Beskrivelse
2016 Judge's Statement
By Julia Watson
The luxury of having three issues of the journal this year brought readers a wealth of essays, all with beautiful full-color cover images on patent-leather-black backgrounds, to engage with and enjoy (and the leisure of my recent retirement allowed me to steep myself in them). I was struck by how many of the essays in volume 31 of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies (2016) are located at the intersection of disciplines throughout, and beyond, the humanities, including history, ethnic studies, education, sociolinguistics, and medical humanities and bioethics. Although auto|biography studies has never been restricted to “literature,” our field is remarkable for inviting conversations across disciplinary boundaries for their mutual illumination.
Perhaps the 2015 death of James Olney tinged my reading with melancholy, as it felt like the passing of the era in which autobiography changed from being the outcast, suspect genre of the New Critics, and English departments more generally, to a mode and a set of reading practices that took up writing about oneself as a kind of narration with a long and multi-sited history. The notion that autobiography could be studied—indeed must be read rather than assumed as a “transparent” rehearsal of “facts”—announced in Olney's ground-breaking 1980 collection Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, both supplemented his earlier Metaphors of Self and brought the field to international attention as simultaneously a method of reading and a canon of multifarious forms.
For some of us the complete autobiography scholar, James was one of the most urbane, generous, and insightful critics I have had the pleasure to know. In thinking about The Hogan Prize, I read with particular interest essays that not only cast their nets widely but also anchored their inquiries in scholarship in autobiographical and narrative studies and in critical theory over the past three or four decades. Several essays memorably performed this work of historical and theoretical analysis.
In the Spring issue of a|b (31.2) “The Slippery Simultaneities of Remembering and Forgetting: Memory, Autobiographical Narrative, and the Case of Nathalie Sarraute's Enfance,” David Lewkowich, writing with graceful elegance and erudition, draws on Freudian psychoanalysis, ethics, and educational theory to situate narratives exploring memory in not just the interplay of memory and forgetting, but also in how forgetting “is always more than just absence” (352). Helga Lénárt-Cheng, in “Paul Ricoeur and the ‘Particular’ Case of Autobiography,” considers Ricoeur's designation of autobiography as a limit of narrative identity, as a “logical fallacy” with a “domino effect” traced in her genealogy of theorizing narrative identity, with particular attention to Paul John Eakin's important work on narrative as a “discourse of identity” (368). The Winter 2016 (31.1) essay by Arnaud Schmitt, “David Shields's Lyrical Essay,” directs his concern for “autofiction,” a hybrid genre vigorously debated by narrative and continental European scholars (and explored in his 2011 a|b essay), to how Shields's manifesto Reality Hunger is qualified—perhaps exploded by—his later “lyrical essay,” How Literature Saved My Life. Noting “the lexical divide between French and American theorists,” Schmitt draws on French theorizing of genre to criticize Shields's proclamation that we are now “outside genre.” Terming the Shields manifesto a “genre-bashing” genre, Schmitt defends the necessity of genre (142) and concludes that “genres do not die, they simply mutate” (143).
I was also impressed by the Winter 2016 cluster of essays on “Biofiction” as a hybrid genre that, although by no means new, has climbed vigorously on Bestseller lists in the past two decades by inviting readers to imagine the interior lives of both famous and behind-the-scenes historical actors. In particular, Catherine Belling's stunning essay on “The President's Glands” in Jed Mercurio's American Adulterer as biofiction—and ultimately perhaps autobiographical fiction—rigorously applies narrative theory to his depiction of the interplay between John F. Kennedy's illnesses and the fantasy of his healthy body. Belling makes a compelling case for how this biofiction, in its focus on the body's “provocative inaccessibility,” undercuts the assumed “difference between psychological and somatic interiority” in a bioscientific era (60). Other essays in this cluster are instructively comparative, with Julia Novak tracking shifts in a series of Elizabeth Barrett Browning biographies, and Claire Battershill contrasting the imaginative methods of Tolstoy biographers in the “New Biography” series translated by the Hogarth Press. These richly informative studies contribute to the ongoing project of constructing the history of our widespread field.
