Transculturing Auto/Biography: Forms of Life Writing

by Baena; Rosalia

• ISBN13: 9780415400435
• ISBN10: 0415400430
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2006-12-13
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Rosalia Baena'¬"s theoretically challenging, analytical volume of essays, explores the diversity of shapes that transcultural life writing takes, demonstrating how it has become one of the most dynamic and productive literary forms of self-inscription and self-representation. Expanding much of the contemporary criticism on life writing, which tends to centre on content, the essays highlight that reading contemporary forms of life writing from a literary perspective is a rich field of critical intervention that has been overlooked because of recent cultural studies'¬" concerns with material issues. To read life writing as primarily cultural texts undercuts much of its value as a complex dynamic of cultural production, where aesthetic concerns and the choice and manipulation of form serve as signifying aspects to experiences and subjectivities. This book was previously published as a special issue of Prose Studies.

Table of Contents

Introduction : transculturing auto/biography : forms of life writing
Shifting forms of sovereignty : immigrant parents and ethnic autobiographers	p. 1
The hungry self : the politics of food in Italian American women's autobiographies	p. 18
Painted selves : autography in the art of South Asian American women	p. 31
A graphic self : comics as autobiography in Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis	p. 47
"Facts of the mind made manifest in a fiction of matter" : theory and practice of life writing in Maya Deren's early films	p. 63
In praise of art and literature : intertextuality, translations and migrations of knowledge in Anna Jameson's travel writings	p. 82
Autobiographical story cycles as a vehicle for enlightenment : Fredelle Bruser Maynard's Raisins and almonds and The tree of life	p. 96
Paradigms of Canadian literary biography : who will write our history?	p. 113
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