text; next, after identifying the periodization of the career, defines structuring facets of the publishing work: a) publisher-book promoter; b) publisher-professor/researcher; c) publisher-author; d) publisher-publisher; and e) publisher-adviser-public official. This analysis leads to theoretical reflections that remain to be explored on the ways memories become biographic devices of self-reflection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study focuses on the four books of memoirs by Esther Tusquets: Confesiones de una editora poco mentirosa (2005), Habíamos ganado la guerra (2007), Confesiones de una vieja dama indigna (2009), and Tiempos que fueron (2012). The initial premise of this research posits that, in recounting her personal experience, the author not only reveals intimate aspects of herself but also constructs a cultural narrative. To unravel the complexity inherent in this duality, three areas fundamental to autobiographical writing are explored: the configuration of identity through the narrative dimension of the text, the fictionality intrinsic to the genre, and the underlying testimonial intention of the author. The analysis shows that, although Tusquets writes these memoirs from a deeply subjective perspective, by contextualising them within a range of geographical, social, cultural, and political circumstances, she produces a dual cultural narative. Thus in the course of documenting the construction of Lumen’s catalogue through a series of definitive milestones, she also furnishes a valuable testimony to what the publishing field in Spain was like between the late Franco era and the 1990s when the great international conglomerates began to erect insurmountable barriers to the work of independent publishers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Henri Deslandres initiated imaging spectroscopy of the solar atmosphere in 1892 at Paris Observatory. He developed two kinds of spectrographs: the 'spectrohéliographe des formes', i.e. the monochromatic instrument to reveal chromospheric structures (such as filaments, prominences, plages and active regions); and the 'spectrohéliographe des vitesses', i.e. the spectroheliograph to record line profiles of cross-sections of the Sun, in order to measure the Doppler shifts of dynamic features. Deslandres moved to Meudon and hired Lucien d'Azambuja in 1899; together they built the large quadruple spectroheliograph. CaII K systematic observations of the full Sun started in 1908 and were followed in 1909 by Hα with two dedicated 3-metre spectroheliographs. Daily observations were organized by d'Azambuja who also intensively used the large 7-metre spectroheliograph for his research and thesis (1930). This paper summarizes fifty years of investigations by Mr and Mrs d'Azambuja, who explored various photospheric and chromospheric lines, obtaining special spectroheliograms with the high dispersion 7-metre instrument. They also intensively observed filaments and prominences, reported results in an extensive memoir (1948) and recorded rare solar activity events with the two 3-metre spectroheliographs, until their retirement in 1959. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What happens if international interveners feel emotions that they consider unsanctioned, unwanted and unprofessional? What if they enact and manage their emotions in ways that they – or others – deem unacceptable? If international interveners face anxiety about being 'too emotional' or not feeling or expressing the 'right' emotions, does this challenge their sense of identity? And what consequences could this have for peacebuilding and the conflict-affected population in which they were working? Building on the growing body of critical peace and conflict scholarship that has analysed international interveners at the micro-scale, this article analyses how individual interveners' emotional and embodied experiences influence their understanding and practice of peacebuilding. Based on a discourse analysis of the memoirs of 10 international interveners, this article identifies two primary interpretive repertoires that the interveners employed and argues that they generated two ideal-type subject positions: the intervener as objective, rational, technocratic 'expert' and the intervener as irrational, fallible, vulnerable 'human'. These subject positions determined the feeling rules that the interveners followed and the dilemmas they faced. This, in turn, affected how the interveners perceived the conflict-affected societies in which they were working, and how they understood and practised peacebuilding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Patrick Chamoiseau's inter-generational fascination with the writing of Saint-John Perse (SJP) is sustained, intense, sentient, and highly generative. The focus on SJP amplifies the connective timbre of Chamoiseau's own writing, confirming the relation to the "pays natal" and to the "tout-monde" as central to both writers' poetics. Five moves constitute the high points of this particular realization of a Glissantian "poetics of Relation": the SJP intertext in Chamoiseau's childhood memoirs and fiction; the two-hander construction of SJP's poetic persona in Lettres créoles (1991); the sentimenthèque disseminated across Écrire en pays dominé (1997); and, most crucially, the "Méditations à Saint-John Perse", an oral presentation from 1995 which was eventually integrated into Chamoiseau's 2013 book-length account of his "Magnetic Liaisons" with Césaire, Saint-John Perse and Glissant. The Méditations articulate a critique of criticism in favor of a demiurgic poetics of self-reflexive magnification and esteem even as they perform a dance of ethno-social and intergenerational convergence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay reads Maryse Condé's 1999récit d'enfance, Le Cœur à rire et à pleurer, as a "generational text"; a text that is both about the unresolved and ambivalent feelings aroused by writing about the dead mother, and also about this loss as the site and