Research Theme: Life Writing, Testimony
and Self-Construction

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Theme: Life Writing, Testimony and Self-Construction

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Biography, national narratives & history

An IASH/Centre for Narrative & Auto/Biographical Studies Workshop

Thursday 13 December 2007, 3.00 - 4.30pm
Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, 2 Hope Park Square

  • Should political and intellectual biographies be seen as 'island stories' which represent even whilst interrogating aspects of national histories and mythologies?
  • Do all biographies engage in the 'ordering of discourse' by intellectuals representing and imposing competing kinds of reading practices?
  • Are political biographies often one narrative too far even for historians who work in a narrative vein? And are intellectual biographies beyond the theoretical and philosophical pale?
  • If autobiography can be seen as 're-membering' or putting a self together using reconstructed memory, then is memory subsumed into history within political and intellectual biography, or bracketed but still present in its sources?
  • What is the present (and past) relationship between political and intellectual biography and biography generally?
  • Are there national forms or sub-forms of biography or is the genre international, and can changes to the form can be discerned in the post-war period?
  • By what means and methods is authorial authority inscribed and what departures from this might mark present day biographies? And are there similar departures in present-day political biography?
  • Is 'postmodern biography' an oxymoron? What might a postmodern political biography look like? Can intellectual biography be more experimental in its approach?

An informal workshop to discuss biography, political and intellectual biography, national narratives and history. The workshop will bring together people from a wide variety of inter/disciplinary backgrounds with a broad interest in the historical development of biography as a genre and also concerning its present-day forms and variations. A group of scholars from the Department of Humanities at the University of Örebro, Sweden, will be present who are involved in a joint project on the theme of 'Biography as a historical genre' which will, among other things, explore possibly different national traditions in writing, reading and evaluating biographies of politicians and intellectuals in particular.

If you are interested in participating in the workshop, please email iash@ed.ac.uk to reserve a place.

Life Writing Seminars

Semester 2, Spring 2008

All the seminars will be held in the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, Hope Park Square at 4 p.m.

Tuesday, 22 January
"Writing Lives for a Dictionary of National Biography"
Panel: Professor John Cairns, Professor Jane Dawson, Professor Peter France, Dr. Roger Savage

Tuesday, 5 February
Professor Sian Reynolds (University of Stirling): "Madame Roland (1754-1793): memoirs or life-writing?"
The woman famous in history as Mme Roland, born Marie-Jeanne Phlipon, was the wife of the minister of the Interior during a critical period of the French Revolution. Both the Rolands were central figures in the Gironde faction. Mme Roland's memoirs, written in prison before her stoical death at the guillotine, combine a narrative of public events, justifying the actions of her husband and friends, with a more 'private' memoir of her early life.

Her reputation has been both inflated and deflated since her death, only to be simply neglected by both revisionist and gender-conscious histories of the Revolution in recent years. This paper (part of work-in-progress on a joint biography of Monsieur and Madame Roland) argues that we can read both sections of the memoirs as performances, inspired respectively by Catherine Macaulay's History of England and Rousseau's Confessions, and that it is possible to re-read and contextualise the life of this much-biographied woman within a broader perspective on gender and politics in the revolutionary period.

Tuesday, 19 February
Professor Laura Marcus (English Literature, University of Edinburgh): "Contemporary fiction and the biographical novel"
Opening with the striking returns contemporary novelists have made to modernist texts - in particular those of James, Forster, Lawrence, Woolf - this paper looks at a recent cluster of texts in which modernist writers have become the subjects of biographical novels. Using texts by Michael Cunningham (The Hours), C.K.Stead (Mansfield) and Colm Toibin (The Master), the paper explores the relationships between fiction and biography, and the extent to which contemporary writers are making a return to some of the aspects of the 'new biography' of the 1920s, with its use of fictional strategies in biographical writing. If the 'new biographers' of the 1920s and 1930s sought to make biographies read like novels, then, the paper argues, works such as Stead's and Toibin's seem to express a contemporary desire to write novels which both emulate biography and function as a challenge to biography 'proper'. My speculative paper is thus intended to open up the question of the connection and divide between biography and fiction and, more broadly, the shifting boundaries of genres.

