Cirrus@Austlit

'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)

'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)