source of (literary) generation. Le Cœur defiantly rewrites the classic narrative of Antillean matrifocality, and yet, although the mother's death is relegated to a single line, maternal loss suffuses the entire narrative. Moreover, the text is a reflection on language, writing and literature more generally, and can be read as an exploration of the painful transition from preoedipal to symbolic. Words in this text are destructive entities that wound and distort all relationships, but especially the relationship with the mother, igniting a sustained yearning to return to the security of the prelinguistic pre-oedipal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Shy: The Alarmingly Outspoken Memoirs of Mary Rodgers" is a candid and humorous memoir written by Mary Rodgers and Jesse Green. It delves into Rodgers' life as the daughter of renowned composer Richard Rodgers and her own journey as a composer and lyricist. The memoir explores her complex relationship with her parents, the challenges she faced as a woman in the music industry, and her personal doubts and setbacks. With its engaging and insightful content, the memoir offers valuable perspectives on the experiences of women in the music industry during the mid-20th century. [Extracted from the article]

This article is a book review of two works about the German Nobel laureate Günter Grass. The first book, "Günter Grass: Der Schriftsteller" by Dieter Stolz, is a comprehensive introduction to Grass's poetry, dramas, and prose fiction. The reviewer notes that Stolz's personal connection to Grass influences his perspective, but praises his deep knowledge of Grass's works. The second book, "Katalogisierung und Kommentierung der Jugendlektüren von Günter Grass in den 1930er und frühen 1940er Jahren" by Dorothee Neuhaus and Volker Neuhaus, focuses on Grass's early life and the books that influenced his literary output. The reviewer highlights the book's insightful interpretations and its value for researchers. [Extracted from the article]

This article focuses on memoirs by three Australian journalists, each of whom was born to European parents from a non-native-English-speaking background: Elisabeth Wynhausen's Manly Girls (1989), Tom Dusevic's Whole Wild World (2016) and James Jeffrey's My Family and Other Animus (2018). I also discuss Jeffrey's Paprika Paradise (2007), an earlier memoir of travelling in his mother's homeland of Hungary with his northern English father. The article explores the extent to which these memoirs are examples of transcultural life writing, attuned to questions of language and culture. I argue that at least two of the texts are, while one is more equivocal on these questions. All three authors take care to translate their non-native-English-speaking family members' cultural and political attitudes into an idiom that makes sense to a contemporary Anglophone Australian readership. At the same time, they often read familiar "Anglo" cultural norms critically, through a transcultural lens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2018, Behrouz Boochani's testimonial memoir No Friend but the Mountains confronted Australian readers with their complicity in the nation's carceral border-industrial complex. In the five years since its publication, it has been translated and sold into eighteen languages in twenty-three countries and adapted for film, theatre and a song cycle. This article uses a book-historical approach to present a short biography of No Friend, analysing how it has evolved as a noteworthy work that has taken on distinct lives in the nation and beyond. It analyses two significant moments of recognition in the biography of this book: the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards, and the special issue of the life writing journal Biography. The life of this book—its production, reception and material form—suggests the potential for allegiances between cultural and literary elites in the reception of life narratives by forcibly displaced people. These allegiances mark the early versions of No Friend and have been central to its extensive mobility to new readerships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses two recent essays published by the memoirists Amani Haydar (The Mother Wound) and Lucia Crowley-Osborne (I Choose Elena; My Body Keeps Your Secrets) during 2020–2022. By conceptualising these essays as paratext, drawing on Gillian Whitlock's consideration of the paratext as a critical apparatus in an ethics of reading memoir, this article argues that Haydar and Crowley-Osborne are amplifying a broader call for care from Australian authors who write about trauma, illness and disability in autobiographical genres. Negotiating with some of the formal, cultural and generic limits for memoir as social justice, these essays emphasise the cultural value of narrating life stories as well as potential personal and community benefits. In their essays, Haydar and Crowley-Osborne offer exegetical insights on process and craft, but they also draw attention to trauma memoirs' afterlives: to the evolving impact of circulation, reception and promotion on autobiographical life writing and in the context of what Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson name the unstable "futurity" of this genre. In doing so, these writers make visible ongoing wellbeing and other challenges for the author of trauma memoir after the work is published. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why and how do pathways to regime complexes diverge? Building on insights from the literatures on institutional design and historical institutionalism, we argue that early institutional design choices produce long-term variation in the pace, density, and composition of institutional layers within a regime complex. In a first step, we argue that if an institution becomes focal, this increases the exit costs for member-states to leave. Additional institutional layers become a more likely outcome. In a second step, we argue that depending on the focal organization's formal or informal design, variegated sovereignty costs inform the additional layering pathways. If a focal organization is formal, sovereignty costs are high for member-states. Consequently, creating additional institutional layers becomes cumbersome, leading to a slow pace of "negotiated layering" and a regime complex characterized by low density and composed of formal and informal institutions. In contrast, low sovereignty costs associated with informal focal organizations enable a rapid process of "breakout layering" resulting in a high density of mostly informal institutions. We develop our argument by examining the evolution of security institutions in Europe and Asia through diplomatic cables, treaty texts, personal memoirs, and policy memos. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reads Hernan Diaz's Trust as a contemporary commentary on, and reimagining of, literature's entanglements with capitalism, liberalism, finance, and law. Beginning with an outline of the history of legal and corporate trusts and connecting that history to the rise of the modern novel, the article spotlights the complex role played by the notion of trust in Diaz's metafictional text. Trust tells the story of a Wall Street financier, his philanthropist wife, and the ghostwriter of his memoir through a four-part structure, moving from a realist novel called Bonds through two memoirs and ending with a diary titled Futures. This structure serves the aim, reaffirmed in Diaz's interviews, of teaching his novel's reader about the ideological implications of literary forms and about the kinds of power—financial and patriarchal—involved in turning reality into fiction. The article explores Trust 's revision of these forms and the ways in which its aesthetics forge an alignment among modernism, feminism, and financial expertise. Reflecting on the novel's metacommentary on its own values and operations, the article concludes by asking whether Trust 's liberal pedagogy offers a persuasive alternative to the narrative forms it sets out to critique. With its carefully wrought aesthetic architecture... Trust confidently insists on its own autonomy from complicity, reaffirming the liberal idea that art symbolizes, and exists in, a realm outside the market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the period when Erebê Şemo (1897-1978) lived, great events and developments took place in the world, and fundamental changes were experienced. In addition to being a witness, Şemo played an active role in many events of his time. The author's personal life journey, the historical, economic, cultural, ethnic, socio-political conditions of the regions where he lived necessitated the transfer of the author's memoir to future generations. Erebê Şemo wrote his autobiographical work Şivanê Kurmanca in 1935. In the work, he narrated about his childhood and youth memories and briefly mentioned the life of his family before his birth. The author publishes another autobiographical work called Berbang in 1958. However, this work is not entirely new. Because the narrated time in the work is the same as the narrated time at the Şivanê Kurmanca, however, the author got involved in the narration in some places. In this article, it has been examined why Erebê Şemo wanted to tell his autobiography, and more importantly, why he thought it necessary to tell his autobiography once again-without expanding the time limits. In addition, it was stated how much of his life he told, how much he did not tell and why he did not tell. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout history, epilepsy has been subject to spiritual or supernatural interpretations and is often construed as a form of possession, divine retribution, or even a mystical endowment. However, from a medical perspective, epilepsy is a chronic neurological disorder. Elodie Durand's graphic memoir, Parenthesis (2021), offers a personal narrative documenting the complexities of epilepsy. Through a meticulous analysis of Durand's memoir, this article aims to investigate the intersections of crip temporalities and the affective dimensions of epilepsy as experienced and depicted by Durand, encompassing her epileptic seizures and neuropsychological evaluations, as well as her attempts at narrative reconstruction. Situated within the conceptual framework of crip time developed by Ellen Samuels, this essay examines the concealed nature of epilepsy as a chronic illness and its implications as an invisible disability. This study in graphic medicine conveys the embodied and experiential nature of epilepsy visualised through the medium of comics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the concept of queer bibliography and its relationship to other critical bibliographical traditions. It emphasizes the significance of an intersectional approach to queer bibliography, taking into account factors such as race, class, dis/ability, and gender in addition to non-normative sexualities. The article explores the connection between queer and Black bibliography, highlighting the importance of recognizing marginalized voices and the transmission of marginalized texts. It also discusses the work of Ann Allen Shockley, a Black lesbian writer and librarian, as an example of how Black bibliography can embody queerness. The authors argue that a new form of bibliographical studies is emerging that challenges exclusionary practices and embraces liberatory futures. The text also delves into the intersection of queer bibliography and feminist theory, emphasizing the need to incorporate lived experiences and embodiment in bibliographic work. It discusses the efforts of lesbian activists in the late twentieth century United States who created bibliographies of lesbian media. The text also stresses the importance of intersectional bibliography that challenges traditional hierarchies and amplifies marginalized voices. The author reflects on the role of biobibliography in preserving queer history in Latin America and shares their personal collection of books on queer personal writings. [Extracted from the article]

