Auto/biography in Canada

Description

Auto/biography in Canada: Critical Directions widens the field of auto/biography studies with its sophisticated multidisciplinary perspectives on the theory, criticism, and practice of self, community, and representation. Rather than considering autobiography and biography as discrete genres with definable properties, and rather than focusing on critical approaches, the essays explore auto/biography as a discourse about identity and representation in the context of numerous disciplinary shifts. Auto/biography in Canada looks at how life narratives are made in Canada .

Originating from literary studies, history, and social work, the essays in this collection cover topics that range from queer Canadian autobiography, autobiography and autism, and newspaper death notices as biography, to Canadian autobiography and the Holocaust, Grey Owl and authenticity, France Théoret and autofiction, and a new reading of Stolen Life, the collaborative text by Yvonne Johnson and Rudy Wiebe.

Julie Rak’s useful “big picture” introduction traces the history of auto/biography studies in Canada. While the contributors chart disciplinary shifts taking place in auto/biography studies, their essays are also part of the ongoing scholarship that is remaking ways to understand Canada.

Sujets

• Life writing

Informations

• Publié par: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
• Date de parution: 02 août 2009
• Nombre de lectures: 2
• EAN13: 9781554587711
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Auto/biography in Canada Critical Directions
Cultural Studies Series
Cultural Studies is the multi- and interdisciplinary study of culture, defined anthropologically as a way of life, performatively as symbolic practice, and ideologically as the collective product of media and cultural industries.
The Cultural Studies series includes topics such as construction of identities; regionalism/nationalism; cultural citizenship; migration; popular culture; consumer cultures; media and film; the body; postcolonial criticism; cultural policy; sexualities; cultural theory; youth culture; class relations; and gender.
For further information, please contact the Series Editor:
Jodey Castricano Department of English Wilfrid Laurier University Press 75 University Avenue West Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, N2L 3C5
Life Writing Series
In the Life Writing Series, Wilfrid Laurier University Press publishes life writing and new life-writing criticism in order to promote autobiographical accounts, diaries, letters, and testimonials written and/or told by women and men whose political, literary, or philosophical purposes are central to their lives. Life Writing will also publish original theoretical investigations about life writing, as long as they are not limited to one author or text.
Series Editor
Marlene Kadar Humanities Division, York University
Manuscripts to be sent to Brian Henderson, Director Wilfrid Laurier University Press 75 University Avenue West Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3C5
Auto/biography in Canada
Critical Directions
JULIE RAK , editor
This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our publishing activities. We acknowledge the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation s Ontario Book Initiative.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Auto/biography in Canada: critical directions / Julie Rak, editor.
(Life writing series) (Cultural studies series)
Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-88920-478-0
1. Canada - Biography - History and criticism. 2. Biography as a literary form. 3. Autobiography. I . Rak, Julie, 1966- II . Series. III . Series: Cultural studies series (Waterloo, Ont.).
PS 8119. A 87 2005 920 .00971 C 2005-902600-6
2005 Wilfrid Laurier University Press Waterloo, Ontario, Canada www.wlupress.wlu.ca
Cover image: Michael Snow, Authorization (detail), 1969. Instant silver prints (Polaroid 55) and adhesive tape on mirror in metal frame. 55.6 44.4 1.4 cm with integral frame. National Gallery of Canada. Image used with permission of the artist. Cover and interior design by P.J. Woodland.
Every reasonable effort has been made to acquire permission for copyright material used in this text, and to acknowledge all such indebtedness accurately. Any errors and omissions called to the publisher s attention will be corrected in future printings.
Printed in Canada
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.
This collection is dedicated to the memory of Gabriele Helms (1966-2004). Her strong support of auto/biographical studies in Canada and around the world endures in her work and in the memories of her colleagues, students, and friends.
Contents
Julie Rak Introduction-Widening the Field: Auto/biography Theory and Criticism in Canada
Susanna Egan and Gabriele Helms Generations of the Holocaust in Canadian Auto/biography
Albert Braz The Modern Hiawatha: Grey Owl s Construction of His Aboriginal Self
Sally Chivers This is my memory, a fact : The Many Mediations of Mothertalk: Life Stories of Mary Kiyoshi Kiyooka
Deena Rymhs Auto/biographical Jurisdictions: Collaboration, Self-Representation, and the Law in Stolen Life: The Journey of a Cree Woman
Ann Fudge Schormans Biographical versus Biological Lives: Auto/biography and Non-Speaking Persons Labelled Intellectually Disabled
Ljiljana Vuletic and Michel Ferrari A Transfer Boy: About Himself
Si Transken Creativity, Cultural Studies, and Potentially Fun Ways to Design and Produce Autobiographical Material from Subalterns Locations

