'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)
Only literary material within AustLit's scope individually indexed. Other material in this issue includes:
Malala Yousafzai, Life Narrative and Collaborative Archive by Kate Douglas
Witnessing Moral Compromise : 'Privilege', Judgement and Holocaust Testimony by Adam Brown
'A Thing My Happen and be a Total Lie': Artifice and Trauma in Tim O'Brien's Magical Realist Life Writing by Jo Lnagdon
Forms of Resistance : Uses of Memoir, Theory, and Fiction in Trans Life Writing by Juliet Jacques
'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)
'Alice Pung’s postmemoir of the after-effects of political violence maps a discursive trajectory from (1) her father’s survivor memory of the Cambodian genocide, to (2) her own postmemory as a second-generation Asian-Australian, to (3) the latter’s remediation as social memory within the Australian (trans)national imaginary. Hirsch describes the family as ‘the privileged site of the memorial transmission’ of trauma. In Her Father’s Daughter, Pung parallels the heroic narrative of her father’s survival of ‘a real and bloody social revolution’ (HFD, 48) with the more modest narrative of her own embodied travails with ‘authentic feeling’ (21) regarding her affective connectivity with her extended family and the cultural and geographical landscapes they inhabited. Her postmemorial journey is one into her own heart, variously described as ‘a deformed dumpling’ (28) and ‘rotting fruit’ (32). Literary texts such as Pung’s can bring about the timely reanimation of the post-settler state’s archives through investing them with familial forms of mediation and aesthetic expression. In Her Father’s Daughter, disaporic subjectivity is articulated through the mapping of transnational and transgenerational histories.' (Publication abstract)
'This work of non-fiction struggles with the technical and ethical difficulties of representing the former Yugoslavia, an area that has experienced deep trauma and that is at a remove from the author’s experience. The author-narrator confronts the challenges of representing others’ trauma in an oblique way: focusing on his own life in Melbourne and his responses to Yugoslavia’s past; critiquing narrative forms and particular literary works that represent the trauma, namely those of the Bosnian-American writers Aleksandar Hemon and Semezdin Mehmedinović; and acknowledging the vexed framework of the creative-writing PhD for which the reflection was produced.' (Publication abstract)
