Project MUSE®: a/b: Auto/Biography Studies - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/483
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in a/b: Auto/Biography Studies.daily12026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 24 (2009) through Vol. 28 (2013)Latest Articles: a/b: Auto/Biography StudiesTWOProject MUSE®a/b: Auto/Biography Studies2151-72900898-9575Latest articles in a/b: Auto/Biography Studies. Feed provided by Project MUSE®From the Editors
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/533702
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The editors of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies are pleased to announce that, beginning in 2014, we will become part of the Routledge Literature Portfolio of journals.We are honored to be affiliated with such a distinguished publisher and feel certain that this partnership will enhance the journal’s position as a leading voice in the lively, global dialogue theorizing life narratives. This publishing partnership will further a/b’s expansion of the critical discourse on narrative analysis while providing enhanced access to scholarship in the field.As a member of the Routledge Literature Portfolio, the journal will continue to draw from a diverse community of global scholars, publishing scholarship on historic and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/483/image/coversmallFrom the Editors2013-12-24text/htmlen-USFrom the Editors2013-12-242013TWOProject MUSE®76172026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002013-12-24The Process: Poetic Re-presentation as Social Responsibility in a Collaborative Documentary
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/533703
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Discussing documentary practice, Trinh T. Minh-ha has stated, “in affirming righteously that one opens a space for those who do not have a voice, one often forgets that the gaining of a voice happens within a framed context, and one tends to turn a blind eye to one’s privileged position as a ‘giver’ and a ‘framer’” (qtd. in Hohenberger 115). I contend as an extention of Trinh’s point that intrinsic to giving is an equal element of taking, and that for practitioners this dynamic highlights the complex dance between self and Other, a tension between aesthetic freedom and ethical practice. This tension is particularly pertinent to auto/biographical1 documentaries that focus on aspects of participants’ lives. Paul John
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/483/image/coversmallThe Process: Poetic Re-presentation as Social Responsibility in a Collaborative Documentary2013-12-24text/htmlen-USThe Process: Poetic Re-presentation as Social Responsibility in a Collaborative Documentary2013-12-242013TWOProject MUSE®461892026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002013-12-24Auto/biographical Ethics: The Case of The Shoebox
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/533704
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This paper discusses ethical issues encountered while making a digital interactive biographical documentary of my mother’s traumatized childhood. Titled The Shoebox, this story is presented to the user/viewer in an online platform. The decision to make the documentary as an interactive piece was twofold. I wanted to explore a digital exposition mode and I wanted to accentuate the fragmented remembrance of the story, reflecting the nature of memory—the protagonist’s memories came to her in fragments just as the digital landscape requires media to be stored and delivered in small units.When a WWI veteran, who has been blinded in one eye on the battlefields of France, drives his car into a tram, he is killed. He
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/483/image/coversmallAuto/biographical Ethics: The Case of The Shoebox2013-12-24text/htmlen-USAuto/biographical Ethics: The Case of The Shoebox2013-12-242013TWOProject MUSE®703682026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002013-12-24“I’ve spent a lot of time looking at these images”: The “Viewing 'I'” in Contemporary Autobiographical Documentary
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/533705
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In the penultimate scene of Agnès Varda’s autobiographical documentary, The Beaches of Agnès, Varda films her “The Cabin of Failure Turned into the Cabin of Cinema,” an art installation she created in 2006. The installation is an enclosed structure whose slanted roof and walls are made of long strips of processed celluloid salvaged in part from The Creatures, a failed movie Varda directed in 1966. In the scene in The Beaches of Agnès, Varda enters the cabin, sits on a tall stack of film canisters, and explains the structure’s history, its transformation from an unsuccessful fiction film starring two famous actors into a physical house of film, her house of film. At the scene’s end she says: “When I’m here, I feel
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/483/image/coversmall“I’ve spent a lot of time looking at these images”: The “Viewing 'I'” in Contemporary Autobiographical Documentary2013-12-24text/htmlen-US“I’ve spent a lot of time looking at these images”: The “Viewing 'I'” in Contemporary Autobiographical Documentary2013-12-242013TWOProject MUSE®1023422026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002013-12-24Performing Identifications, Queering Autobiography: Reading Mark Dendy’s Dream Analysis
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/533706
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The premise is familiar: the protagonist recounts his past in an attempt to understand himself. Narrated through a series of therapeutic sessions, he describes the recurring dreams and childhood memories that haunt him in his struggle to find self-acceptance. These sessions reveal stories of an unhappy youth, hidden family secrets, and a desire to escape small-town life. Interspersed with these recollections are revelations of a tempestuous adjustment to adulthood, including a move to the big city to become a dancer, a confession of sexual shame, and a drug-induced suicide attempt. Recounting this journey from childhood family dysfunction to adult personal turmoil allows the protagonist seemingly to heal the wounds
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/483/image/coversmallPerforming Identifications, Queering Autobiography: Reading Mark Dendy’s Dream Analysis2013-12-24text/htmlen-USPerforming Identifications, Queering Autobiography: Reading Mark Dendy’s Dream Analysis2013-12-242013TWOProject MUSE®1116672026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002013-12-24Ekphrasis as an Analytical Mode in Biography: Finding Vida Lahey’s Romantic “Character”
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/533707
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In 1958, Australian artist Vida Lahey (1882–1968) received the Medal of the British Empire for her services to art. The following year, the Queensland Art Gallery commissioned her to write the first history of Queensland art. By then, she had spent almost a lifetime studying, painting, teaching, and campaigning, accruing praise from activists, artists, and critics alike (MacAulay 11). She had personal and professional insights into a history she helped to shape as a dutiful public figure who was deeply conscious of her responsibilities as an ambassador for art. Lahey was only twenty, though, when she travelled to New Zealand in 1902. There, she joined Isabella Rose Brown, a relative by marriage, and proceeded by
