Joe Sacco’s Australian Story single work   criticism  
Issue Details: First known date: 2017... 2017 Joe Sacco’s Australian Story
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'Although Joe Sacco is frequently present in the frame of his comics journalism, as a witness, listener and scribe, he rarely attaches his own autobiographical experience to these representations of self. Recently some more detailed biographical detail about Joe Sacco’s own life story has begun to emerge in the frames of his comics, particularly in his work on refugees and asylum seekers. One of the least significant and little known facts about Joe Sacco’s life, his childhood as a migrant in Australia, becomes relevant here, extending his enduring commitment to ethical spectatorship, and the visibility of human rights violations, by engaging with this most difficult and intimate work of interrogating citizenship, our own and ‘others’.'  (Publication abstract)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Life Writing vol. 14 no. 3 2017 12015624 2017 periodical issue

    'As my co-editor Maria Takolander writes elsewhere in this collection, ‘Life writing has long been theorised in terms of its limits’. Indeed, one might say that a concern with limits brought the field of life-writing studies into being. The rise of auto/biography studies (the forerunner of life-writing studies) in the 1970s and 80s was in large part a concern with the generic and disciplinary limits of what constituted both auto/biography and ‘Literature’. This was despite Paul de Man’s warning that attempts to define autobiography in terms of genre ‘seem to founder in questions that are both pointless and unanswerable’ (919). Philippe Lejeune sought to circumvent such definitional problems by attending to autobiography as a mode of reading, and (famously) understood the relationship between autobiographer and reader as a ‘pact’ (a formal agreement of limitations). Lejeune’s legal metaphor and structuralist approach, though, was far from reductive. His conclusion that autobiography is a ‘historically variable contractual effect’ (30) effectively draws attention to the limits of proposing limits.'  (Editorial introduction)

    2017
    pg. 283-295
  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon The Limits of Life Writing David McCooey (editor), Maria Takolander (editor), Abingdon New York (City) : Routledge , 2018 16658058 2018 anthology criticism

    'In the age of social media, life writing is ubiquitous. But if life writing is now almost universal-engaged with on our phones; reported in our news; the generator of capital, no less-then what are the limits of life writing? Where does it begin and end? Do we live in a culture of life writing that has no limits? Life writing-as both a practice and a scholarly discipline-is itself markedly concerned with limits: the limits of literature, of genres, of history, of social protocols, of personal experience and forms of identity, and of memory.

    'By attending to limits, border cases, hybridity, generic complexities, formal ambiguities, and extra-literary expressions of life writing, The Limits of Life Writing offers new insights into the nature of auto/biographical writing in contemporary culture. The contributions to this book deal with subjects and forms of life writing that test the limits of identity and the tradition of life writing. The liminal case studies explored include magical-realist fiction, graphic memoir, confessional poetry, and personal blogs. They also explore the ethical limits of representation found in Holocaust life writing, the importance of ficto-critical memoir as a form of resistance for trans writers, and the use of `postmemoir' to navigate the traumas of diasporic experience. In addition, The Limits of Life Writing goes beyond the conventional limits of life writing scholarship to consider how writers themselves experience limits in the creation of life writing, offering a work of life writing that is itself concerned with charting the limits of auto/biographical expression. This book was originally published as a special issue of Life Writing.'    (Publication summary)

    Abingdon New York (City) : Routledge , 2018
Last amended 28 Jun 2024 10:18:35
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Joe Sacco’s Australian Storysmall AustLit logo
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