Tuesday, 4 March
Dr. James Clapperton (Postdoctoral Fellow of IASH): "Remembering the Siege of Leningrad: Conversations with Survivors"
The presentation will examine the topic of testimony, and in particular the act of bearing witness to traumatic lifetime events and experiences. Personal recollections of the 900 day blockade turn our attention away from Soviet master-narratives towards the 'myths of everyday life'. Correspondingly, survivors recall the strange sights, smells and sounds of besieged Leningrad and the bloody realities of war. In particular, they remember how the maintenance of daily routines became the key to survival and a source of patriotic pride. Veterans recount a wide range of myths and rumours which circulated amongst the populace at the time. Thus, the relationship between myth and history will be discussed as well as the potential bearing witness has in providing us with a more comprehensive understanding of the past.

Tuesday, 18 March
Professor Ruth Perry (Literature Faculty, MIT; Visiting Fellow of IASH) : "On the Trail of Anna Brown: Biographies of Ordinary Women are the Hardest"
This talk will be about my current project, a biography of Anna Gordon Brown, an eighteenth-century Scotswoman (1747-1810) whose ballads formed the aesthetic core of Francis James Child's magisterial The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1886-1898). Who she was and how she became the conduit for our common literary and musical heritage-our "best" ballads-is the story of a woman's life during the Scottish enlightenment and the golden age of collecting oral folk songs at the end of the eighteenth century. In this talk, I will outline what I know so far about my subject, how I am pursuing the research on her life, and what larger questions I hope to illuminate in writing this biography.

Semester 1, Autumn 2007

Tuesday, 9 October
Professor Liz Stanley (Sociology & Centre for Narrative & Auto/Biographical Studies, University of Edinburgh) "Murder, suicide or accidental death? Thomas & Znaniecki's The Polish Peasant… and the untimely demise of the early biographical approach in sociology (and history, anthropology and social psychology)"

Thomas & Znaniecki's The Polish Peasant in Europe and America is the founding work in 'biographical sociology' and it uses, indeed it actually provides within its covers, sets of correspondence (a total of over 700 letters in extended family groupings) and one long life history to explore the dynamics, structures and processes of mass migration from Poland to the USA. It was published in the USA in a number of volumes between 1913 and 1918. In the late 1930s, it was described in a major review from Herbert Blumer (commissioned by the US Social Science Research Council) as the most influential piece of Sociology published to that point, with a dominating influence in this particular discipline, and also with enormous influence on anthropology, history and social psychology as well as on practice in social and community work. However, today the title of The Polish Peasant… is only vaguely known - few sociologists have read it and even fewer anthropologists, historians and others know about its earlier impact and the influence of biographical approaches in these disciplines too.

The senior author of The Polish Peasant…, W.I. Thomas, was one of the founders of Chicago School Sociology, with the history, reception and mushrooming influence of this book over time is complexly related to the changing context of Chicago Sociology and Thomas' role in it. Blumer's commission to review the methodological aspects and 'failings' of The Polish Peasant… was a high-level recognition of its importance - but carried out by someone who was in fundamental disagreement with some of its working methods and procedures. His review was followed by an interdisciplinary conference organised to discuss these, and the role of both his review and the conference in helping undermine its pre-eminence will be sketched out. In addition, the role of wartime influences on the aims and procedures of sociology, changes to the intellectual and evaluative climate and negative impact on non-positivist approaches more generally will be indicated. However, the emphasis will be on providing a contrast to Blumer's reading of The Polish Peasant… - the biographical approach as articulated by Thomas and Znaniecki will be re-read in some detail. As part of this, its methodological approach and its analytical and theoretical concerns with 'self and society' will be discussed from the perspective of today's biographical sociology and its interest in the documents of life, and also lessons to be learned from the strengths of this unjustly neglected work will be detailed.

Tuesday, 30 October
Dr. Louise A. Jackson (School of History and Classics, University of Edinburgh) "Detective Days: Gender, Genre and the Police Memoir"

Over 300 police memoirs and autobiographies have been published in the UK since 1829, many positioning themselves within the genre of 'true crime' writing, a form of highly popular non-fiction with a substantial pedigree. 'True crime' has its origins in the seventeenth-century ballads and pamphlets that narrated the lives of 'criminals' and 'rogues'. As the official bureaucracy associated with the criminal law expanded in the nineteenth century, new occupational groups charged with the administration of the law added their own accounts to the older repertoires that had been 'ghost-written' on behalf of convicts and prison chaplains. This paper will offer an overview of the historical development of the police memoir, of its form, function and content, and of its links with related genres, including crime fiction. It will discuss the importance of time and space in structuring accounts of personal career trajectory as well as in the positioning of the author within the mechanisms of 'modern' surveillance. Finally, it will focus specifically on the construction of gendered occupational identities by comparing texts produced by women officers (appointed within the police service from 1919 onwards) with an existing tradition established by male officers.

