Kate Douglas

Blurbing Biographical: Authorship and Autobiography

Especially with the growth of new media, and amid the boom in representations of self and life in literature and popular culture, questions of authorship continue to be keenly debated. This interest in the ways artists and consumers are positioned in relation to knowledge and creativity has been spurred by the increased attention given to notions of artistic origins and narrative ownership, particularly in recent autobiographical discourse. There is significant work encompassing the effects of scholarly criticism upon the figure of the author. Despite its public visibility, however, book publicity, and its particular significance to discussions of authorship, is one issue that has remained mostly unexamined. Such an examination unveils an interesting contradiction. At a time when two, or perhaps even three generations of literary theorists have primarily been raised on the notion that the biography of the author is almost irrelevant to the text, in the contemporary world of book publication and marketing, the author has if anything become even more crucial to a book’s success. Such disparities between academic and commercial literary reception have of course been well noted over the years. Eric Homberger and John Charmley assert that “everywhere in academic life the subtle, [and] the notso-subtle denigration of biography grows apace,” as “influential voices tell us that the ‘author’ is dead, and that biographical study of a writer or artist is either irrelevant or not fully serious” (ix). Yet publishers and critics agree that, for better or worse, the production and popular consumption of life writing, and interest in the biographical details of contemporary authors, are experiencing a notable boom. As Hilary McPhee argues, “life-writing is now a profitable enterprise for publishers. The readership is growing all the time. First person narratives, especially those by 24-years-old footballers, sell much

Why literature students should practise life writing

This article considers our experiences teaching a hybrid literature/creative writing subject called “Life Writing.” We consider the value of literature students engaging in creative writing practice—in this instance, the nonfiction subgenre of life writing—as part of their critical literary studies. We argue that in practicing life writing, our literature students are exposed to and gain wider perspective on the practical, critical, creative, and ethical issues that arise from working with literary texts. Such an approach is not with risk. As we discuss in this article, life writing texts can often narrate difficult or traumatic material. However, we want to show how life writing, with its particular focus on actual lives and lived experience, creates a particularly conducive ethical, intellectual, and creative space for learning about and practicing writing.

Building reading resilience : re-thinking reading for the literary studies classroom

ABSTRACT This paper introduces the concept of ‘reading resilience’: students’ ability to read and interpret complex and demanding literary texts by drawing on advanced, engaged, critical reading skills. Reading resilience is a means for rethinking the place and pedagogies of close reading in the contemporary literary studies classroom. Our research was across four Australian universities and the first study of its kind in the Australian context. We trialled three working strategies to support students to become consistent and skilled readers, and to equip teachers with methods for coaching reading: ‘setting the scene’ for reading, surveying students on their reading experiences and habits, and rewarding reading within assessment. We argue that the nature and pedagogy of close reading has not been interrogated as much as it should be and that the building of reading resilience is less about modelling or outlining best practice for close reading (as has traditionally been thought) and more about deploying contextual, student-centred teaching and learning strategies around reading. The goal is to encourage students to develop a broad suite of skills and knowledge around reading that will equip them long term (for the university and beyond). We measured the effectiveness of our strategies through seeking formal and informal student feedback, and through students’ demonstration of skills and knowledge within assessment.

The affects of not reading: Hating characters, being bored, feeling stupid

This article brings recent debates in literary studies regarding the practice of close reading into conversation with Derek Attridge’s idea of ‘readerly hospitality’ (2004) to diagnose the problem of students in undergraduate literary studies programme not completing set reading. We argue that the method of close reading depends on encouraging students to foster positive affective responses towards difficulty – semiotic, emotional and intellectual. Drawing on trials of teaching methods in literary studies’ classrooms in four universities in Australia, we suggest that introducing students to the concept of ‘readerly hospitality’ – rather than assuming an appreciation of difficulty – can better prepare students for the encounters they will have in set literary texts and strengthen the effectiveness of classroom teaching.

Ethical Dialogues: Youth, Memoir, and Trauma

This article maps the reception of an African soldier memoir, Ishmael Beahs A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, and in response explores what an ethical reading of this youth-authored trauma text might require. This case study offers a mandate for ethical scholarship in the study of youth-authored trauma narratives.

Go Back to Where You Came From: Stunt Documentary, Conversion Narrative, and the Limits of Testimony on Australian Television

The 2011 reality television series Go Back to Where You Came From used established narrative modes of stunt memoir, testimony, and conversion to start a public conversation about Australia’s recent treatment of asylum seekers. This essay explores both the cultural possibilities and the pitfalls of the series’ textually-hybrid approach.

