Live Writing in Times of Crisis

Cluster Introduction: Life Writing in Times of Crisis

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.21827/ejlw.14.42763

Keywords:

editorial

Abstract

We are pleased to present a special cluster of articles inspired by the IABA conference held in Warsaw from July 5–8, 2023, at the University of Warsaw. The conference, titled Life-Writing in Times of Crisis, also lends its name to this collection. During the conference, numerous thought-provoking presentations explored how experiences of crisis are documented in autobiographical literature. Contemporary crises can unfold on a collective scale — encompassing war, genocide, pandemics, or economic hardships such as inflation, unemployment, and housing instability — or on an individual level, involving illness, bereavement, imprisonment, forced confinement, hunger, homelessness, or involuntary displacement. These are all circumstances of unwanted change, sudden rupture, and discontinuity that often give rise to a sense of living in an unfamiliar, radically altered world. In such moments, various forms of life-writing emerge — diaries, memoirs, letters — many of which are represented in this cluster.

Author Biographies

Teresa Bruś , University of Wrocław

Teresa Bruś is associate professor at University of Wrocław, Poland. Her major fields of research include visual culture, interactions of photography and literature, life-writing, poetics of the essay, and modernism. She has published extensively on various aspects of life-writing and photography. Her most recent papers are on interiorography, text/image hybridity in life-writing, experiments with images and writing, and the concept of dust in life-writing by Patti Smith. She is the author of Life Writing as Self-Collecting in the 1930s: Cecil Day Lewis and Louis MacNeice (University of Wrocław Press 2012) and Face Forms in Life-Writing of the Interwar Years (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023).

Paweł Rodak, University of Warsaw

Paweł Rodak is a historian of Polish culture, professor at the Institute of Polish Culture, University of Warsaw. His main publications: Wizje kultury pokolenia wojennego [Visions of Culture in the War Generation] (2000); Pismo, książka, lektura. Rozmowy [Writing, Book, Lecture. Conversations with Jacques Le Goff, Roger Chartier, Jean Hébrard, Daniel Fabre, Philippe Lejeune] (2009); Między zapisem a literaturą. Dziennik polskiego pisarza w XX wieku (Żeromski, Nałkowska, Dąbrowska, Gombrowicz, Herling-Grudziński)  [Between the Written Practice of Everyday Life and Literature. Polish Writer’s Diary in the 20th Century] (2011). Head of the research project "Życie pisane na konkurs. Praktyki pamiętnikarskie w Polsce 1918-1939 (analiza – recepcja – znaczenie)" [Life writing competitions. Memoir-writing practices in Poland 1918-1939 (analysis - reception - meaning)].

Published

2025-07-10

Issue

Vol. 14 (2025): EJLW

Section

Live Writing in Times of Crisis

Copyright (c) 2025 Teresa Bruś , Paweł Rodak

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