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6 books match the query 'Life Writing'

cover of Down Syndrome Culture: Life Writing, Documentary, and Fiction Film in Iberian and Latin American Contexts

Down Syndrome Culture

Life Writing, Documentary, and Fiction Film in Iberian and Latin American Contexts

Benjamin Fraser

University of Michigan Press, 2024

People with Down syndrome possess a culture. They are producers of culture. And in the 21st century, this culture is increasingly visible as a global phenomenon. Down Syndrome Culture examines Down syndrome alongside its social, cultural, and artistic representation. Author Benjamin Fraser draws upon neomaterialist and posthumanist approaches to disability as well as the work of disability theorists such as David Mitchell, Sharon Snyder, Susan Antebi, Tobin Siebers, and Stuart Murray. By particularly focusing on Down syndrome, he showcases the unique place that it holds as an intellectual and developmental disability—one that fits between the social and medical models of disability—within the disability studies field. 

Down Syndrome Culture also pushes the traditionally Anglophone borders of disability studies by examining examples in Spanish, Catalan, and Portuguese-language texts, and incorporating the work of thinkers in Iberian and Latin American studies. Through a close analysis of life writing, documentaries, and fiction films, the book emphasizes the central role of people with Down syndrome in contemporary cultural production. Chapters discuss the autobiography of Andy Trias Trueta, the social actors of the documentary Los niños [The Grown-Ups] (2016), dancers from Danza Mobile, and a variety of fiction films, challenging ableist understandings of disability in nuanced ways. Ultimately, this book reveals the lives, cultural work, and representations of people with trisomy 21 in an international context.
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cover of Life Writing in the Long Run: A Smith and Watson Autobiography Studies Reader

Life Writing in the Long Run

A Smith and Watson Autobiography Studies Reader

Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson

Michigan Publishing Services, 2016

 Life Writing in the Long Run gathers twenty-one essays by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson written in collaboration or solo and published over the last quarter-century. It includes the introductions to their five edited collections; essays focused on such autobiographical genres as autoethnography, Bildungsroman, diary, digital life writing, genealogy, graphic memoir, human rights witnessing, manifesto; and essays engaging the key concepts of authenticity, performativity, postcoloniality, relationality, and visuality.
 
Available in print, eBook, and open access versions, this collection captures decades of exciting developments in the field, making it indispensable reading for courses on modes and media of self-presentation in cultural, gender, and literary studies and feminist theory.
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cover of Myself and Some Other Being: Wordsworth and the Life Writing

Myself and Some Other Being

Wordsworth and the Life Writing

Daniel Robinson

University of Iowa Press, 2014

As a young writer with neither profession nor money, William Wordsworth committed himself to a career as a poet, embracing what he believed was his destiny. But even the “giant Wordsworth,” as his friend and collaborator Samuel Taylor Coleridge called him, had his doubts. In Myself and Some Other Being, Daniel Robinson presents a young Wordsworth, as ambitious and insecure as any writer starting out, who was trying to prove to himself that he could become the great poet he desired to be and that Coleridge, equally brilliant and insecure, believed he already was.

Myself and Some Other Being is the story of Wordsworth becoming Wordsworth by writing the fragments and drafts of what would eventually become The Prelude, an autobiographical epic poem addressed to Coleridge that he hid from the public and was only published after his death in 1850. Feeling pressured to write the greatest epic poem of all time, a task set for him by Coleridge, Wordsworth feared that he was not up to the challenge and instead looked inside himself for memories and materials that he might make into poetry using the power of his imagination. What he found there was another Wordsworth—not exactly the memory of his younger self but rather “some other being” that he could adapt for an innovative kind of life-writing that he hoped would justify his writing life. By writing about himself and that other being, Wordsworth created an innovative autobiographical epic of becoming that is the masterpiece he believed he had failed to write.