Heavy Lifting: The Pedagogical Work of Life Narratives

Life narrative, as a practice or a theory, is a staple in various educational contexts. For instance, life narratives often play a complementary role in courses with a wider focus. First-year writing courses might include a “personal essay”; classes in the social sciences may include interviews and case studies. History lectures can draw on testimonies as primary sources that illustrate public events, and creative writing seminars often assign memoir or other autojbiographical texts. Education classes might ask for reflective journal writing or multimodal autobiographical practices as educational methodologies, as described in Gergana Vitanova’s essay in this issue. This array of locations in different disciplinary settings illustrates the breadth and flexibility of life narratives, the different pedagogical as well as cultural and social work they can take on or enable. When we teach life narratives, we often use these materials to approach not just the text itself but the work that autojbiography does in the world: it seems the “social actions” (Miller) of the genres of life narrative carry over into the roles they play in the classroom. It is this pedagogical work, what “teaching lives” does for students and teachers, for institutions and for disciplinary knowledge, that concerns us in this special issue. In particular, we are interested in what fruit might be borne from the convergence of our current “age of memoir” (Gilmore, Limits 1) and the urgent, necessary work of decolonizing pedagogies (Cervantes and Salda~ na; Shay; Trifonis; and Brophy; and Edwards and Hogarth in this special issue). It seems to us that life narratives, with their capacity to “speak truth to power” (Smith and Watson 85), have the particular potential to help instructors contribute to public interventions: to consider the power that reading and writing life stories can have in engaging critical thinking, exploring subjectivity, and promoting diverse experiences and perspectives. So what are we teaching when we teach lives? The contributors to this special issue, as well as to Miriam Fuchs and Craig Howes’s landmark collection Teaching Life Writing Texts, articulate how life narrative texts can serve as “a conduit to other subjects and debates” (14). They can embody issues and concepts—such as power, agency, “race,” and class—that need to take form for students to contend with them in meaningful ways, encouraging readings that are textually and contextually responsive and recognizing the lived

Lost and Found: the Life Narratives of Child Asylum Seekers

Abstract In this paper I explore the emergence of asylum seeker narratives, and suggest their significance as a form of Australian life writing. These narratives have emerged strongly in recent years and have functioned to raise awareness of the experiences of asylum seekers. I use the examples of Julian Burnsides From Nothing to Zero: Letters from Refugees in Australias Detention Centres and Heather Tylers Asylum: Voices Behind the Razor Wire to explore the dynamics of these narratives and issues such as testimony, counter-memory, witnessing, advocacy and collaboration. I focus this study by closely examining particular examples of life narrative occurring within these publications: the life narratives of child asylum seekers. The child figure has become central to the debates surrounding asylum seeking in Australia: from news and documentary footage of the innocent child being held in a detention centre, to the ambiguous images of ‘children overboard’. It is clearly significant that childrens stories are being foregrounded in asylum seeker life narratives. Thus, it is crucial to look at the ways in which childrens life narratives, for example, the physical image of the child or the representation of their narrative voice, is being deployed in these collaborative life narrative publications. I explore the significance and implications of this deployment, the political utility of these narratives more broadly, and their importance to life writing scholars.

“Indecent Exposure? Margaux Fragoso and the Limits of Abuse Memoir”

In 2011, North American creative writing graduate Margaux Fragoso published her first book, a memoir titled Tiger, Tiger. Detailing the authors childhood sexual “relationship” with a 57-year-old man, the memoir was highly controversial. In critical receptions of the memoir, three themes recurred: a sense that it exceeds the limits of appropriate representation, unease with Fragoso bringing child abuse into a stylized literary space, and the question “why do we need to read this story” – a view that it is potentially damaging for readers to consume such narratives. In this paper, we explore the reception of Tiger, Tiger and we argue the text reveals how memoir remains lodged in an uneasy relationship to ideals of public good (dictated by critics and reviewers) versus the needs and ethics of individual representation.

Trauma in the Twenty-First Century

In her genealogical approach to the study of trauma, Ruth Leys situates the most recent turn to trauma studies across a range of disciplines and in relation to the waxing and waning of interest in trauma over the course of more than a century. Leys is a useful place to begin, for she reminds us that the current surge in trauma studies is distinctively shaped by politics, culture and history in and of the present, and embedded within an intellectual history that goes back to the origins of psychoanalysis in European modernity. What we have seen these past two decades, then, draws deeply on debates and therapies that have emerged variously: in the rise of psychoanalysis in the years after 1900; the phenomenon of ‘shell shock’ after the Great War; the recognition of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder amongst veterans in the wake of the Vietnam War, and feminist campaigns in the 1970s concerning sexual abuse in children. Although the germinal texts in theorising trauma and representation in the recent past have focussed on the Holocaust*/for example Dominick LaCapra, Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, and Cathy Caruth*/and although the long-term effects of trauma on survivors of the Nazi genocide was evident in the aftermath of World War II, the Holocaust did not trigger the recent upsurge of trauma studies. Ironically the history of trauma itself is marked by an alternation between episodes of forgetting and remembering, as the experiences of one generation of psychiatrists have been neglected only to be revived at a later time: ‘[j]ust as it took World War II to ‘‘remember’’ the lessons of World War I, so it took the experience of Vietnam to ‘‘remember’’ the lessons of World War II, including the psychiatric lessons of the Holocaust’ (Leys 15). A vigorous and widespread turn to the practice and theory of life writing (a term that covers biography, autobiography and variants and mutations of both) has occurred along with this most recent emergence of trauma studies. The Greek root of trauma is ‘wound’, and the experience of trauma is an overwhelming and self-shattering event that is frequently theorised as unspeakable, resistant to representation. Trauma, suggests Leigh Gilmore, takes autobiography to the limits of representation. Yet life writing thrives here at the limits, and Gilmore’s book considers the aesthetic forms and cultural practices of traumatic