Introduction: The Work of Life Writing

In English "work" comes from the Old English "weorc," simple enough. Etymologically the Old English word stretches back further to an Indo-European word that also leads to the Greek word for energy and has cognates that lead on to our words liturgy, orgy and zymurgy (an act of fermentation). "Work" has further links to terms for organ, tool, religious performance, and urge. So it's long been a useful term for doing something, for the means of doing something, and for doing things physical ("workout" comes from boxing), and metaphysical. For many academics, whose principal work of thinking needn't be done in a workplace, "work" never goes away: it is a concept that threads together contingent concepts. So what might be distinctive to the idea of work in relation to life writing?

The papers assembled here show how the work of life writing is various, particular, purposeful, and often intricate. One aspect common to many life writing projects is that of the work of recovery—recovering voices, especially those belonging to people vulnerable to oppression and oblivion. Life writers work to translate and mediate the lived experience of their subjects into a medium that features sometimes tangentially in academia, in both good and less good ways. Life writing scholars may themselves be variously employed, so that their obligations in their work pre-construct models of definition. Some work as teachers and researchers; some are independent of academia; some are creative writers whose affiliations may or may not be to academia; some are employed in explicitly therapeutic professions; some are artists. Some are precariously employed; some work unpaid. Nonetheless, it is reasonable to think of life writing, both in the world and in academic worlds, as doing work to connect people across what could otherwise be seen as disjunct domains. Expected outputs differ and are differently rewarded: as Kathryn Hughes discusses in relation to the fences erected in Britain between academia and biographers, lucre may be clean and cultural capital grubby.

"Work" in life writing often involves establishing—and contesting—cultural memory. What Astrid Erll says of cultural memory studies, that it is "decidedly concerned with social, medial, and cognitive processes and their ceaseless interplay" (6) can be applied to the work of life writing. The history of that linguistic nexus which in the English language muddles up the verbs "think", "feel" and "believe" under the umbrella of "know" has led to patterns of investment in each term that make it account for things apparently transparently, yet without being accountable itself. As Charles Lock has elegantly explained, "Among modern languages English may be the odd one out in using 'think' in an apparently imprecise way to mean nothing more than 'I believe', which itself tends to be idiomatically exchangeable with 'I feel'"(Lock 2009). To put it differently, what we think becomes what we believe; what we believe becomes what we think, and thus feeling around belief and thought can sometimes escape scrutiny. When scrutiny is turned upon feeling, it can be difficult then to scrutinize the ideologies that feeling works upon: thus Lauren Berlant's concept of "intimate publics," in which affect performs much cultural work. For Berlant, such work can be redemptive: "To love a thing is not only to embrace its most banal iconic forms, but to work those forms so that individuals and populations can breathe and thrive in them or in proximity to them"(3).

Life-writing scholars are probably and unusually highly aware of themselves as subjects present in their exploration of subjects not themselves: hence one theme of this special issue is the role of the author in the construction of the subjects under investigation. Philippe Lejeune's model of textual genetics offers a meticulous model for investigating the process of literature in relation to texts published, unpublished, rewritten, edited, or abandoned. His working method also allows the creativity and humanity of the critic to become visible. The main purpose of textual genetics, Lejeune proposes, is to study creation. As he shows, creation by writers can also be understood through creation by life-writing scholars as...