The primary focus of several essays was importantly on uses of self-presentation in the context of cultural studies. Heidi E. Bollinger assesses how Margaret Seltzer's fake memoir exploits her white privilege in mobilizing stereotypes of the urban black family to validate her narrative's “authenticity.” Yet the construction of authentic subjects continues to drive much life writing, as Sarah Ray Rondot explores, noting important shifts in twenty-first century examples by transgender life writers narrating their lives as continuous subjects rather than as split between their pre- and post-transition selves. And a recurring theme, coinages for new genres of life writing, appeared in three essays: Arturo Arias makes an intriguing distinction between testimonio and what he terms “autorepresentation” as a practice of gaining agency through distancing in Victor Montejo's important Testimony; Deena Rymhs proposes the genre of “automobiography” for Indigenous art installations that perform a counternarrative of innovation while reflecting on state curtailment of mobility; and Pramod K. Nayar identifies “autobiogenography” as a new formation focused on the human genome and what G. Thomas Couser dubbed the human “scriptome” that pressures subjects to compose “autobiological” narratives.
In this wealth of excellent commentary expanding the model of James Olney's theoretical explorations, the scholarly essay that stood out for me was “Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle: A Real Life in a Novel,” by Arnaud Schmitt and Stefan Kjerkegaard. Arguably a contemporary landmark of life writing (confession: I have only read Book I), Knausgaard's six-volume oeuvre opens up a new direction. Not only is it problematically both a memoir and—proclaimed by him—a novel, but it pressures theorists to rethink both our definitions of and our desires in life writing. Schmitt and Kjerkegaard link several issues in provocative questions: How does paratextual information influence the reading of serialized texts published over years (and circulating internationally years later in translation)? Situating My Struggle in its Norwegian context (where it has sold nearly a half-million copies; it has also been translated into 22 languages) they identify its project as a quest for a reader-directed “new sincerity,” in contrast to “authenticity,” and subjective agency in search of nothing less than intersubjective truth (555).
Schmitt and Kjerkegaard insist that Knausgaard is not narrating a life, as usually occurs in autobiographical writing and autofiction, but rather a self, expounding on “his identity-in-the-making” (555). Because of its paratextual situatedness, this narrative of the self solicits a “double pact” with the reader, one “signed” and the other “at the back of your mind … in case renegotiations are necessary” (561), thus invoking and reckoning with the theoretical positions of both Genette and Lejeune, as well as their commentators. Referencing a later Lejeune book on the “contagion” of the autobiographical pact (Signes de vie: le pacte autobiographique 2), Schmitt and Kjerkegaard assess why both “fiction” and “autobiography” are inadequate designations for the experience of “reciprocity” and the “mirror effect” that Knausgaard's text draws readers into. Reciprocity with the reader can, in Marlene Kadar's terms, “foster his|her own self-consciousness” (572): “we feel drawn into an intersubjective relation with the author, one in which we cannot remain neutral” (569). And they buttress this claim, in a section that is an innovative form of criticism, a third-person “case study” account of a French academic's (Schmitt's) responses to My Struggle as both a responsive, and at times resisting, reader. Of course Knausgaard's extended and intimate narrating exceeds the assumed limits of privacy as he reveals fragments of memory embedded in details of everyday life; and his use of diary-like chronicling is admittedly narcissistic (although that view of the diary was contested in Rebecca Hogan's pioneering essays on women's diaries). But his “seeming to be real” (573) enables his text to connect with readers beyond either objective analysis or voyeurism and “echo our own self-experience so that we can envision our own narrative” (573).
Schmitt and Kjerkegaard's emphasis on My Struggle as “a self-narration, not a life narration” is not only an insightful and provocative reading of this 2500-page tour de force. It is also an occasion for proposing what self-narration is becoming as both, in Eakin's terms, a discourse of identity and the genre of “reality effects” structuring experience in much life writing (573). Knausgaard's paradoxical description of his project, to “combat fiction with fiction” (Book I 218), reflects “overall tendencies regarding self-representation in a media-saturated world” (576) but also reshapes what we call literature at the nexus of multiple disciplines and analytical models.
I find the collaborative Schmitt and Kjerkegaard essay to be an important intervention in a|b scholarship at this time for several reasons. Not only is it the first essay in the journal to take on Knausgaard's behemoth of what must be called contemporary self-writing (in distinction to life writing), the essay also situates My Struggle within geographical, historical, and theoretical contexts; incorporates analyses from narrative theory on paratexts, translation, and reception; redefines the autobiographical pact, so influential in discussions of life writing, in relationship to author-reader reciprocity; takes up issues of public intimacy and privacy that haunt both the virtual world of social media and our daily lives; and returns us to thinking about our work with life-writing texts as both critical analysis and interactive, provocative reading experiences. Kjerkegaard's work is wide-ranging and densely argued, but also theoretically supple and multi-faceted in ways that demonstrate how life-writing criticism can both engage with challenging texts and chart an illuminating path of interdisciplinary scholarship.
