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Essays on Life Writing: From Genre to Critical Practice

Edited by Marlene Kadar

Ebook - PDF

Published: May 1992

Product Details

Imprint: University of Toronto Press

Series: Series: Theory / Culture

Page Count: 234 Pages

Dimensions: 6.00 x 9.00

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234 Pages , 6.00 x 9.00 x 0.70 in

ISBN: 9780802067838

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• Description

Life writing is the most flexible and open term available for autobiographical fragments and other kinds of autobiographical-seeming texts. It includes the conventional genres of autobiography, journals, memoirs, letters, testimonies, and metafiction, and in earlier definitions it included biography. It is a way of seeing literary and other texts that neither objectifies nor subjectifies the nature of a particular cultural truth.

Marlene Kadar has brought together an interdisciplinary and comparative collection of critical and theoretical essays by diverse Canadian scholars, most of whom are women engaged in larger projects in life writing or in archival research. In the more practical pieces the author has discerned a pattern in autobiographical text, or subtext, that has come to revolutionize the life, the critic’s approach, or the discipline itself. In the theoretical pieces, authors make cogent proposals to view a body of literature in a new way, often in order to incorporate feminist visions or humanistic interpretations.

The contributors represent a broad range of scholars from disciplines within the humanities and beyond. Collectively they provide an impressive overview of a growing field of scholarship.

Marlene Kadar is Canada Research Fellow and Assistant Professor in the Humanities Division and at the Robarts Centre of Canadian Studies, York University.

Literary Studies

• Literature & Fiction
• History & Criticism

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Essays on Life Writing: From Genre to Critical Practice (THEORY/CULTURE) Hardcover – January 1, 1992

• Print length 234 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Univ of Toronto Pr
• Publication date January 1, 1992
• Dimensions 6.25 x 1 x 9.5 inches
• ISBN-10 0802027415
• ISBN-13 978-0802027412
• See all details

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Univ of Toronto Pr (January 1, 1992)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 234 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0802027415
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0802027412
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.18 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.25 x 1 x 9.5 inches
• #51,516 in Literary Criticism & Theory

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Essays on Life Writing: From Genre to Critical Practice

Description, contributor.

R.G. Moyles is a professor of English at the University of Alberta.

To be more accurate, though not disparaging, this collection of essays should be entitled Feminist Essays on Life Writing, for not only are all the essays by feminist theorists, but nearly all (save two or three) are directed toward an understanding of female issues. In Parts 1 and 3, which concentrate on “Literary Women Who Write the Self,” Alice Van Wart explores Elizabeth Smart’s early journals; Christl Verduyn offers a feminist critique of Marian Engel’s Cahiers; Helen Buss examines Anna Jameson’s Winter Studies and Summer Rambles as an “epistolary dijournal”; Eleanor Ty argues that Mary Wollstonecraft’s travelogue derives its covertness from the fact that she is “daughter,” not “son”; and Janice Williamson reads Elly Danica’s Don’t: A Woman’s Word as a metaphor of the “powerless child.” Only in the last two essays (Evelyn Hinz’s “Mimesis: The Dramatic Lineage of Auto/Biography” and Shirley Neuman’s “Autobiography: From Different Poetics to a Poetics of Differences”) are we offered what might be termed more objective theoretical—less polemical—analyses of “life writing.” This is not to devalue the importance of this collection, merely to suggest that there is an unevenness of approach that is slightly disturbing. The collection perhaps should have been solely feminist (with a title to suggest such) or more accommodating of other approaches (to truly reflect its present title). This reservation aside, the collection is an excellent contribution to a growing area of academic study, and in its comprehensive definition of “life writing” expands our view of the subject.

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• University of Toronto Quarterly

Essays on Life Writing: From Genre to Critical Practice ed. by Marlene Kadar (review)

• Elspeth Cameron
• University of Toronto Press
• Volume 65, Number 1, Winter 1995/96
• pp. 151-153
• View Citation

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HUMANITIES 151 French realist Gustave Flaubert'; 'Longfellow's The Golden Legend (1851), a true Nativity play.' The bibliography of 'Rainbow' begins with D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature: why? Whatever the virtues of this book - and no doubt most of the articles are workmanlike to excellent - it has shortcomings. There is a considerable quantity of shoddy work, mostly transfer of material from other reference books carelessly and without first-hand examination. The obviousness of some of the errors - add Fefine at the Fair, '[Parleying] with George Bulib Dodington,' Vilette - suggests that no very long-term reader of Eng Lit took much hand in the checking, if checking there was. (A comparable, if smaller and more limited, recent project has been the Spenser Encyclopedia, also edited, at least in part, from an Ontario university: its Introduction describes its very thorough editorial procedures , and its list of 403 contributors is preceded by one of 364 scholars, equally respectable, who are thanked for advising and checking article drafts - a guarantee to the user that these editors are worthy guides and friends. It also has, bless its generous heart, a general bibliography and an index.) Moreover, comparing two of DBTEL's source texts, Ginzberg and Fulghum, with several articles has left me with the impression that the style in which each was used was, frequently, in different ways aimed more at giving an impression of capacious scholarship than at writing a useful article which author and editors could fully back up. Shall I, after all this, recommend DBTEL to that inquiring student? Well, probably: her Latin certainly extends to Caveat Emptor, and meantime there are the pleasures of Abel, Abraham, Absalom ... (JAY MACPHERSON) Marlene Kadar, editor. Essays on Life Writing: From Genre to Critical Practice University of Toronto Press 1992. 235. $45.00, $18.95 paper 'Like water, the shape of genres does not really exist, and their essence can never really be captured,' maintains York University humanities professor Marlene Kadar. This fluid image of genre is central to Kadar's own probing of life writing and is a useful concept with which to approach her edited collection Essays on Life Writing. An exploration of both theory and practice in life writing is long overdue. Given the impact on late twentieth-century literary criticism and theory of hermeneutics, postmodernism, feminism, reader-response theory, and psychoanalysis, it is no surprise that what Kadar calls 'the limited and limiting genres of [eighteenth century] biography and autobiography' which claim 'objective truth' and espouse 'narrative regularity' are ripe for reconsideration. Many of the contributors to Essays 152 LETTERS IN CANADA 1994 on Life Writing favour contesting genre boundaries and widening definitions to include a proliferation of texts - especially women's texts such as letters, journals, diaries, oral narratives, anthropological life histories - even court records. From time to time in these essays, the theories of Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida , Julia Kristeva, Nicole Brossard, Helene Cixous, Catherine Clement, and M.M. Bakhtin are alluded to as bases for arguing that 'truthful' texts, like the 'self,' are constructions neither objectively nor subjectively homogeneous. Essays on Life Writing offers a politics of portraits. Ironically - given that this collection as a whole advocates the blurring of boundaries - Essays on Life Writing is laid out in four parts - a rigid and imposed structure that shapes somewhat uncomfortably an extremely disparate collection of essays. Kadar's introductory piece, 'Coming to Terms: Life Writing - from Genre to Critical Practice,' carefully identifies the issues involved in updating life writing to keep step with the evolution of politicat social, and literary movements. Part 1 consists of critical examinations of primary texts by literary women as alternatives to the strictures of eighteenth-century ideas about biography and autobiography: Elizabeth Smart's diaries and journals (by Alice van Wart), Marian Engel's cahiers and notebooks (by Christl Verduyn), Anna Jameson 's Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada (called an 'epistolary dijoumal' by Helen Buss), and Mary Wollstonecraft's Letters (called an 'epistolary novel' by Eleanor Ty). Part 2 includes three essays on nonliterary narratives: two on Italian Renaissance court records by Elizabeth S. Cohen and Thomas V. Cohen, and one on anthropological life...

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• DOI: 10.3138/9781442674615
• Corpus ID: 141935032

Essays on life writing : from genre to critical practice

• Marlene Kadar
• Published 31 January 1992
• College Composition and Communication

131 Citations

Recent developments in early modern english life writing and romance, the ecology of identity : memoir and the construction of narrative, polish-canadian women’s life writing, the liberal‐christian vision in alan paton's autobiography, a taxonomy of life writing: exploring the functions of meaningful self-sponsored writing in everyday life, editorial: labelling our selves: genres and life writing, locating the self : re-reading autobiography as theory and practice, with particular reference to the writings of janet frame, indigenous writing: poetry and prose, transculturing auto/biography, clcweb: comparative literature and culture, related papers.

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Like water, the shape of genres does not really exist, and their essence can never really be captured,' maintains York University humanities professor Marlene Kadar. This fluid image of genre is central to Kadar's own probing of life writing and is a useful concept with which to approach her edited collection Essays on Life Writing.

An exploration of both theory and practice in life writing is long overdue. Given the impact on late twentieth - century literary criticism and theory of hermeneutics, postmodernism, feminism, reader - response theory, and psychoanalysis, it is no surprise that what Kadar calls 'the limited and limiting genres of [eighteenth century] biography and autobiography' which claim 'objective truth' and espouse 'narrative regularity' are ripe for reconsideration. Many of the contributors to Essays on Life Writing favour contesting genre boundaries and widening definitions to include a proliferation of texts -- especially women's texts -- such as letters, journals, diaries, oral narratives, anthropological life histories -- even court records. From time to time in these essays, the theories of Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Nicole Brossard, Helene Cixous, Catherine Clement, and M.M. Bakhtin are alluded to as bases for arguing that 'truthful' texts, like the 'self,' are constructions neither objectively nor subjectively homogeneous. Essays on Life Writing offers a politics of portraits.

Ironically -- given that this collection as a whole advocates the blurring of boundaries -- Essays on Life Writing is laid out in four parts -- a rigid and imposed structure that shapes somewhat uncomfortably an extremely disparate collection of essays. Kadar's introductory piece, 'Coming to Terms: Life Writing -- from Genre to Critical...

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Essays on Life Writing: From Genre to Critical Practice

Essays on Life Writing: From Genre to Critical Practice Marlene Kadar ed. (University of Toronto Press, 1992 ).

Essays on Life Writing: From Genre to Critical Practice

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• Coming to terms : Life writing, from genre to critical practice / Marlene Kadar
• "Life out of art' : Elizabeth Smart's early journals / Alice Van Wart
• Between the lines : Marian Engel's Cahiers and notebooks / Christl Verduyn
• Anna Jameson's Winter studies and summer rambles in Canada as epistolary dijournal / Helen M. Buss
• Writing as a daughter : autobiography in Wollstonecraft's travelogue / Eleanor Ty
• Court testimony from the past : self and culture in the making of text / Elizabeth S. Cohen
• Agostino Bonamore and the secret pigeon / Thomas V. Cohen
• Anthropological lives : the reflexive tradition in a social science / Sally Cole
• 'I peel myself out of my own skin' : reading Don't : a woman's word / Janice Williamson.
• Whose life is it anyway? : out of the bathtub and into the narrative / Marlene Kadar
• Reading reflections : the autobiographical illusion in Cat's eye / Nathalie Cooke
• Dreaming a true story : the disenchantment of the hero in Don Quixote, part 2 / Ellen M. Anderson
• Mimesis : the dramatic lineage of auto-biography / Evelyn J. Hinz
• Autobiography : from different poetics to a poetics of differences / Shirley Neuman.

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Coming to Terms: Life Writing - from Genre to Critical Practice

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