Synopses & Reviews
Women, Autobiography, Theory is the first comprehensive guide to the burgeoning field of womens autobiography, drawing into one volume the most significant theoretical discussions on womens life writing of the last two decades.
The authoritative introduction by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson surveys writing about womens lives from the womens movement of the late 1960s to the present. It also relates theoretical positions in womens autobiography studies to postmodern, poststructuralist, postcolonial, and feminist analyses.
The essays from thirty-nine prominent critics and writers include many considered classics in this field. They explore narratives across the centuries and from around the globe, including testimonios, diaries, memoirs, letters, trauma accounts, prison narratives, coming-out stories, coming-of-age stories, and spiritual autobiographies. A list of more than two hundred womens autobiographies and a comprehensive bibliography of critical scholarship in womens autobiography provide invaluable information for scholars, teachers, and readers.
Review
“A fascinating volume that makes a distinguished contribution to not one but two burgeoning fields of scholarly inquiry. The contributors make skillful use of literary theories, case studies, and personal histories to investigate the distinctive way that comics present and shape autobiographical narratives and discourses.”—Kent Worcester, coeditor of A Comics Studies Reader and Arguing Comics
Review
“This is a varied but well-focused collection of essays that is more thorough than anything else in print. Readers of graphic novels and autobiography will need to start here to learn the basic principles of discussion and terms of discourse.”—M. Thomas Inge, author of Comics as Culture
Review
“Welcome proof of the graphic novel’s multiplicity and bearing. Summing Up: Highly Recommended.”—M. W. Cox, Choice
Review
“Identity Technologies rectifies a gap in autobiography studies by creating a comprehensive foundation from which we can theorize identity in the Web 2.0 world of the twenty-first century. It makes a substantial contribution to the field of digital media and communications while significantly impacting conceptualizations of text and definitions of narrative.”—Ricia Anne Chansky, editor of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies
Review
“There is no other reader like this one on theories of womens autobiography, despite the now wide-ranging approaches to this field. . . . It has the merit of combining within the genre of autobiography criticism many of the critical issues that have been paramount during the past two decades, incorporating and going beyond what both feminism and cultural studies have attempted. Important and timely.”—Françoise Lionnet, Northwestern University
Review
“This volume will appeal to anyone interested in autobiography, identity, media studies, or the intersections of online and offline experience.”—T. E. Adams,
ChoiceSynopsis
Some of the most noteworthy graphic novels and comic books of recent years have been entirely autobiographical. In Graphic Subjects, Michael A. Chaney brings together a lively mix of scholars to examine the use of autobiography within graphic novels, including such critically acclaimed examples as Art Spiegelman’s Maus, David Beauchard’s Epileptic, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, Alan Moore’s Watchmen, and Gene Yang’s American Born Chinese. These essays, accompanied by visual examples, illuminate the new horizons that illustrated autobiographical narrative creates. The volume insightfully highlights the ways that graphic novelists and literary cartoonists have incorporated history, experience, and life stories into their work. The result is a challenging and innovative collection that reveals the combined power of autobiography and the graphic novel.
Synopsis
Focusing on such acclaimed examples as Maus, Persepolis, and Watchmen, these essays successfully highlight the ways that graphic novelists and literary cartoonists have incorporated history, experience, and autobiography into their work. The result is a collection that is both challenging and innovative.
Synopsis
Identity Technologies is a substantial contribution to the fields of autobiography studies, digital studies, and new media studies, exploring the many new modes of self-expression and self-fashioning that have arisen in conjunction with Web 2.0, social networking, and the increasing saturation of wireless communication devices in everyday life. This volume explores the various ways that individuals construct their identities on the Internet and offers historical perspectives on ways that technologies intersect with identity creation. Bringing together scholarship about the construction of the self by new and established authors from the fields of digital media and auto/biography studies, Identity Technologies presents new case studies and fresh theoretical questions emphasizing the methodological challenges inherent in scholarly attempts to account for and analyze the rise of identity technologies. The collection also includes an interview with Lauren Berlant on her use of blogs as research and writing tools.
About the Author
Anna Poletti is a lecturer in literary studies at Monash University, where she is codirector of the Centre for the Book. She is the author of Intimate Ephemera: Reading Young Lives in Australia Zine Culture. Julie Rak is a professor of English and film studies at the University of Alberta in Canada. She is the author of Boom! Manufacturing Memoir for Popular Markets and Negotiated Memory: Doukhobor Autobiographical Discourse.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Michael A. Chaney
Part I: Art Spiegelman
1 Reading Comics: Art Spiegelman on CD-ROM
Paul John Eakin
2 Mourning and Postmemory
Marianne Hirsch
3 Art Spiegelman and AutobioGRAPHICal Re-Vision
Erin McGlothlin
4 Breakdowns and Breakthroughs: Looking for Art in Young Spiegelman
Bella Brodzki
Part II: The Global Scope of Autography
5 Human Rights and Comics: Autobiographical Avatars, Crisis Witnessing, and Transnational Rescue Networks
Sidonie Smith
6 Picturing Oneself as Another
Linda Haverty Rugg
7 Dominique Goblet: The List Principle and the Meaning of Form
Jan Baetens
8 The Animal Witness of the Rwandan Genocide
Michael A. Chaney
9 Autobiography as Discovery in Epileptic
Stephen E. Tabachnick
10 Manga and the End of Japan's 1960s
James Dorsey
Part III: Visualizing Women's Life Writing
11 Autographic Disclosures and Genealogies of Desire in Alison Bechdel's Fun Home
Julia Watson
12 Witnessing Persepolis: Comics, Trauma, and Childhood Testimony
Leigh Gilmore
13 A Story Told in Flashback: Remediating Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis
Nima Naghibi
14 Autobiography: The Process Negates the Term
Phoebe Gloeckner
15 Up from Surgery: The Politics of Self-Representation in Women's Graphic Memoirs of Illness
Theresa Tensuan
16 The Gutter Effect in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's A Dialogue on Love
Carolyn Williams
17 Photau(gyno)graphy: The Work of Joanne Leonard
Domna C. Stanton
Part IV: Varieties of the Self
18 The Diary Comic
Isaac Cates
19 Justin Green: Autobiography Meets the Comics
Joseph Witek
20 Narrative Worldmaking in Graphic Life Writing
David Herman
21 In Praise of Joseph Witek's Comic Books as History
Ian Gordon
22 Selective Mutual Reinforcement in the Comics of Chester Brown, Joe Matt, and Seth
Bart Beaty
23 Keeping it (Hyper)Real: Autobiographical Fiction in 3-D
Damian Duffy
24 Fictional Auto/Biography and Graphic Lives in Watchmen
Victoria A. Elmwood
25 American Born Chinese: Challenging the Stereotype
Rocío G. Davis
26 Materializing Memory: Lynda Barry's One Hundred Demons
Hillary Chute
27 Reflections on Lynda Barry
Andrea A. Lunsford
Contributors
Index