The Ohio State University, Emerita
By Julia Watson
The luxury of having three issues of the journal this year brought readers a wealth of essays, all with beautiful full-color cover images on patent-leather-black backgrounds, to engage with and enjoy (and the leisure of my recent retirement allowed me to steep myself in them). I was struck by how many of the essays in volume 31 of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies (2016) are located at the intersection of disciplines throughout, and beyond, the humanities, including history, ethnic studies, education, sociolinguistics, and medical humanities and bioethics. Although auto|biography studies has never been restricted to “literature,” our field is remarkable for inviting conversations across disciplinary boundaries for their mutual illumination.
Perhaps the 2015 death of James Olney tinged my reading with melancholy, as it felt like the passing of the era in which autobiography changed from being the outcast, suspect genre of the New Critics, and English departments more generally, to a mode and a set of reading practices that took up writing about oneself as a kind of narration with a long and multi-sited history. The notion that autobiography could be studied—indeed must be read rather than assumed as a “transparent” rehearsal of “facts”—announced in Olney's ground-breaking 1980 collection Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, both supplemented his earlier Metaphors of Self and brought the field to international attention as simultaneously a method of reading and a canon of multifarious forms.
For some of us the complete autobiography scholar, James was one of the most urbane, generous, and insightful critics I have had the pleasure to know. In thinking about The Hogan Prize, I read with particular interest essays that not only cast their nets widely but also anchored their inquiries in scholarship in autobiographical and narrative studies and in critical theory over the past three or four decades. Several essays memorably performed this work of historical and theoretical analysis.
In the Spring issue of a|b (31.2) “The Slippery Simultaneities of Remembering and Forgetting: Memory, Autobiographical Narrative, and the Case of Nathalie Sarraute's Enfance,” David Lewkowich, writing with graceful elegance and erudition, draws on Freudian psychoanalysis, ethics, and educational theory to situate narratives exploring memory in not just the interplay of memory and forgetting, but also in how forgetting “is always more than just absence” (352). Helga Lénárt-Cheng, in “Paul Ricoeur and the ‘Particular’ Case of Autobiography,” considers Ricoeur's designation of autobiography as a limit of narrative identity, as a “logical fallacy” with a “domino effect” traced in her genealogy of theorizing narrative identity, with particular attention to Paul John Eakin's important work on narrative as a “discourse of identity” (368). The Winter 2016 (31.1) essay by Arnaud Schmitt, “David Shields's Lyrical Essay,” directs his concern for “autofiction,” a hybrid genre vigorously debated by narrative and continental European scholars (and explored in his 2011 a|b essay), to how Shields's manifesto Reality Hunger is qualified—perhaps exploded by—his later “lyrical essay,” How Literature Saved My Life. Noting “the lexical divide between French and American theorists,” Schmitt draws on French theorizing of genre to criticize Shields's proclamation that we are now “outside genre.” Terming the Shields manifesto a “genre-bashing” genre, Schmitt defends the necessity of genre (142) and concludes that “genres do not die, they simply mutate” (143).
I was also impressed by the Winter 2016 cluster of essays on “Biofiction” as a hybrid genre that, although by no means new, has climbed vigorously on Bestseller lists in the past two decades by inviting readers to imagine the interior lives of both famous and behind-the-scenes historical actors. In particular, Catherine Belling's stunning essay on “The President's Glands” in Jed Mercurio's American Adulterer as biofiction—and ultimately perhaps autobiographical fiction—rigorously applies narrative theory to his depiction of the interplay between John F. Kennedy's illnesses and the fantasy of his healthy body. Belling makes a compelling case for how this biofiction, in its focus on the body's “provocative inaccessibility,” undercuts the assumed “difference between psychological and somatic interiority” in a bioscientific era (60). Other essays in this cluster are instructively comparative, with Julia Novak tracking shifts in a series of Elizabeth Barrett Browning biographies, and Claire Battershill contrasting the imaginative methods of Tolstoy biographers in the “New Biography” series translated by the Hogarth Press. These richly informative studies contribute to the ongoing project of constructing the history of our widespread field.
The primary focus of several essays was importantly on uses of self-presentation in the context of cultural studies. Heidi E. Bollinger assesses how Margaret Seltzer's fake memoir exploits her white privilege in mobilizing stereotypes of the urban black family to validate her narrative's “authenticity.” Yet the construction of authentic subjects continues to drive much life writing, as Sarah Ray Rondot explores, noting important shifts in twenty-first century examples by transgender life writers narrating their lives as continuous subjects rather than as split between their pre- and post-transition selves. And a recurring theme, coinages for new genres of life writing, appeared in three essays: Arturo Arias makes an intriguing distinction between testimonio and what he terms “autorepresentation” as a practice of gaining agency through distancing in Victor Montejo's important Testimony; Deena Rymhs proposes the genre of “automobiography” for Indigenous art installations that perform a counternarrative of innovation while reflecting on state curtailment of mobility; and Pramod K. Nayar identifies “autobiogenography” as a new formation focused on the human genome and what G. Thomas Couser dubbed the human “scriptome” that pressures subjects to compose “autobiological” narratives.
