Life Writing and Ekphrasis (Behluli) Flashcards
What is life writing?
- Is “a generic term used to describe a range of writings about lives or parts of lives, or which provide materials out of which lives or parts of lives are composed.” (Leader 1)
- Includes numerous genres such as autobiography, biography, memoirs, diaries, letters, autofiction, biofiction, creative non- fiction, auto/biografiction, etc.
- “The present avalanche of autobiographical writing indicates that our time has a great interest in questions of self and identity” (Shands et al. 7).
- Today, life writing occupies a large space on the literary market and constitutes a vast research field in literary scholarship.
What are some important forerunners to life writing?
- “Confessions” by Saint Augustine
- “The Confessions” by Jean-Jacques Rousseu
- The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
- Anne Frank
What are some modern examples of life writing?
- “Spare” by Prince harry
- “A Life’s Work” by Rachel Cusk
Smith and Watson distinguish between what categories of life writing?
- Life writing
- Life narrative
- Autobiography
Define Smith and Watson’s term of Life writing?
“a general term for writing of diverse kinds that takes a life as its subject. Such writing can be biographical, novelistic, historical, or an explicit self-reference to the writer”
Define Smith and Watson’s term of life narrative?
“a somewhat narrower term that includes many kinds of self-referential writing, including autobiography” —> includes autobiography, memoir, diary, etc
Define Smith and Watson’s term of autobiography?
“a term for a particular practice of life narrative that emerged in the Enlightenment and has become canonical in the West”
Define Smith and Watson’s term of biography?
Non-self-referential writing about life: the author and the subject of the text are not identical
What distinguishes Life Narrative vs. Biography?
Life Narrative
* self-referential
* First-person pronoun
* 2 selves (historical & internal)
* Limited temporality of writing (death)
* Personal memories as primary archive
Biography?
* Non-self-referential
* Third-person Pronoun
* 1 self (historical)
* Unlimited temporality of writing
* Multiple forms of evidence that are evaluated
What distinguishes Life Narrative vs. the Novel?
Life Narrative
* “Autobiographical pact” (cf. Lejeune): key statistics (name, birthday, etc.) of author and narrator are identical
* We read for ‘truth’
* Embedded in author’s historical time
Novel
* Key statistics between author and narrator are not identical
* Suspension of disbelief; imagination and other forms of ‘truth’ (e.g. internal consistencies)
* Not bound by historical Time
What distinguishes Life Narrative vs. history?
Life Narrative
* Personal history
* Rhetorical acts beyond history (e.g. justification)
* Short temporality of one life span
* The writing self is at the center and all evidence, memories, etc. are personally colored
History
* Collective history
* Historiography, truth, etc. as driving forces
* Long temporality of collective time
* The writing self (historian) is ‘outside’ and evaluates evidence objectively
Name four strategies of the Smith and Waston toolkit (Twenty Strategies for Reading Life Narratives)
- Authorship and the Historical Moment
- The History of Reading Publics
- Autobiographical ‘I’
- Identity
- Narrative Plotting and Modes
- Temporality
- Audience and Addressee
- Coherence and Closure
- Memory
- Trauma and Scriptotherapy
- Evidence
- Authority and Authenticity
- Voice
- Experience
- Body and Embodiment
- Agency
- Relationality
- Knowledge and Self-Knowledge
- Collaborative Autobiography
- Ethics
Medial “Others” in W. J. T. Mitchell’s Picture Theory (1994):
“The ‘otherness’ of visual representation from the standpoint of textuality may be anything from a professional competition (the paragone of poet and painter) to a relation of political, disciplinary, or cultural domination in which the ‘self’ is understood to be an active, speaking, seeing subject, while the ‘other’ is projected as a passive, seen, and (usually) silent object” (Mitchell 157)
How and why does life writing rely on visual media, i.e. use intermedial strategies?
- Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) traces the fictional life of a protagonist, whose progressing moral corruption is reflected in the titular portrait of himself. The portrait is fictional and supports the fantastical life story.
- Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando: A Biography (1928) features photographs of Woolf’s friend and lover, Vita Sackville-West, who poses as the titular and fictional character, Orlando. The photos serve as ‘evidence’ to an impossible (life) story: Orlando lives for centuries and changes sex from man to woman.
- Olivia Laing’s visual memoir, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone (2016), culturally and historically embeds the author’s loneliness in a community of queer, lonely artists by featuring nine black-and-white photographs and numerous ekphrastic evocations of their art.
Name the 5 examples of border crossings in contemporary life writing:
- Between media –> intermedial phenomena such as ekphrases, graphic novels, etc.
- Between genres –> crossing between life writing, novels, criticism, etc. –> hybrid genres
- Between fact and fiction –> biofiction, autofiction, etc.
- Between authorial roles –> fiction authors, art critics, academics, etc.
- Between disciplines –> literary studies, media studies, art history, etc.
–> When life writing employs intermedial strategies, you are likely to find other border-crossings within the text.
What kind of border crossing is Diego Velázquez’s painting, Las Meninas?
Aesthetics of border-crossing (e.g. genre hybridity)
Name the 2 examples that ekphrastically draw from the Velázquez painting?
- The Vanishing Man: In Pursuit of Velázquez (2016) by Laura Cumming
- Painter to the King (2018) by Amy Sackville
Explain the genre and intermediality of The Vanishing Man: In Pursuit of Velázquez (2016)
- Genre hybrid: biography, art critical essay, detective story, etc.
- Intermediality: Life writing and ekphrasis are combined to explore not only one person’s life, but also man’s obsession with art more broadly
Explain the genre and intermediality of Painter to the King (2016)
- Genre hybrid: Historical novel, fictionalized life story of Diego Velázquez (‘biofiction’), autofiction?
- Intermediality: Life writing and ekphrasis are combined to explore the artist’s life and, moreover, to reflect on how visual and verbal representations influence historiography.
Summary: Cumming and Sackville
- Both Sackville and Cumming use Las Meninas as a source of inspiration to generate life writing and to meditate on art, affect and constructions of self.
- Through ekphrasis they conjure Las Meninas at the beginning and end of their narratives. This frames their life writings with the painting’s qualities: self-referentiality, genre hybridity, semantic plurality, knowledge gaps and interpretative indeterminacy.
- Hence, the ekphrases of Las Meninas indicate Cumming’s and Sackville’s metafictional interest in the poetics of life writing itself.
- Intermediality, in these two texts, is therefore used to point to a host of other ‘inters’, ‘betweens’ and ‘acrosses’ in life writing.