This article discusses two memoirs, "Bad Mormon" by Heather Gay and "I'm Glad My Mom Died" by Jennette McCurdy, and their relationship to Mormon culture and literature. Both authors grew up in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints but eventually moved away from their faith. Gay's memoir focuses on her departure from the Church and her journey to embrace her true self, while McCurdy's memoir mentions her Mormon upbringing but does not attribute it as the cause of her personal struggles. These memoirs offer alternative narratives to the typical stories of either staying in or leaving the Church, highlighting the complexity of individual experiences. [Extracted from the article]

In Egypt's 2012 elections, the Muslim Brotherhood came to power after many years of repression, an unprecedented victory for the country's most active opposition movement. The Brotherhood's journey can be divided into several stages. One of the most important, which has not received enough attention, is the imprisonment of many of its major figures. Long before the coup that overthrew President Mohamed Morsi in 2013, the Arab nationalist President Gamal Abdel Nasser brutally put down the movement with mass arrests. The Brotherhood's members dominated Egypt's prisons, but they were far from the only activists in the system, which also held communists, Zionists, and other Jewish prisoners. This article uses the memoirs of the incarcerated enemies of the state to examine the struggles of these groups inside Egypt's prisons and show how the institutions served as platforms to promote the ideological struggle against the regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This archival piece presents an excerpted translation from the memoirs of Willy Haas, Die Literarische Welt (1958). Haas was a Czech-German writer and scenarist who migrated to Bombay during the Nazi purge of European Jews. The translation, by Xan Holt, offers rich atmospheric and technical details about an underdocumented period in Indian film history. The framing commentary by Debashree Mukherjee goes deeper into the histories coded in the excerpt: of Bhavnani Productions, a studio founded by film director Mohan Bhavnani, and the first film that Haas wrote for him, a controversial adaptation of Ibsen's Ghosts, released in India as Jhoothi Sharm (1940). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that contemporary tales of trauma and healing, such as Hanya Yanagihara's novel A Little Life (2015) or Helen Macdonald's memoir H Is for Hawk (2014), model aesthetic structures akin to narrative therapy approaches used in patients with posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms. Their readers are asked to imaginatively partake in and to distance themselves from these narratives at the same time. This complex reading process parallels elements of a therapeutic conversation. Interpreting the aforementioned texts is certainly not identical with trauma therapy as such, but there are relevant points of encounter. The aim of this paper is to retrace the intersections between exemplary narrative texts and central premises of trauma therapy by looking at structural similarities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In universities, research on Autobiography has not only clarified the general requirements of this genre but also made it much easier to determine the boundaries and restrictions of this sort. Initial research in universities was limited to the intellectual and technical examination of Autobiographies. A reader takes interest in the genre of Autobiography not only because of his attachment to the personality of Autobiography, but also because of the political, social, cultural and cultural elements of the era of Autobiography. The Article examines the Thesis, written in Pakistani universities on Urdu Autobiography at the PhD level so that the techniques and tradition of Autobiography can be further improved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the late 1980s and 1990s, a stream of Cultural Revolution memoirs written by Chinese dissident writers became bestsellers in the U.S., the U.K., and other countries in the Anglosphere. Travelling through transnational circuits of exchange made possible by a multinational publishing industry, Cultural Revolution memoirs were promoted as authentic cultural productions that documented the hardships of life under Communism. This article situates the Anglophone Cultural Revolution memoir in a global Cold War framework. Drawing on theories of Occidentalism, I discuss how English language acquisition is invoked in Anglophone Cultural Revolution memoirs as a pathway towards achieving individual freedom. Through formalist readings, I demonstrate how two emblematic Cultural Revolution memoirs - Da Chen's Colors of the Mountain and Jung Chang's Wild Swans - establish their narrators as liberal subjects through the process of learning English, thereby elevating the central figure of the dissident who crosses the Bamboo Curtain and seeks a new life in the West. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This creative-critical essay tells the collective life story of couples, by drawing together memoir and other texts (film, art, photography, biographical fragments) and social observation. It is inspired by two things: the 'immersive coupledom' (Laura Kipnis's term) enforced by the Covid lockdowns; and a series of recent essaycum-memoirs that have explored the experience either of being single or being in a couple. These books note the resilience of 'the couple norm' even as feminist and LGBTQ+ movements have challenged other societal norms. My essay also examines my own life as a single man, but tangentially, by considering its opposite: coupledom. Unpacking the unquestioned norm of coupledom is, I argue, a way of thinking about the hidden strangeness of our mundane lives--how love and care get routinised, and how the stories we tell about human relationships become true