Tuesday, 13 November
Dr. Helen Dampier (Leeds Metropolitan University): "'Heroines Among Their Own People'? Reading Women's Testimony Writings of the 1899-1902 South African War"

This paper examines the problems that arise in a present-day reading of two women's testimonies of the South African War: Sarah Raal's 1938 Met Die Boere in die Veld (With the Boers in the Field), and Hendrina Rabie-Van der Merwe's 1940 Onthou! In die Skaduwee van die Galg (Remember! In the Shadow of the Gallows). While much of the theoretical literature concerning women's testimonies, particularly women's wartime testimonies, assumes the moral right and 'heroism' of testifying women, these two texts challenge such assumptions for the present-day reader. Both women present themselves as 'heroines among their own people' and are unambiguous about their 1930s political objectives in publishing accounts of their wartime experiences from forty years earlier. It is these political objectives I shall bring into analytic focus. Re-reading these texts enables crucial questions about the workings of memory, referentiality and moral authority in life writings to be raised. Drawing on narrative theory and ideas about 'rehearsed narratives', I discuss Rabie-Van der Merwe and Raal's work as 'canonical' versions of the past that formulaically rehearse the most powerful and meaningful elements of the story of the war and the camps. In addition, I point up the racist treatment of 'race' matters in Onthou! and Met Die Boere…, thereby problematising the moral right and 'heroism' claimed by these and other testimony-writers, and highlighting the ambiguities these texts pose from a feminist and post-1994 point of view, as well as the challenges they present to theorists of testimony more generally.

Tuesday, 27 November
Professor Carole Hillenbrand (Professor of Islamic History, University of Edinburgh): "Writing the lives of medieval Muslim women"
The paper will explore the gulf between the rules laid down for Muslim women in the books of law and what can be gleaned from literary sources about what women actually did.

 

Semester 2, Spring 2007

Tuesday, 16 January
Professor Ian Brown (freelance scholar, playwright and poet): "The personal poem: inscribing a life through dedicated poetry"

In early July 1996, a friend, the theatre director Joan Knight, telephoned to say that an inoperable cancer had been diagnosed. Moved by her matter-of-factness and our years of close friendship, I promised from then on to write her a poem a week. This promise led to the sequence of poems published in 2001 under the title Poems for Joan. Drawing on this poem sequence and on earlier poems of mine written specifically for others, this paper considers the ways in which writing a poem for and about another person demands direct and indirect means of inscribing that person's personality and life in that poem. The paper addresses the thematic and poetic strategies by which the poet can create a framework within both the individual poem and the sequence as a whole may express a person and write a life. In doing this, it considers the ways in which both specific poems and an overall sequence can express a shared narrative of a relationship, a lifetime and a career. It considers the processes by which a series of poems, individually generated, can come to cohere. It also considers how far such a series as this - which, from the time of first writing, must inevitably, but at an unknowable time, conclude with the subject's death - can both embody a spontaneous testimony to the specifics of a friendship and constitute a cycle celebrating a whole life. In addressing these topics, the paper considers the creative poetic strategies that may be adopted to respond to the apparently open-ended creative task of writing a poem driven by the needs of a very specific life and death situation. In reviewing practice in a number of poems, the paper seeks to identify creative strategies, approaches and devices that may be employed to address the nature of the individual for and about whom the poem is written. The paper, therefore, addresses a sequence of dedicated poems as a very particular form of Life Writing. In this light, each poem and the accumulation of all combine to construct a vision of the self not only as seen by a close friend, but as developed through an iterative process of communication between poet and subject.

Tuesday, 30 January
Professor Liz Stanley (Sociology, University of Edinburgh): "Auto/biography & the troubles with genres"

Having earlier theorised the idea of 'auto-slash-biography' to recognise the complexity of forms of life writing and life representations more generally, in this paper I return to the 'troubles with genres'. A number of examples of morphing between genres concerning Boer women's I-witnerss testimonies, Johanna Brandt's diary, photographs of Hannah Cullwick and my own research notebooks are explored. From this base, the idea of 'genre-for-her' is developed in relation to Olive Schreiner's published and unpublished writings and in particular in relation to the Schreiner epistolarium and Schreiner's c7000 extand letters (which I am currently transcribing and editing for publication as the complete Schreiner letters).