In focusing on this young, ambitious, yet insecure Wordsworth struggling to find his place among other writers, Robinson ably demonstrates how The Prelude may serve as a provocative, instructive, and inspirational rumination on the writing of one’s own life. Concentrating on the process of Wordsworth’s endless revisions, the real literary business of creativity, Robinson puts Wordsworth forward as a model and inspiration for the next generation of writers.
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cover of Queer Livability: German Sexual Sciences and Life Writing

Queer Livability

German Sexual Sciences and Life Writing

Ina Linge

University of Michigan Press, 2023

Finalist: Waterloo Centre for German Studies Book Prize | December 10, 2024

This book brings together an exciting new archive of queer and trans voices from the history of sexual sciences in the German-speaking world. A new language to express possibilities of gender and sexuality emerged at the turn of the twentieth century, from Sigmund Freud’s theories of homosexuality in Vienna to Magnus Hirschfeld’s “third sex” in Berlin. Together, they provided a language of sex and sexuality that is still recognizable today. Queer Livability: German Sexual Sciences and Life Writing shows that individual voices of trans and queer writers had a significant impact on the production of knowledge about gender and sexuality during this time and introduces lesser known texts to a new readership. It shows the remarkable power of queer life writing in imagining and creating the possibilities of a livable life in the face of restrictive legal, medical, and social frameworks.

Queer Livability: German Sexual Sciences and Life Writing will be of interest to anyone who wants to learn more about LGBTQ+ history and literature. It also provides a fascinating insight into the historical roots for our thinking about gender and sexuality today. The book will be of relevance to an academic readership of students and faculty in German studies, literary studies, European history, and the interdisciplinary fields of gender and sexuality studies, medical humanities, and the history of sexuality.

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cover of Recovering Bodies: Illness, Disability, and Life Writing

Recovering Bodies

Illness, Disability, and Life Writing

G. Thomas Couser

University of Wisconsin Press, 1997

    This is a provocative look at writing by and about people with illness or disability—in particular HIV/AIDS, breast cancer, deafness, and paralysis—who challenge the stigmas attached to their conditions by telling their lives in their own ways and on their own terms. Discussing  memoirs, diaries, collaborative narratives, photo documentaries, essays, and other forms of life writing, G. Thomas Couser shows that these books are not primarily records of medical conditions; they are a means for individuals to recover their bodies (or those of loved ones) from marginalization and impersonal medical discourse.
    Responding to the recent growth of illness and disability narratives in the United States—such works as Juliet Wittman’s Breast Cancer Journal, John Hockenberry’s Moving Violations, Paul Monette’s Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir, and Lou Ann Walker’s A Loss for Words: The Story of Deafness in a Family—Couser addresses questions of both poetics and politics. He examines why and under what circumstances individuals choose to write about illness or disability; what role plot plays in such narratives; how and whether closure is achieved; who assumes the prerogative of narration; which conditions are most often represented; and which literary conventions lend themselves to representing particular conditions. By tracing the development of new subgenres of personal narrative in our time, this book explores how explicit consideration of illness and disability has enriched the repertoire of life writing. In addition, Couser’s discussion of medical discourse joins the current debate about whether the biomedical model is entirely conducive to humane care for ill and disabled people.
    With its sympathetic critique of the testimony of those most affected by these conditions, Recovering Bodies contributes to an understanding of the relations among bodily dysfunction, cultural conventions, and identity in contemporary America.
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cover of The Man Who Wrote Pancho Villa: Martin Luis Guzman and the Politics of Life Writing

The Man Who Wrote Pancho Villa

Martin Luis Guzman and the Politics of Life Writing

Nicholas Cifuentes-Goodbody

Vanderbilt University Press, 2016

Martin Luis Guzman was many things throughout his career in twentieth-century Mexico: a soldier in Pancho Villa's revolutionary army, a journalist-in-exile, one of the most esteemed novelists and scholars of the revolutionary era, and an elder statesman and politician. In The Man Who Wrote Pancho Villa, we see the famous author as he really was: a careful craftsman of his own image and legacy. His five-volume biography of Villa propelled him to the heights of Mexican cultural life, and thus began his true life's work. Nicholas Cifuentes-Goodbody shapes this study of Guzman through the lens of "life writing" and uncovers a tireless effort by Guzman to shape his public image.


The Man Who Wrote Pancho Villa places Guzman's work in a biographical context, shedding light on the immediate motivations behind his writing in a given moment and the subsequent ways in which he rewrote or repackaged the material. Despite his efforts to establish a definitive reading of his life and literature, Guzman was unable to control that interpretation as audiences became less tolerant of the glaring omissions in his self-portrait.

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