by default. But I also suggest that coupledom can't just be reduced to a story, a heteronormative convention. A couple is, like the human beings who comprise it, a beautiful, maddening, undeterminable mess. Every couple is a social invention, but also a one-off, an anomaly, a dataset of one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Zahra Husayni's war memoir Da (2008) is widely recognized as one of the most successful productions of Hawzah-yi Hunari's Holy Defence oral history project. Focusing on this work and by using a combination of paratextual analysis and close reading, the present article explores the dynamics of meaning-making as a contested phenomenon within the propagandist messaging of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The analysis hinges on the fact that despite the official promotion of this memoir as a tribute to the mothers of martyrs of the Iran-Iraq War, the narratives of these mothers are surprisingly marginalized within the text. Approaching the Holy Defence discourse as a Lyotardian grand narrative, this article raises the question whether in light of this discrepancy, a counter-discursive reading of Da is possible. Exploring this question provides insight into the construction and propagation of meaning in the Holy Defence war memoirs industry in Iran. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the experiences of Soviet mannequins in the 1960s and 1970s, focusing on the account of Valentina Chernova at the Leningrad Dom Modelei. Unlike contemporary fashion models, Soviet mannequins operated within a centralized and controlled system of fashion institutions. However, they still managed to cultivate their allure and project their images beyond their organizations. The article challenges stereotypes about fashion in the USSR and highlights the unique beauty, charisma, and creative input of Soviet mannequins. The research emphasizes the creativity and agency of mannequins and examines their labor through the lens of "glamour labor." The article aims to fill gaps in understanding Soviet models and challenges ideas of oppression and objectification commonly associated with the modeling profession and the Soviet era. [Extracted from the article]

The article explores the challenges and gaps in teaching and analyzing creative nonfiction (CNF) in literature classrooms. It highlights the limited scholarship on critically reading and teaching CNF, with a focus on defining and categorizing the genre rather than exploring its unique elements. The authors propose a framework for analyzing CNF in the literature classroom, emphasizing the elements of narrator, reflection, structure, and aboutness. They provide examples and questions to guide students in analyzing these elements. The article also discusses the concept of "aboutness" in CNF and its importance in analyzing texts, encouraging instructors to contribute to the development of analytic tools for teaching CNF as literature. [Extracted from the article]

This article provides a list of books and films that may have been overlooked by mainstream audiences. The books cover a range of topics, including the experiences of Kurds in Iran, the impact of illegal abortion, and the influence of asset manager speculators on society. The films include stories about hiding Jews during the Nazi occupation, the lives of workaday characters in Portland, and a young Jewish art student helping others escape Germany. These works offer diverse perspectives and shed light on important social issues. [Extracted from the article]

In the 1970s, the India Office Archive within the British Library began inviting the last generation of the Indian Civil Service and Indian Political Service to commit their experiences to written record. Running until the mid-1980s and eventually producing 135 manuscript memoirs, this archive offers a unique insight into the end of the British Empire, as seen a generation hence. This article argues that these memoirs, generated in a time of crisis and fracture within British national identity, are not only vital historical sources but are a significant body of creative work within the context of acute cultural production of narratives of Empire known as the 'Raj Revival'. Moreover, in their acknowledgement, inclusion and direct dialogue with colonial fictions from Kipling to Forster, as well as their own aesthetic form, these memoirs are part of the long tendency towards the blurring of the boundaries between fiction and life writing within the historical publishing cultures of British India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Victorio Hosle called Hans Jonas "the last German philosopher." Jonas' Memoirs connect changing philosophical priorities with devastating life events. The shock of learning of his former mentor, Heidegger's, affiliation to National Socialism, his exile from Germany and his mother's death in Auschwitz, made the conceptual universe of German Idealism, Husserl and Heidegger, seem nihilistic and akin to a Gnostic denigration of worldliness. The brutal wartime realities exposed a callous removal from nature and any meaningful humanism. After soldiering in the war with "Maccabean rage," he subsequently created his philosophical biology of organism, one which respected the corporeal, metabolic basis of life. His consequent innovations in Environmental and Medical Ethics had an enormous impact on the German scholarly world. Jonas retained a lifelong attachment to German culture and "saved" German philosophy by making critical amendments. Later in life he wrote in German, spent a sabbatical year in Germany, received the medal of honor from the Federal Republic of Germany and honorary doctorates from several German universities. The "German" Jonas brought a respect for ontology and nature to a philosophy that was prone to sterile abstractions. The life-affirming "Jewish" Jonas restored an ethical mandate for responsibility for the future of the planet and humankind to a bereft ethics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]