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/483/image/coversmallEkphrasis as an Analytical Mode in Biography: Finding Vida Lahey’s Romantic “Character”2013-12-24text/htmlen-USEkphrasis as an Analytical Mode in Biography: Finding Vida Lahey’s Romantic “Character”2013-12-242013TWOProject MUSE®831042026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002013-12-24Crossing Boundaries: Authority, Knowledge, and Experience in the Autobiography Vida y sucesos de la monja alférez
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/533708
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Spanish travellers to the New World from the late fifteenth century brought back to Spain a great number of relaciones (news pamphlets), diaries, and letters that served as testimony of their exploits.1 Examples can be found in the diaries and relación of Columbus (1451?–1506), the letters of Hernán Cortés (1485–1547) to Charles I, and the relación of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca (1507–1559), among others. Most of these travellers made themselves the narrators and protagonists of their texts, and by using “yo” or “nosotros,” these Spanish conquerors became witnesses of the New World. However, in these historical records, secular female voices and female witnesses to the New World are indeed rare.Sidonie Smith claims
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/483/image/coversmallCrossing Boundaries: Authority, Knowledge, and Experience in the Autobiography Vida y sucesos de la monja alférez2013-12-24text/htmlen-USCrossing Boundaries: Authority, Knowledge, and Experience in the Autobiography Vida y sucesos de la monja alférez2013-12-242013TWOProject MUSE®786512026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002013-12-24Writing the Lives of Painters: Biography and Artistic Identity in Britain 1760–1810 by Karen Junod (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/533709
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Once, Cimabue thought to hold the field / In painting; Giotto’s all the rage today; / The other’s fame lies in the dust concealed.The eighteenth century is often considered the turning point in the modern history of life writing. It was during this period that biography underwent what Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson in Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives describe as an “explosion in both the kinds and the sheer numbers of life narratives” (1). Among these was the emergence of the biography of the British artist, yet its status as a literary genre is as contested now as it was 250 years ago. Writing from the perspective of the early nineteenth century, James Northcote, Sir Joshua
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/483/image/coversmallWriting the Lives of Painters: Biography and Artistic Identity in Britain 1760–1810 by Karen Junod (review)2013-12-24text/htmlen-USWriting the Lives of Painters: Biography and Artistic Identity in Britain 1760–1810 by Karen Junod (review)2013-12-242013TWOProject MUSE®140112026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002013-12-24Teaching Olaudah Equiano’s Narrative: Pedagogical Strategies and New Perspectives edited by Eric D. Lamore (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/533710
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Editor Eric D. Lamore’s “Introduction” to Teaching Olaudah Equiano begins immediately with the historical and scholarly problems that have concerned the critical research of Equiano’s Interesting Narrative since the last decades of the twentieth century. Lamore then observes that previous studies, which focus on the Narrative’s “authenticity … generic classification, usefulness for applying colonial and post-colonial theory,” etc., are all still relevant, but they are lacking any specifically pedagogical applications: Equiano scholarship does not immediately translate into teaching strategies. Pedagogical implementation is important, Lamore argues, because, “meaningful teaching of the Narrative, or any other text
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/483/image/coversmallTeaching Olaudah Equiano’s Narrative: Pedagogical Strategies and New Perspectives edited by Eric D. Lamore (review)2013-12-24text/htmlen-USTeaching Olaudah Equiano’s Narrative: Pedagogical Strategies and New Perspectives edited by Eric D. Lamore (review)2013-12-242013TWOProject MUSE®106772026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002013-12-24Borrowed Tongues: Life Writing, Migration, and Translation by Eva C. Karpinski (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/533711
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Eva Karpinski’s Borrowed Tongues: Life Writing, Migration, and Translation is a transcultural and transnational journey into the human (migrant) condition. Eva Karpinski’s analysis of key autobiographical/autoethnographic texts is immersed in multiple translations. The author deploys a theoretical framework of translation studies to examine how diasporic women author’s life writing of their migrant communities exemplifies modes of self-representation that not only articulate but also reinforce power hierarchies. Shaped by specific translocal, transcultural, sociopolitical, and gendered expressions of identity, such narrative performativities illustrate the markers of difference and the parameters of agency.
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/483/image/coversmallBorrowed Tongues: Life Writing, Migration, and Translation by Eva C. Karpinski (review)2013-12-24text/htmlen-USBorrowed Tongues: Life Writing, Migration, and Translation by Eva C. Karpinski (review)2013-12-242013TWOProject MUSE®141832026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002013-12-24American Autobiography by Rachel McLennan (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/533712
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In this admirable, gracefully written book, author Rachel McLennan sets out to produce a work that, perhaps surprisingly, has never before existed: the very first textbook to focus exclusively on American autobiographical forms. According to the book's back cover, American Autobiography seeks to provide "an accessible guide in the major forms of autobiographical writing in America." Drawing on an extensive range of American autobiographical authors, texts, and central issues, McLennan both skillfully accomplishes and also confidently surpasses this principal objective.McLennan's American Autobiography is the most recent volume in Edinburgh University Press's valuable British Association for American Studies (BAAS)
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/483/image/coversmallAmerican Autobiography by Rachel McLennan (review)2013-12-24text/htmlen-USAmerican Autobiography by Rachel McLennan (review)2013-12-242013TWOProject MUSE®132782026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002013-12-24