Announcements

Dear Reader,

Five new articles and two book reviews have been added to the 9th volume of the European Journal of Life Writing:

  • Arnaud Schmitt: ‘The Autobiographical Dimension of Brainy Books’ 
  • Jerome Boyd Maunsell: ‘The Writer as Reporter’ 
  • Agata Sikora: ’From Social Performance to Expressing the “True Self”’ 
  • Karina Lukin: ’Voice and Frames in the Soviet Nenets Auto/Biographies’
  • Marcel Herbst: ‘My Poyln’ 
  • Charles Reeve: review of  Pablo Picasso and Gertrud Stein: Correspondence
  • Arnaud Schmitt: review of Sam Ferguson's Diaries Real and Fictional in Twentieth-century French Writing 

See: https://ejlw.eu/

  • Diary as Literature Through the Lens of Multiculturalism in America

    2020-01-27

    This  collection of diary voices, side by side, document and demonstrate how social pressures and literary practices affect people despite race, culture, creed, or pedigree. 

    Based on the diary, the contributors of Diary as Literature write about multiculturalism and intercultural relations during the Civil War experienced by African-Americans and Irish-Americans soldiers, through the lives of Afro-Cuban diaspora, within a New Englander’s cultural clash in the Appalachia, the hardships of a Bengali immigrant in New York City, and the “racial barriers as a false social construct to create multicultural identities.”

    Read more about Diary as Literature Through the Lens of Multiculturalism in America

  • Call for Papers Life Writing in Translation (Conference) King's College London / Centre for Life-Writing Research / 27 May 2020

    2019-10-23

    The Centre for Life-Writing Research is a pioneering group producing some of the most innovative work in the field. Established in 2007, and now part of the Arts & Humanities Research Institute, it enables experts and students to share, research and exchange ideas with a wider audience. We work on all sorts of topics and periods covering a wide range of genres – biography, autobiography, autofiction, diaries and letters, memoirs, digital life writing including social media, blogs, audio and video, the visual arts (especially portraiture), poetry, and medical narratives. What connects us is an interest in the theory, history and practice of life writing.

    It's more that when it comes to writing and reading translations the question of what is wholly normal or truly plausible, of what was really said or written, gets suspended, slightly. The translator asks me to agree to its suspension. To suspend, or to suspend even further, my disbelief. /.../ Which is to say: before we're even in the position to critique or worry over the decisions made by the translator, some provisional agreement has already been made. We have accepted the book in English. We have accepted that the book is now written in what appears to be English. (Kate Briggs, This Little Art)

    Read more about Call for Papers Life Writing in Translation (Conference) King's College London / Centre for Life-Writing Research / 27 May 2020

  • Announcement: Life Writing and Social Inclusion: or, Three Pots, a Lid and a Wedding

    2019-10-04

    Life Writing and Social Inclusion. Or, Three Pots, a Lid and a Wedding

    Life Writing from Below in Europe (EJLW 7, 2018) explored ways in which, historically, social groups previously excluded from full participation in their societies narrated their lives as a way of asserting dignity and the right to be included.  Such struggles continue today.  One such effort, Healthnic, a collaborative European project funded within the EU's Erasmus framework, embeds life narration as part of workshops involving the exchange of culinary, dietary, and IT skills.

     

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  • Notice to the Readers

    2019-07-20

    Dear Reader,

    On behalf of the editorial board of the European Journal of Life Writing, we are very happy to announce that the EJLW has published the first 28 articles of its eighth volume. Since the end of 2018, the European Journal of Life Writing is no longer published by the University Library of the VU Free University in Amsterdam, but by the University of Groningen Press. We are very grateful to the people of the Library of the VU Free University, who have very skilfully and kindly helped and guided us when we first started our Journal. At the same time we are very happy to have joined the collection of interesting scholarly journals published by the no less skilful, helpful and kind staff of the University of Groningen Press at Groningen University, who have expertly remodelled the lay-out of the EJLW and introduced a new version of OJS (Open Journal System). Please note that the European Journal of Life Writing is an open-access, scholarly e-journal, which is not funded by any governmental or other organisations. To support the ongoing work of the Journal, please visit https://ejlw.eu/donations. We are most grateful for any kind of financial support.Another possibility to support the Journal is by purchasing a hard copy of the Festschrift we made for Philip Lejeune on the occasion of his 80th birthday. A copy can be bought for € 30 (Libraries: € 50).If you have any questions about submitting an article or about donating money to the Journal, or if you would like  buy a copy of the Festschrift, please contact the journal managers Monica Soeting (m.soeting@xs4all.nl) or Petra van Langen (ptvanlangen@gmail.com).Thank you very much for your support!

