These proceedings of the international 2006 symposium ‘The Theory and Practice of Life Writing: Auto/biography, Memoir and Travel Writing in Post/modern Literature’ at Haliç University, Istanbul, include the majority of contributions to this event, some of them heavily revised for publication. A first group, treatments of more comprehensive and/or theoretical aspects of life and travel writing, concerns genre history (Nazan Aksoy; Manfred Pfister), typology (Manfred Pfister; Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson), issues of narration (Gerald P. Mulderig; Rana Tekcan), the recent phenomenon of blogging (Leman Giresunlu), and therapeutic narrative (Wendy Ryden). A second group—whose concern often heavily overlaps with the first in that it also pursues theoretical goals—concentrates on individual authors and artists: Sabâ Altınsay and Dido Sotiriou (Banu Özel), Samuel Beckett (Oya Berk), the sculptor Alexander Calder (Barbara B. Zabel), G. Thomas Couser and his filial memoir, Moris Farhi (Bronwyn Mills), Jean Genet (Clare Brandabur), Henry James (Laurence Raw), Orhan Pamuk (Dilek Doltaş; Ayşe F. Ece), Sylvia Plath (Richard J. Larschan), Edouard Roditi (Clifford Endres), Sara Rosenberg (Claire Emilie Martin), the dancer Mrinalini Sarabhai (Leena Chandorkar), Alev Tekinay (Özlem Öğüt), Uwe Timm (Jutta Birmele), and female British and American Oriental travellers (Tea Jansson).

projects, and an extensive bibliography. --Book Jacket.

Rosalia Baena’s theoretically challenging, analytical volume of essays, explores the diversity of shapes that transcultural life writing takes, demonstrating how it has become one of the most dynamic and productive literary forms of self-inscription and self-representation. Expanding much of the contemporary criticism on life writing, which tends to centre on content, the essays highlight that reading contemporary forms of life writing from a literary perspective is a rich field of critical intervention that has been overlooked because of recent cultural studies’ concerns with material issues. To read life writing as primarily cultural texts undercuts much of its value as a complex dynamic of cultural production, where aesthetic concerns and the choice and manipulation of form serve as signifying aspects to experiences and subjectivities. This book was previously published as a special issue of Prose Studies.

The past thirty years have witnessed a rapid growth in the number and variety of courses and programs that study life writing from literary, philosophical, psychological, and cultural perspectives. The field has evolved from the traditional approach that biographies and autobiographies were always about prominent people—historically significant persons, the nobility, celebrities, writers—to the conception of life writing as a genre of interrogation and revelation. The texts now studied include memoirs, testimonios, diaries, oral histories, genealogies, and group biographies and extend to resources in the visual and plastic arts, in films and videos, and on the Internet. Today the tensions between canonical and emergent life writing texts, between the famous and the formerly unrepresented, are making the study of biography and autobiography a far more nuanced and multifarious activity. This volume in the MLA series Options for Teaching builds on and complements earlier work on pedagogical issues in life writing studies. Over forty contributors from a broad range of educational institutions describe courses for every level of postsecondary instruction. Some writers draw heavily on literary and cultural theory; others share their assignments and weekly syllabi. Many essays grapple with texts that represent disability, illness, abuse, and depression; ethnic, sexual and racial discrimination; crises and catastrophes; witnessing and testimonials; human rights violations; and genocide. The classes described are taught in humanities, cultural studies, social science, and language departments and are located in, among other countries, the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Australia, Germany, Eritrea, and South Africa.

From a writer whose international acclaim can now spread to US shores comes a wise, craftily spun, and spine-tinglingly erotic tale of love, courage, and the forging of conscience-'a novel of startling integrity and beauty' (Independent on Sunday). In the beginning there is death, says one narrator in this enthralling 'treasure of a novel' (Alan Silletoe), but after that there is life: robust, riotous, nave, sensual, tragic, and profound. Through a series of 13 linked stories connected by a circle of young friends, Moris Farhi writes of the trials and joys of children coming of age in an increasingly dangerous and politicized world: Turkey just before, during, and after World War II. The death at the beginning is that of a girl endowed with second sight, who sees the war and the Holocaust coming and can't bear the gift of life. For Musa, a boy allowed into the women's bath like a fly in a bowl of naked fruit, the change comes when one woman notices his manhood. Bilal, a Jew, sets off for occupied Greece to rescue his relatives and never comes back. Davut participates in a plot to save a poet who is a national hero and anathema to the ruling party, and finds his innocence abused by the plotters. Here is a novel that captures the richness of a moment in history and the timeless aspirations of youth. Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade, Yucca, and Good Books imprints, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in fiction—novels, novellas, political and medical thrillers, comedy, satire, historical fiction, romance, erotic and love stories, mystery, classic literature, folklore and mythology, literary classics including Shakespeare, Dumas, Wilde, Cather, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

This volume celebrates a fascinating variety of nonfiction known as life writing. This genre resonates quintessentially with the core of the humanities in its profoundly individual ways of fusing narrators with their narrative subjects. The book brings together scholars from around the world to explore the personal mapping of such narrators in the context of their cultural legacies. The hybrid fusions themselves form several subgenres that complement each other as they affirm human dignity and values and our need for human connection, felt at all times, but especially during times of globally met threats. The ever-expanding forms of hybridography here—along with testimonies, diaries, letters and journals—bear witness to how individuals have contrived to overcome their own traumatic sources of pain and suffering to discover joy and how to further map their pathways forward. The narratives not only communicate important information and aesthetic beauty needed to prolong troubled lives due to social anxiety or mental illness, but also challenge sociocultural issues involving stigma, migration, racial discrimination and persecution, human trafficking, and ecological concerns. Global in scope, personal in focus, and historically and culturally contextualized, the analyses provided here once again illustrate how much we have to learn from each other.

Marlene Kadar has brought together an interdisciplinary and comparative collection of critical and theoretical essays by diverse Canadian scholars.