Tuesday, 13 February
Ms Aileen Christianson (English Literature, University of Edinburgh): "Jane Welsh Carlyle: Writing Volumes"

Aileen Christianson has worked on The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle edition since 1967 as an editor. Her most recent critical essays have developed her method of looking at Welsh Carlyle critically, relating the letters to particular modes and genres. She has a Leverhulme fellowship for this semester to develop this approach into a book which will consider Welsh Carlyle's letters as part of a sustained piece of work which, though unpublished in her lifetime, can be approached as text and analysed using theoretical and critical approaches, rather than be used for biographical interest or anecdote (as has hitherto mainly been the case). This study will provide an introduction to the work of one of Britain's greatest letter writers, raising questions on the position of women in the early to mid-nineteenth century, and on the relation of women of that time to their writing, published and unpublished. It will provide an introduction to ways of approaching life-writing theoretically and analytically, using Welsh Carlyle's 2,000 surviving letters as its textual basis. In the workshop she will introduce her ideas and discuss the differing ways that she hopes to use in her approach to the questions of the construction of a writer not published in her lifetime, and the particular approaches that she will take to the genres that she traces in Welsh Carlyle's work.

Tuesday, 13 March
Dr. Alexandra Shepard (Faculty of History, University of Cambridge): "Worth, credibility and the referents of self-presentation by witnesses in the English church courts, c.1550-1750"

Historians of the early modern period have made extensive use of the narratives constructed by witnesses appearing in the church courts (which heard a remarkable range and volume of business in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) in order to shed light on normative values and mentalities. While considerable attention has been paid to the stories witnesses told, less thought has been given either to the identities of the witnesses themselves or to the ways in which witnesses situated themselves within their narratives and asserted their own credibility. This paper will focus on the responses given by witnesses to a question that enquired about their 'worth' (with both material and ethical connotations) in order to examine the modes of self-evaluation witnesses adopted as a means of authenticating their testimony.

Tuesday, 27 March
Dr. Nora Sellei (Institute of English and American Studies, University of Debrecen): "Patterns of Self-Creation in Virginia Woolf's Autobiographical Texts"

Though very sceptical about first-person narration, in her autobiographical texts Virginia Woolf obviously could not avoid the letter 'I'. Based on the close reading of three autobiographical texts of hers, the question I am raising is how the autobiographical 'I' is textually constructed, and what relevance these subject constructions may bear upon what Toril Moi calls Woolf's textual politics. I propose that the dislocation of the autobiographical 'I' from the centre of the narrative in the case of both 'Reminiscences' and '22 Hyde Park Gate' and the utter dispersal of the narrated subject in 'A Sketch of the Past' tie in both with Woolf's feminist politics and with her modernist agenda in terms of narrative techniques.

Semester 1, Autumn 2006

Tuesday, 3 October
Dr. Sarah Edwards ((Department of English Studies, University of Strathclyde): "Feminine genius, spiritualist authorship and the Birmingham Civic Gospel"

Tuesday, 17 October
Dr. Suzanne Trill (English Literature, University of Edinburgh): "Self and/or Soul: problems and paradoxes in the Life-Writings of Anne, Lady Halkett (1621?-1699)"

This paper will explore the theoretical and practical problems of addressing the concepts of 'subjectivity' and the 'self' in a (predominantly) pre-Lockean context. In a period in which 'self' had negative connotations (due to its perceived binary opposition to spirit), is 'soul' a more appropriate term? To what extent is this further complicated when the self or soul concerned is female? In a predominately patriarchal society, can early modern women be said to be subjects or selves at all? This paper will address these and other problems and paradoxes in relation to the extensive and diverse life writings of Lady Anne Halkett. Born in 1621/2, Halkett's extant writing covers the period 1650-1699; her corpus includes letters, diaries, select and occasional meditations, 'a true accountt of [her] life', mother's advice manuals and accounts. Due to both its breadth and diversity, Halkett's writing offers an ideal opportunity to examine the above questions and, potentially, to explore the changing nature of a particular early modern woman's concept of her 'self'.

Tuesday, 31 October
Professor Norma Clarke (English Literature, Kingston University London): "Mrs. Pilkington's Memoirs"

Published in the same year (1748) as Cleland's Fanny Hill or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, Laetitia Pilkington's Memoirs are assumed to be 'scandalous' and sexually titillating. In fact, sex in the Memoirs is played for laughs and the scandal lies elsewhere: in male hypocrisy and the sexual double standard, and in English treatment of Ireland. Problems of categorisation will be addressed in this talk along with some account of Mrs Pilkington and the contemporary reception of her Memoirs. In telling her life, the story of a precocious child who grew up to be an ambitious poet, and who then became a divorcee and defamed woman, she invented a new form. It was capacious enough to incorporate poetry as well as prose, anecdotes of her former patron, Jonathan Swift (she was the first in the field) and her 'adventures' as a jobbing writer in Dublin and London which included a stint in the Marshalsea and encounters with sundry philanthropists, libertines, actors, bishops, military men and aristocrats. Like her friend Colley Cibber's Apology (1740), a memoir that was at the same time a cogent history of four decades of the London theatre, Mrs Pilkington's Memoirs offer more than an individual life. They are a history of her times, as seen by a woman schooled by Swift, who had lived in the world 'from the palace to the prison' and who brought a satirist's vision to what she saw.

