Tracing the Autobiographical

by Marlene Kadar; Susanna Egan, edited by Linda Warley & Jeanne Perreault

tagged: counseling, communication studies

Description

About the Authors

Marlene Kadar is an associate professor in humanities and women’s studies at York University, and the former director of the graduate programme in interdisciplinary studies.

Linda Warley teaches in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Waterloo. She has published articles in journals such as Canadian Literature, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, and Reading Canadian Autobiography, a special issue of Essays on Canadian Writing.

Jeanne Perreault is professor of English at the University of Calgary. She is coeditor (with Sylvia Vance) of Writing the Circle: Native Women of Western Canada (1990), and coeditor (with Joseph Bruchac) of Critical Visions: Contemporary North American Native Writing, a special issue of Ariel (1994). She is the author of Writing Selves: Contemporary Feminist Autography (1995). Other publications include “Memory Alive: An Inquiry into the Uses of Memory in Marilyn Dumont, Jeannette Armstrong, Louise Halfe, and Joy Harjo” (Native North America: Critical and Cultural Perspectives, ed. Renée Hulan, ECW Press, 1999), and “Writing Whiteness: Linda Griffith’s Raced Subjectivity in The Book of Jessica” (Essays on Canadian Writing, 1996). Currently, she is examining the racializing of whiteness in white women’s texts.

Susanna Egan is a professor in the department of English at the University of British Columbia. Her most recent monograph is titled Mirror Talk: Genres of Crisis in Contemporary Autobiography.

Editorial Reviews

''Since 1995, the Life Writing series has established itself as a major forum for showcasing primary sources and theoretical work in the field of autobiography studies in Canada.... International in scope Tracing the Autobiographical unsettles the generic boundaries of auto/biography (the slash consisten witha programmatic effort to blur the lines) and offers a variety of innovative reading strategies and interdisciplinary approaches.... Reading these contributions is not only an intellectual feast, but also an ethical encounter with lives lived by people who have left only fragments or traces of themselves.... Resonating with the themes of 'ethics, tyranny, and hope' several of the essays present a testimony of pain and erasure that leaves the reader profoundly moved.''

— University of Toronto Quarterly, Letters in Canada 2005, Volume 76, number 1, Winter 2007

''The editors of this volume are to be commended for their daring inner- and inter-generic redefinitions of autobiography. Tracing the Autobiographical takes the navel-gazing of autobiography genre criticism out for a cultural studies spin.... This volume is for thos who are eager to rethink boundaries.... All essays are refreshing and spot-on, particularly where they combine genre theoretical reflections with historically specific contextualization and close analytical readings.... All in all, I highly recommend this volume to anyone with an interest in changing their literary approach to the genre of autobiography. Tracing the Autobiographical is sure to reenergize the discussion of generic limitations, and I hope it will do more: encourage readers to problematize and theorize the relationships between selves, others/Others, and their myriad mediation practices in the age of New Media and postmemory.''

— The International Fiction Review, 34, 2007

''This is a fascinating collection, full of innovative reading practices and 'egodocuments.'... All of these critics are attuned to the more performative notions of selfhood, the contingent, and historical projections of the self in texts.... Autobiography writing and critism is now sharp and exciting, and as it happens much of the best is also Canadian.... Tracing the Autobiographical ... ''

— Canadian Literature, 196, Spring 2008

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Tracing the Autobiographical

by Marlene Kadar; Susanna Egan, edited by Linda Warley & Jeanne Perreault

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