In this wealth of excellent commentary expanding the model of James Olney's theoretical explorations, the scholarly essay that stood out for me was “Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle: A Real Life in a Novel,” by Arnaud Schmitt and Stefan Kjerkegaard. Arguably a contemporary landmark of life writing (confession: I have only read Book I), Knausgaard's six-volume oeuvre opens up a new direction. Not only is it problematically both a memoir and—proclaimed by him—a novel, but it pressures theorists to rethink both our definitions of and our desires in life writing. Schmitt and Kjerkegaard link several issues in provocative questions: How does paratextual information influence the reading of serialized texts published over years (and circulating internationally years later in translation)? Situating My Struggle in its Norwegian context (where it has sold nearly a half-million copies; it has also been translated into 22 languages) they identify its project as a quest for a reader-directed “new sincerity,” in contrast to “authenticity,” and subjective agency in search of nothing less than intersubjective truth (555).
Schmitt and Kjerkegaard insist that Knausgaard is not narrating a life, as usually occurs in autobiographical writing and autofiction, but rather a self, expounding on “his identity-in-the-making” (555). Because of its paratextual situatedness, this narrative of the self solicits a “double pact” with the reader, one “signed” and the other “at the back of your mind … in case renegotiations are necessary” (561), thus invoking and reckoning with the theoretical positions of both Genette and Lejeune, as well as their commentators. Referencing a later Lejeune book on the “contagion” of the autobiographical pact (Signes de vie: le pacte autobiographique 2), Schmitt and Kjerkegaard assess why both “fiction” and “autobiography” are inadequate designations for the experience of “reciprocity” and the “mirror effect” that Knausgaard's text draws readers into. Reciprocity with the reader can, in Marlene Kadar's terms, “foster his|her own self-consciousness” (572): “we feel drawn into an intersubjective relation with the author, one in which we cannot remain neutral” (569). And they buttress this claim, in a section that is an innovative form of criticism, a third-person “case study” account of a French academic's (Schmitt's) responses to My Struggle as both a responsive, and at times resisting, reader. Of course Knausgaard's extended and intimate narrating exceeds the assumed limits of privacy as he reveals fragments of memory embedded in details of everyday life; and his use of diary-like chronicling is admittedly narcissistic (although that view of the diary was contested in Rebecca Hogan's pioneering essays on women's diaries). But his “seeming to be real” (573) enables his text to connect with readers beyond either objective analysis or voyeurism and “echo our own self-experience so that we can envision our own narrative” (573).
Schmitt and Kjerkegaard's emphasis on My Struggle as “a self-narration, not a life narration” is not only an insightful and provocative reading of this 2500-page tour de force. It is also an occasion for proposing what self-narration is becoming as both, in Eakin's terms, a discourse of identity and the genre of “reality effects” structuring experience in much life writing (573). Knausgaard's paradoxical description of his project, to “combat fiction with fiction” (Book I 218), reflects “overall tendencies regarding self-representation in a media-saturated world” (576) but also reshapes what we call literature at the nexus of multiple disciplines and analytical models.
I find the collaborative Schmitt and Kjerkegaard essay to be an important intervention in a|b scholarship at this time for several reasons. Not only is it the first essay in the journal to take on Knausgaard's behemoth of what must be called contemporary self-writing (in distinction to life writing), the essay also situates My Struggle within geographical, historical, and theoretical contexts; incorporates analyses from narrative theory on paratexts, translation, and reception; redefines the autobiographical pact, so influential in discussions of life writing, in relationship to author-reader reciprocity; takes up issues of public intimacy and privacy that haunt both the virtual world of social media and our daily lives; and returns us to thinking about our work with life-writing texts as both critical analysis and interactive, provocative reading experiences. Kjerkegaard's work is wide-ranging and densely argued, but also theoretically supple and multi-faceted in ways that demonstrate how life-writing criticism can both engage with challenging texts and chart an illuminating path of interdisciplinary scholarship.
The Ohio State University, Emerita
| Tildelingsdato | dec. 2016 |
|---|---|
| Grad af anerkendelse | International |