    On behalf of all the editors of the European Journal of Life Writing,

    Petra van Langen and Monica Soeting

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  • Beyond Boundaries: Authorship and Readership in Life Writing. A two-day conference held at Tilburg University, the Netherlands, 24 and 25 October 2019

    2019-07-02

    A two-day conference held at Tilburg University, the Netherlands, 24 and 25 October 2019

    Keynote speakers: Julia Lajta-Novak, Anna Poletti, Bart Moeyaert and Edward van de Vendel

     Conference organizers:  Helma van Lierop (Tilburg University), Jane McVeigh (University of Roehampton),  Monica Soeting (European Journal of Life Writing)

    For more information see:  beyond-boundaries.

    Read more about Beyond Boundaries: Authorship and Readership in Life Writing. A two-day conference held at Tilburg University, the Netherlands, 24 and 25 October 2019

  • IABA EUROPE CONFERENCE 2019 KNOWING THE SELF: AUTO/BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVES AND THE HISTORY OF KNOWLEDGE

    2018-11-23

    June 19–21, 2019 UNIVERSIDAD COMPLUTENSE DE MADRID (SPAIN) 

    Conference Fees:

    PARTICIPANTS AND ATTENDEES: EARLY BIRD 200€; AFTER MAY, 15TH: 250€

    STUDENTS: EARLY BIRD 120€; AFTER MAY, 15TH: 150€ 

    Deadline for Late Bird registration is June 10th. Conference website: 

    https://eventos.ucm.es/26045/detail/iaba-conference-2019.-knowing-the-self_-autobiographical-narratives-and-the-history-of-knwoledge.html

    (Be sure to check ‘English’ in the ‘IDIOMA’ tab on the upper-right corner of the site) 


    The sixth IABA Europe conference proposes to examine the interrelation between life writing and the history of knowledge. Insofar as all life writing is concerned with human self-understanding, it is necessarily entangled with diverse fields that produce knowledge about humans, whether the narration aims at rendering a seemingly given knowledge of the self or at acquiring it, at questioning it or at staging it. Any “knowledge of the self” is inscribed in a broader history—or histories—of knowledge. Yet, to which bodies of knowledge and which theoretical languages do auto/biographical narratives refer in order to gain or communicate a specific “knowledge” of the self? Which historically and culturally diverse fields of knowledge have contributed or are contributing to shaping ideas of “the self,” and how do these fields affect the modes of production, the forms and the rhetoric of life narratives? And vice versa: Which role do auto/biographical narratives play for knowledge production and the evolution of disciplines? 
    While certain fields of the humanities have been widely recognized for their importance for auto/biographical self-fashioning and self-exploration, such as historical and psychoanalytic hermeneutics, the conference encourages an interdisciplinary exploration of the relationship between auto/biographical writing and a wide range of fields of knowledge and of disciplines. At the same time, not least in view of the rapidly growing number of “expert autobiographies,” it aims at stimulating research on the role of life writing in the development and shaping of disciplines. On a further level, the conference aims at sparking methodological reflections on how to go about examining interrelations between life writing and the sciences or the humanities. Are connections to be described as a matter of influence, or can we identify epistemic currents that equally encompass autobiographical writing and the generation of knowledge, scientific, theoretical, or other? With which notion of knowledge do we and with which notion do the works studied operate? Especially with regard to autobiographies, this involves also the question: to what extent we are to distinguish between “subjective” autobiographical and “objective” theoretical writing—if at all. And how is the relation between autobiographical and theoretical writing negotiated by the narratives themselves? Do they confirm, subvert, blur or contest established distinctions between scientific facts, evidence-based knowledge and theoretical writing on the one hand, and individual self-observation and personal writing on the other? What is their “poetics of knowledge”?

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  • Portrayals of the Bride in Screen, Stage and Literary Productions, and Pop Culture Narratives.

    2018-09-08
      

    This is a call for abstracts for an international edited collection entitled Portrayals of the Bride in Screen, Stage and Literary Productions, and Pop Culture Narratives.

    To whatever degree, every culture in the world is different to all others. Yet one figure that consistently features in almost every culture is the bride. The bride is a central figure in the wedding ceremony, a ritual that symbolizes the psychological and real foundation of marriage or committed union and expresses both the promise of happiness, security, safety, protection, and peace and unity in the home and the most exalted aspects of frith—the sanctity of the unionized state and human life. From antiquity to the present, brides feature in stories, witticisms, anecdotes, jokes and in both high and low culture. The concept of the bride symbolizes the promise of renewal and growth of the family and is an important part of social and cultural history and ritual in all societies, world-wide, yet it would seem that there are no published academic books on portrayals of the bride from the angle suggested in this cfp.

    Read more about Portrayals of the Bride in Screen, Stage and Literary Productions, and Pop Culture Narratives.