Andrew Lesk Camp, Kitsch, Queer: Carole Pope and Toller Cranston Perform on the Page
Laurie McNeill Writing Lives in Death: Canadian Death Notices as Auto/biography
Barbara Havercroft (Un)tying the Knot of Patriarchy: Agency and Subjectivity in the Autobiographical Writings of France Th oret and Nelly Arcan
Yuko Yamade Auto/Bio/Fiction in Migrant Women s Writings in Qu bec: R gine Robin s La Qu b coite and L immense fatigue des pierres
Wendy Roy The ensign of the mop and the dustbin : The Maternal and the Material in Autobiographical Writings by Laura Goodman Salverson and Nellie McClung
Contributors
JULIE RAK
Introduction- Widening the Field: Auto/biography Theory and Criticism in Canada
I N THE FIFTEEN YEARS SINCE THE FIRST book collection specifically dealing with autobiography and Canada was published, both the study of autobiography and the study of Canada have changed dramatically. When K.P. Stich wrote the introduction to Reflections: Autobiography and Canadian Literature in 1998, international autobiography studies was caught up in debates between humanists and poststructuralists about the referentiality of the subject in autobiography. Only a handful of feminist studies about autobiography had been published. Biography itself, as an area of study, was mostly confined to criticism about an author s life. In Canada, as Shirley Neuman has said, the study of autobiography consisted of taxonomies such as those in The Literary History of Canada (1963-), while critical works focused more on autobiography as part of a national project than on the international developments in the field. Neuman describes this as a divorce between nationalist and generic approaches. Furthermore, only two Canadian critics, Susanna Egan and Neuman herself, were working in the area of autobiography poetics during the 1980s, and neither of them was working on Canadian material at the time (1996).
In 2003, the situation in autobiography and biography theory and criticism is quite different. There have been hundreds of books and thousands of articles published in many countries about autobiography, biography, life writing, and other terms that have been coined to describe the representation of identity in non-fiction. This activity collectively has come to be called auto/biography studies. 1 Through the work of Sidonie Smith, Nancy K. Miller, and many others, feminist autobiography theory now constitutes a major contribution to the development of feminist theory and epistemology. Henry Louis Gates Jr, Joanna Braxton, William J. Andrews, and other scholars have made the study of auto/biography central to African-American studies.
Auto/biography studies has also grown as a field, and the International Association of Autobiography and Biography ( IABS ) was founded in 1999 to provide a regular international conference for the area. There are more than fifteen journals devoted to aspects of autobiography, biography, life writing, and diary writing in at least seven languages, 2 and there are now special series devoted to auto/biography and life writing at many academic presses. What Sidonie Smith said in 1987 still seems to be accurate: Everyone in the universe of literary critics and theorists seems to be talking about autobiography (1987, 3).
In Canada, Shirley Neuman and Susanna Egan now have company. As a rough measure of the volume of scholarship now in print in literary studies, the Modern Language Association database currently has more than 350 references for the keywords autobiography and Canadian alone, more than twenty for autobiography and Quebec, and another sixty-five for life writing and Canadian. Scholars whose specialty is auto/biography in literary studies and the social sciences-including Helen Buss, Patricia Cormack, Valerie Raoul, Marlene Kadar, Patricia Smart, Ira Nadel, Barbara Havercroft, and Julie LeBlanc-have made contributions to the field in Canada and Quebec, as well as internationally.
Why has the field of auto/biography in Canada blossomed so in recent years? There are a number of answers to this question. For one thing, there is more to write about, as authors like Daphne Marlatt, Nicole Brossard, George Woodcock, Michael Ondaatje, and Fred Wah have specifically chosen to write experimental autobiography that, in turn, is receiving critical attention. The recently published Vintage Book of Canadian Memoirs includes autobiographical excerpts from more than twenty writers (2001). Clara Thomas s impassioned call for more Canadian literary biography (1976) has been answered by biographers including Sandra Djwa, Elspeth Cameron, James King, and Rosemary Sullivan. Auto/biographical scholarship has expanded well beyond literary studies to new areas such as cyberculture, ethnography, sociology, and history in Canada and internationally, and so now there are more texts and contexts to write about than ever before. This is, in part, because forms of biography and autobiography that are not necessarily literary have helped to make what Leigh Gilmore has called