Autobiography and Narrative Resilience

Autobiography and the Autobiographical Mode as Narrative Resistances. An Interdisciplinary Perspective

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.21827/ejlw.11.38655

Keywords:

autobiography, metabiography, war narratives, memory, selfhood, identity, trauma

Abstract

If every human gesture is autobiographical, then autobiographical genres and modes are being enriched day by day by contemporary and emerging disciplines and fields which do not necessarily belong to life writing. When it comes to trauma and war studies, the autobiographical imposes itself in a variety of thematic and structural ways in order to express the subjectivity of the oppressed, not without difficulties. This international and inter-disciplinary cluster of articles proposes to explore autobiography through the filiation narrative, autofiction, the anecdote, the body, the rewriting of the Grand Historical narratives, namely World War Two and the Franco-Algerian conflict, and the deconstruction of such binary oppositions as War Vs Peace and Lived Trauma Vs Narrated Trauma. The present introduction to the cluster will first introduce the genre of life writing in general, and autobiography in particular, by tracing its evolution towards a postmodern, more metabiographical stance. It will then summarize and comment on each article in the cluster so as to highlight their shared thematic patterns and the various findings which are pertinent to the fields of autobiography, trauma and war studies. The final section of the introduction will provide a new perspective on Freudian studies through the lens of auto/biography and metabiography.

Author Biography

Souhir Zekri Masson, University of Tunis, Tunesia

Souhir Zekri Masson holds a PhD in English Studies from the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow (Scotland) and is currently Assistant Professor at the Higher Institute of Applied Humanities of Tunis. Her main research areas include life writing theory, postcolonial theory, women’s postmodern fiction, gender studies and spatial theory. In addition to articles published on these topics both in Tunisia and abroad, her PhD has been published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing as a book titled Mapping Metabiographical Heartlands in Marina Warner’s Fiction in July 2019.

Published

2022-04-21

Issue

Vol. 11 (2022): EJLW

Section

Autobiography and Narrative Resilience

Copyright (c) 2022 Souhir Zekri Masson

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