Search

Volker Depkat

Letters and Diaries as Life Writing

In lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of this forum contribution:

The burgeoning field of life-writing studies constitutes a meeting ground of historiography and literary criticism. Historians and literary critics approach one and the same phenomenon from different disciplinary perspectives and with different epistemological interests. For historians, the texts that literary critics call life writing are personal documents, Selbstzeugnisse, or ego-documents that help pave the way toward understanding the “subjective dimension” of history, i.e., the personality, minds, motivations, emotions, and worldviews of concrete historical actors, who made, experienced, or endured history.^[1]

Nassim Balestrini, Silvia Schultermandl

Life Writing and American Studies

This forum seeks to outline a variety of research prospects at the intersection of American studies and life-writing studies. The common thread that interrelates the individual contributions is spun and twisted out of various filaments of life writing theory which productively dialogue with current trajectories in American studies. The contributors to this special forum highlight what they consider particularly significant developments of the interdisciplinary field of life-writing studies. Taken together, they raise issues about representations of the self in film, literature, and popular culture from the vantage points of transnational American studies, feminist studies, intermediality studies, oceanic studies, affect theory, critical race theory, and queer theory. The result is a rich, multi-layered conversation about the future of American studies within the interdisciplinary and decidedly transnational context of life-writing studies.

Silvia Schultermandl, Nassim Balestrini

Outlook on Life Writing and American Studies

In lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of this contribution:

Having discussed five distinct areas of inquiry within life writing studies, we are acutely aware of the various interconnected themes. By way of a conclusion, we would like to sketch three particular aspects which merit extensive attention. First, the fact that all of the contributions highlight the constructedness of life writing can be seen as a call for enhancing our understanding of the mechanisms of self-representation and their implications for the represented autobiographical self and for the multi-genre phenomenon of life writing. The field of life writing studies has been instrumental in uncovering multiple phenotypes linked to medium-specific possibilities and to the contexts in which such content is generated, disseminated, and received. Thus, we will need to grapple further with researching competing and differing media selves, including the roles of curators and adapting generic forms like the scrapbook and the self-help manual as well as the economic backdrop and impact of production and distribution.

Ben Robbins

"Marriages ought to be secret": Queer Marriages of Convenience and the Exile Narrative

In histories of exile and migration, LGBTQ+ people have often entered marriages of convenience. Within these arrangements, a gay man and lesbian woman typically enter a marriage to expedite immigration processes or to placate conservative family members. Most commonly, these relationships do not produce children, and they consequently call into question the pronatalism that is often associated with hetero-normative conceptions of marriage. This article explores the complex dynamics of these relationship structures through an analysis of childfree married women in the novels of two female queer exile writers: Jane Bowles and Patricia Highsmith. In Bowles's Two Serious Ladies (1943), a US-American upper middle-class couple, Mr. and Mrs. Copperfield, journey to Panama, where Mrs. Copperfield begins an affair with a female sex worker called Pacifica and refuses to return to the United States with her husband. In Highsmith's Ripley Under Ground (1970), the union between the US-American Tom Ripley and the French heiress Heloise Plisson provides a cover for Tom's ambiguous sexuality, as well as his diverse criminal activities, and allows Heloise to enjoy a life of aimless pleasure. In both these novels, queer marriages of convenience permit transnational mobility within unions that are markedly non-procreative and thereby occupy non-future oriented temporalities. This article demonstrates how these writers used the alternative temporal organization of the marriage of convenience plot to undermine the conventional structures of patriarchal genres, including the modernist quest narrative and suspense or crime fiction.

Philipp Reisner

Autobiography: A Very Short Introduction. By Laura Marcus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 168pp.

Philipp Reisner reviews Laura Marcus's Autobiography: A Very Short Introduction (2018)