Tuesday, 14 November
Ms Andrea Salter (Sociology, University of Edinburgh): "Women Writing for Mass-Observation: Wartime Diaries and the ‘Diary-Genre’"

In this ‘work in progress’ presentation, I discuss the dis/associations that a set of women’s diaries, written during and after WW2 for the social research organisation Mass-Observation (M-O), have with ‘Diaries’ as a ‘genre’ of life-writing. With particular reference to the diary of Nella Last, I begin by arguing that M-O’s Wartime Diaries do not fit easily into conventional understandings of what ‘a diary is’. And, by demonstrating empirically the ways in which these diaries confuse perceived genre boundaries, I query the often-assumed fixity of such boundaries, suggesting that they are confining and limiting to comprehending the practices involved in writing a diary for M-O. Next, as part of this querying, and stemming inductively from the archival material that I gathered during my six months in the Mass-Observation Archive during 2004 and 2005, I argue that the Wartime Diaries can be considered ‘social texts’, confounding the convention of ascribing the status of ‘private writing’ to diaries per se and exemplifying M-O diary-writing as a socially-located and socially-conditioned set of practices – practices which are also importantly temporally-located.

Tuesday, 28 November
Dr. Gillian Sutherland (Newnham College, Cambridge): "The Cloughs and their Circle: Group biography of family and friends"

Gill Sutherland is the author of Faith, Duty and the Power of Mind. The Cloughs and their Circle 1820-1960 (CUP 2006). She will be talking about some of the issues raised by writing about a group of family and friends over several generations.

Among the themes she hopes to air are:
1. The uses of such a study in exploring wider social structures, in this case among the emerging British middle class, and paying particular attention to the position of women family members.
2. Its uses in exploring intellectual issues and crises, in this case loss of faith and its legacies.
3. Together these lead on to a a consideration of the disjunction between the public rhetoric of individual achievement and the vital importance of the kin network in supporting family members in difficulties; and of the centrality of the women members of kin and friendship groups in keeping such networks in good order.

Among the methodological issues she hopes to raise are:
1. Problems of tracking finances
2. Diaries, memoirs and autobiographies as sources.
3. Evaluating changes in language over time, with particular reference to the language of love and friendship.
4. Visiting subjects' houses, talking to those who remember them - what Hilary Spurling has called, 'The Glendower Effect'.

Semester 2, Spring 2006

The following series of Seminars was held in the
Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, Hope Park Square:

Tuesday, 7 February
Professor Liz Stanley (Sociology, University of Edinburgh):
"Philosophical autobiography, the persona of the philosopher and the writing of David Hume's My Own Life"

Tuesday, 21 February
Dr. Clare Jackson (History of Political Thought, University of Cambridge):
"Writing the life of Sir George Mackenzie of Rosehaugh"

Tuesday, 7 March
Dr. Kathy Bacon (Postdoctoral Fellow of IASH): "Writing the saint, writing the readers: hagiography as life-writing"

 

Wednesday, 10 May 2006

2.30 - 4.00 p.m.

SYMPOSIUM on:
Life writing and life representation in the long 18th century (1670-1830)

This informal symposium discussed both some aspects of the development of different forms of life writing across the period, and also possibilities for a future seminar series looking in depth at some of these developments.

Further information from: liz.stanley@ed.ac.uk

Monday, 25 April 2005

Colloquium: Testimonies of Violence: Narratives and Memory in Conflict

Speakers:

Professor Liz Stanley (Professor of Sociology, University of Newcastle upon Tyne)
Remembering and forgetting the concentration camps of the South African War: secular icons and narrative violence

Professor Juliet Gardiner (writer, author of "Wartime: Britain 1939-1945")
Puncturing the Myth: reconfiguring narratives of the Second World War

Professor Rosemary Jolly (Department of English and Southern Africa Research Centre, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario)
Spectral Presences: Narrating Women in the Context of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission