Editors’ Note, iii

ARTICLES

Against Depression: Final Knowledge in Styron, Mairs, and Solomon
Lee Zimmerman, p. 465

If contemporary depression narratives sometimes allude to the difficulty of representing such an elusive subject as depression, ultimately they purvey an ostensibly “final” knowledge. Reading such narratives by William Styron, Nancy Mairs, and Andrew Solomon, I argue that, in purveying such knowledge, these texts, often presented as “useful,” may at the same time reproduce depression’s central dilemma—symptomatically reenacting the failure of meaning at depression’s center.

Mediating Historical Memory in Family Memoirs: K. Connie Kang’s Home Was the Land of Morning Calm and Duong Van Mai Elliott’s The Sacred Willow
Rocío G. Davis, p. 491

This essay analyzes forms of historical mediation through auto/biographical writing by proposing how history may be mediated structurally and thematically. Using K. Connie Kang’s Home was the Land of Morning Calm (1995) and Duong Van Mai Elliott’s The Sacred Willow (1999), the article explores how Asian/American family memoirs also create cultural memory to empower a community through historical knowledge and awareness of cultural location in society.

Annual Bibliography of Works About Life Writing, 2006–2007
Phyllis E. Wachter and William Todd Schultz, p. 512

REVIEWS

Satan: A Biography, by Henry Ansgar Kelly
Reviewed by James H. Morey, p. 633

Imagining the Sacred Past: Hagiography and Power in Early Normandy, by Samantha Kahn Herrick
Reviewed by David Crouch, p. 635

Early Modern Autobiography: Theories, Genres, Practices, edited by Ronald Bedford, Lloyd Davis, and Philippa Kelly
Reviewed by Jessica C. Murphy, p. 637

The Captive’s Position: Female Narrative, Male Identity, and Royal Authority in Colonial New England, by Teresa A. Toulouse
Reviewed by Ralph Bauer, p. 640

Rhetorical Drag: Gender Impersonation, Captivity, and the Writing of History, by Lorrayne Carroll
Reviewed by Teresa A. Toulouse, p. 642

Aspects of Samuel Johnson: Essays on His Arts, Mind, Afterlife, and Politics, by Howard D. Weinbrot
Reviewed by Greg Clingham, p. 645

The Wake of Wellington: Englishness in 1852, by Peter W. Sinnema
Reviewed by Cornelia Pearsall, p. 649

Race and Form: Towards a Contextualized Narratology of African American Autobiography, by Dejin Xu
Reviewed by Jennifer Terry, p. 651

Scripted Geographies: Travel Writings by Nineteenth-Century Spanish Authors, by Gayle R. Nunley
Reviewed by Jorge L. Bacelis, p. 654

Virtual Voyages: Cinema and Travel, edited by Jeffrey Ruoff
Reviewed by Joel Black, p. 658

Ecritures du moi et idéologies chez les romancières francophones, by Tang Alice Delphine
Reviewed by Brian Gordon Kennelly, p. 661

Remembering and Imagining the Holocaust: The Chain of Memory, by Christopher Bigsby
Reviewed by Lars Fischer, p. 663

The Philosopher’s I: Autobiography and the Search for the Self, by J. Lenore Wright
Reviewed by Marya Schechtman, p. 666

REVIEWED ELSEWHERE, p. 670
Excerpts from recent reviews of biographies, autobiographies, and other works of interest

CONTRIBUTORS, p. 724

INDEX: VOLUME 30: 2007, 727

Cover Art

Editors’ Note, p. iii

ARTICLES

Nancy K. Miller
I Killed My Grandmother: Mary Antin, Amos Oz, and the Autobiography of a Name, p. 319
Read together as autobiographies of a name, these two very different narratives provide unexpected points of connection to my silenced family story. The essay explores the extent to which my identity as a third-generation American has been entangled with a collective history shaped by the trauma of departure. I reimagine the documents of my personal archive within the grand immigration sagas of the twentieth century.

James Gregory
Eccentric Biography and the Victorians, p. 342
This essay examines a neglected biographical sub-genre—collective “eccentric biography”—in its Victorian form. It contextualizes the genre by outlining its early-modern origins in character books and collections of wonders, and by relating Victorian versions to a wider press and public interest in eccentrics. The essay addresses readership, critical reception, publishing history, and the relationship of eccentric biography to the poetry of William Wordsworth, and to the fiction of Walter Scott and Charles Dickens, as well as reasons for the absence of new collections after the 1860s.

REVIEWS

Soft Weapons: Autobiography in Transit, by Gillian Whitlock, p. 377
Reviewed by John Marx

Autobiography, Travel, and Postnational Identity: Gandhi, Nehru and Iqbal, by Javed Majeed, p. 379
Reviewed by Philip Holden

Remembering War: The Great War between History and Memory in the Twentieth Century, by Jay Winter, p. 382
Reviewed by Daniel Todman

Writing Medieval Biography: Essays in Honour of Frank Barlow, edited by David Bates, Julia Crick, and Sarah Hamilton, p. 387
Reviewed by Anne J. Duggan

The Holy Bureaucrat: Eudes Rigaud and Religious Reform in Thirteenth-Century Normandy, by Adam J. Davis, p. 389
Reviewed by Nicholas Vincent

The Recycled Bible: Autobiography, Culture, and the Space Between, edited by Fiona C. Black, p. 393
Reviewed by Jennifer Rycenga

Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History, edited by Antoinette Burton, p. 397
Reviewed by Mark Allen Greene

Writing the Roaming Subject: The Biotext in Canadian Literature, by Joanne Saul, p. 400
Reviewed by Linda Warley

Métamorphoses du journal personnel. De Rétif de la Bretonne à Sophie Calle,
edited by Catherine Viollet and Marie-Françoise Lemonnier-Delpy, p. 402
Reviewed by Raylene Ramsay

Speaking Power: Black Feminist Orality in Women’s Narratives of Slavery, by DoVeanna S. Fulton, p. 406
Reviewed by Joycelyn Moody

REVIEWED ELSEWHERE, p. 412
Excerpts from recent reviews of biographies, autobiographies, and other works of interest

CONTRIBUTORS, p. 461

Editors’ Note, p. iii

ARTICLES

Susan Bruce
Sherston’s Imaginary Friend: Siegfried Sassoon’s Autobiographical Prose and the Idea of Photography, p. 173
In this essay, I take Siegfried Sassoon’s prose works as exemplary of a construction of selfhood peculiar to what I call “narratives of hindsight”: mid-twentieth-century narratives whose first person narrator is constructed out of two selves—an older self who writes, and a younger whose experience he or she relates—whose dual perspectives overlay and mediate each other, neither ever dominating or achieving authoritative veracity with respect to the other. I argue that this familiar (but historically specific) construction of selfhood-in-time is enabled by, and contingent upon, the rise of photography, whose advent ushers in new ways of relating to our pasts, and to our past selves.More generally, insofar as Sassoon is concerned, I illustrate broader ways in which his compulsive reiteration of his past is mediated through an imagination and a memory which is ineluctably photographic, and I try to show the ways in which his “autobiographies,” both “real” and “fictionalized,” are indebted, in general and in particular ways, to early photographic images.

Udi E. Greenberg
Remembering Walter Benjamin: Benjamin and His Biographers, p. 194
Having long ago emerged from years of obscurity, Walter Benjamin functions today as an icon not only among an academic audience, but also in many products of popular culture. Through the examination of three key biographies, this study traces the different meanings given to Benjamin’s life from the 1970s until today.

REVIEWS

Theatre and AutoBiography: Writing and Performing Lives in Theory and Practice, edited by Sherrill Grace and Jerry Wasserman, p. 213
Reviewed by Ryan Claycomb

Musical Biography: Towards New Paradigms, edited by Jolanta T. Pekacz, p. 215
Reviewed by Christopher Wiley

Loving Dr. Johnson, by Helen Deutsch, p. 220
Reviewed by Paul Tankard

Traveling Women: Narrative Visions of Early America, by Susan Clair Imbarrato, p. 224
Reviewed by Catherine Allgor

The Ethics of Working Class Autobiography:Representation of Family by Four American Authors, by Elizabeth Bidinger, p. 227
Reviewed by Michelle M. Tokarczyk

The Era of the Witness, by Annette Wieviorka, p. 230
Reviewed by Catherine Hobbs

From Split to Screened Selves: French and Francophone Autobiography in the Third Person, by Rachel Gabara, p. 234
Reviewed by Kirsty Ball

C’était Marguerite Duras, 1914–1945, by Jean Vallier, p. 238
Reviewed by Cécile Hanania

REVIEWED ELSEWHERE, p. 241
Excerpts from recent reviews of biographies, autobiographies, and other works of interest

LIFELINES, p. 314

CONTRIBUTORS, p. 317

Special Issue: Life Writing and Science Fiction

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION, p. v

John Rieder
Life Writing and Science Fiction: Constructing Identities and Constructing Genres, p. v
Each essay in the issue grapples with problems attending the social and literary construction of personal identities. Juxtaposing life writing and science fiction also suggests that generic identities ought to be grasped as complex social practices that connect discourse and power in a variety of ways.

ARTICLES

Dianne Newell and Jenéa Tallentire
For the Extended Family and the Universe: Judith Merril and Science Fiction Autobiography, p. 1
This article, in exploring why so few SF writers produce compelling or innovative autobiographies, examines Judith Merril’s controversial memoir, Better to Have Loved, written in collaboration with her granddaughter, Emily Pohl-Weary. The memoir authorship and form have no equal in SF circles. Merril (1923–1997) was a central, socially radical powerhouse in the extraordinary “man’s world” of modern science fiction, tracing her career through NewYork City, London, Tokyo, and Toronto between the 1940s and 1990s. Her fractured, nonlinear, and collaborative memoir that “tells it like it was” reflects precisely how she interacted with science fiction all her life.

Lisa Hammond Rashley
Revisioning Gender: Inventing Women in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Nonfiction, p. 22
Employing the same narrative techniques of experimentation and play that characterize her fiction, Ursula K. Le Guin has also created a substantial body of nonfiction. This article explores how her nonfiction continually challenges and questions the role of gender in literature and culture, but also in her own life as a woman writing.

Georgia Johnston
Discourses of Autobiographical Desires: Samuel Delany’s Nevèrÿon Series, p. 48
Science fiction writer, intellectual, and memoirist Samuel Delany reconfigures cultural narratives of sexuality. His science fiction fantasy series Nevèrÿon and his cultural criticism Times Square Red/Times Square Blue create an intertextual echo. The autobiographical intertextuality helps Delany to foreground a desiring gay fetishistic sexual subject as acceptable and normal, a narrative speech act that changes the terms of narrative and sexuality.

Kim Kirkpatrick
Begin Again: James Tiptree, Jr.’s Opossum Tricks, p. 61
This article analyzes how Tiptree taught her audience to question gender and age by planting in her readers the idea of the ephemeral nature of division into age groups and gender: it is the reader’s decision to see what he or she wants to see, rather than just accepting patriarchal definition.

Keith McDonald
Days of Past Futures: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go as “Speculative Memoir”, p. 74
This article considers Kazuo Ishiguro’s dystopian novel Never Let Me Go as a text which utilizes memoir as a means of presenting a possible future where human rights are decimated, but where human stories remain. The novel is considered as an example of an ongoing science-fictional model where life-writing acts as a window into a world where the individual’s experiences guide the reader through the speculative world.

Mark Bould and Sherryl Vint
Of Neural Nets and Brains in Vats: Model Subjects in Galatea 2.2 and Plus, p. 84
Building on feminist critiques of autobiography, we argue that bringing together sf and life-writing theory can further critique the ideological connection between narrative mode and bourgeois, monadic subjectivity characteristic of much autobiography, as revealed by our reading of non-humans coming to consciousness in Richard Powers’s Galatea 2.2 and Joseph McElroy’s Plus.

REVIEWS

Life Writing and Victorian Culture, by Joseph Wiesenfarth, p. 105
Reviewed by Francis O’Gorman

The True Story of Alice B. Toklas: A Study of Three Autobiographies, by Anna Linzie, p. 108
Reviewed by Margot Norris

Reading Charlotte Salomon, edited by Michael P. Steinberg and Monica Bohm-Duchen, p. 112
Reviewed by Brent Ashley Kaplan

The Afterlife of John Brown, edited by Andrew Taylor and Eldrid Herrington, p. 114
Reviewed by Robert Blakeslee Gilpin

REVIEWED ELSEWHERE, p. 119
Excerpts from recent reviews of biographies, autobiographies, and other works of interest

LIFELINES, p. 168

CONTRIBUTORS, p. 170

Cover Art

Editors’ Note, p. v

ARTICLES

Erica L. Johnson
Auto-Ghostwriting Smile, Please: An Unfinished Autobiography, p. 563
Jean Rhys’s Smile, Please: An Unfinished Autobiography was not actually written by Rhys, but by novelist David Plante in an act that can only be characterized as ghostwriting. This essay theorizes ghostwriting in the context of autobiography and life writing, and shows how the ghostwriting process results in contested layers of written and spoken texts. Rhys resists the ghostwriter’s displacement of her spoken text by quoting her own written texts verbatim throughout Smile, Please, thus in effect auto-ghostwriting her autobiography.

Kylie Cardell
Bloodsport: Thomas Goltz and the Journalist’s Diary of War, p. 584
This article examines how the war correspondent Thomas Goltz negotiates the representation of war and conflict, and the exigencies of his profession as a journalist, through diary. Particularly in Chechnya Diary, the second in his “Caucasus Trilogy,” Goltz uses the diary to focus on his profession and to make particular ethical and moral dilemmas visible. For Goltz, diary is a political tool, but the problem is it is also a personal device.

Mark Maslan
Biographical Fraud Traumatic Nationalism: Joseph Ellis’s Vietnam Testimony, p. 605
In 2001, the Boston Globe reported that Joseph Ellis, an award-winning presidential biographer and professor of history, had lied to students and reporters about having served in the Vietnam War. This essay presents the Ellis scandal as an example of how traumatic events serve as vehicles for national affiliation, and of how the concept of trauma misrepresents our relationship to history.

Phyllis E. Wachter
Annual Bibliography of Works about Life Writing, 2005–2006, p. 615

REVIEWS

Ford Madox Ford and the Regiment of Women: Violet Hunt, Jean Rhys, Stella Bowen, Janice Biala, by Joseph Wiesenfarth, p. 726
Reviewed by Max Saunders

Women and the Politics of Travel, 1870–1914, by Monica Anderson, p. 733
Reviewed by Barbara T. Gates

Traveling South: Travel Narratives and the Construction of American Identity, by John D. Cox, p. 736
Reviewed by Edlie L. Wong

Sovereign Selves: American Indian Autobiography and the Law, by David J. Carlson, p. 740
Reviewed by Laura L. Mielke

Late-Medieval Prison Writing and the Politics of Autobiography, by Joanna Summers, p. 742
Reviewed by Elizabeth Schirmer

English Biography in the Seventeenth Century: A Critical Survey, by Allan Pritchard, p. 745
Reviewed by Peter McCullough

Women Writing Africa. Vol. 2: West Africa and the Sahel, edited by Esi Sutherland-Addy and Aminata Diaw, p. 747
Reviewed by Lisa McNee

Narrating the Holocaust, by Andrea Reiter, p. 751
Reviewed by David Brauner

Hitler’s Face: The Biography of an Image, by Claudia Schmölders, p. 753
Reviewed by Richard T. Gray

La Forme des jours: pour une poétique du journal personnel, by Michel Braud, p. 756
Reviewed by Virginia Ricard

Genèse, censure, autocensure, by Catherine Viollet and Claire Bustarret, p. 759
Reviewed by Virginia Ricard

REVIEWED ELSEWHERE, p. 762
Excerpts from recent reviews of biographies, autobiographies, and other works of interest

CONTRIBUTORS, p. 806

INDEX, p. 809

Cover Art

Editors’ Note, p. iii

ARTICLES

Jaume Aurell
Autobiographical Texts as Historiographical Sources: Rereading Fernand Braudel and Annie Kriegel, p. 425
This article engages autobiographical texts by French historians Fernand Braudel and Annie Kriegal as historiographical sources that help us comprehend the intersection between personal lives and scholarly production. This perspective serves as a reference for comprehending the way historians construct our access to the knowledge of the past to increase our understanding not only of history, but importantly, of the writing of history.

Jennifer Jensen Wallach
Building a Bridge of Words: The Literary Autobiography as Historical Source Material, p. 446
Certain aspects of historical reality can best be captured by literary autobiographies. Historical reality is inherently perspectival. Autobiography effectively describes the universe as it appeared from different acknowledged perspectives, enabling historians to rethink and refeel past experiences. Literary techniques such as irony and metaphor make autobiography a particularly evocative historical source material.

Alexis Harley
“This reversed order of things”: Re-Orientation aboard HMS Beagle, p. 462
This essay explores how Darwin’s Beagle Diary navigates between geographical and intellectual travel in logging a literal voyage of discovery; it focuses on the diary’s allegorical use of geography in a narrative of religious disorientation, and on Darwin’s descriptions of the disorienting effects of encountering different cultures and environments.

REVIEWS

History, Historians, and Autobiography, by Jeremy D. Popkin, p. 481
Reviewed by Allan Megill

Arms and the Self: War, the Military, and Autobiographical Writing, edited by Alex Vernon, p. 486
Reviewed by Frances B. Cogan

Sounds of Defiance: The Holocaust, Multilingualism, and the Problem of English, by Alan Rosen, p. 490
Reviewed by Natania Rosenfeld

Trauma Cinema: Documenting Incest and the Holocaust, by Janet Walker, p. 493
Reviewed by Tom Conley

Auto/Biography and Identity: Women, Theatre and Performance, edited by Maggie B. Gale and Viv Gardner, p. 495
Reviewed by Susan Bennett

Five Empresses: Court Life in Eighteenth-Century Russia, by Evgenii V. Anisimov, p. 497
Reviewed by Ruth Dawson

At the House of Gathered Leaves: Shorter Biographical and Autobiographical Narratives from Japanese Court Literature, by Joshua Mostow, p. 500
Reviewed by Robert Huey

Imagining Lives: Autobiographical Fiction of Yiddish Writers, by Jan Schwartz, p. 502
Reviewed by Amelia Glaser

REVIEWED ELSEWHERE, p. 506
Excerpts from recent reviews of biographies, autobiographies, and other works of interest

LIFELINES, p. 559
Upcoming events, calls for papers, and news from the field

CONTRIBUTORS, p. 560

Editors’ Note, p. v

ARTICLES

Hsuan L. Hsu
Personality, Race, and Geopolitics in Joseph Heco’s Narrative of a Japanese, p. 273
Joseph Heco, a Japanese castaway who spent the 1850s working and studying in the US, played a significant role as translator, entrepreneur, and advisor after returning to Japan. This article examines the circum-Pacific contexts and stylistic idiosyncrasies of Heco’s autobiographical Narrative of a Japanese, arguing that its formal flaws reflect disjunctions between the conventions of equality that underwrite Western autobiography and the uneven conditions governing Japan’s forced modernization.

Catherine Scott
Time Out of Joint: The Narcotic Effect of Prolepsis in Christopher Reeve’s Still Me, p. 307
In this article I examine Christopher Reeve’s memoir Still Me, in which Reeve explores the painful and traumatic shift from his previous able-body to his present disabled body. I explore not only the way in which Reeve struggles with his public image as Superman, but also the way in which Reeve’s narrative continually fast forwards through episodes of pain and suffering, in order to keep the strong and powerful image of the Super-Crip intact.

James Walter
The Utility of Short Lives, p. 329
“Short lives” were the earliest manifestations of biography. Their memorializing intent remains alive (in obituaries and biographical dictionaries). That said, these essays were tendentious—making arguments, or exemplifying moral conduct—rather than simply celebrating individuals. Given that biography, since the romantic age, has tended to celebrate individuals, what can we learn by revisiting more tendentious “brief lives”? This article suggests that some research agendas and some disciplinary imperatives are conducive to short lives. Noting the ways in which tendentious essays are deployed in current life writing, this article identifies generic differences between full-scale biography and (contemporary) short lives to argue that the potential of the latter should be more fully appreciated.

REVIEWS

Encyclopedia of Women’s Autobiography, edited by Victoria Boynton and Jo Malin, p. 338
Reviewed by Maureen Perkins

Autobiographical Writing and British Literature, 1783–1834, by James Tredwell, p. 341
Reviewed by Julian North

How to Make It as a Woman: Collective Biographical History from Victoria to the Present, by Alison Booth, p. 344
Reviewed by Mary Ellis Gibson

Graham R: Rosamund Marriott Watson, Woman of Letters, by Linda K. Hughes, p. 349
Reviewed by Celeste Pottier

Boudica: Iron Age Warrior Queen, edited by R. Hingley and L. Unwin, p. 351
Reviewed by A. T. Fear

The Making of Saints: Contesting Sacred Ground, edited by James Hopgood, p. 354
Reviewed by Samantha Barbas

The Lives of Women: A New History of Inquisitorial Spain, by Lisa Vollendorf, p. 357
Reviewed by Barbara F. Weissberger

I Am Aztlán: The Personal Essay in Chicano Studies, edited by Chon A. Noriega and Wendy Belcher, p. 360
Reviewed by Carlos Gallego

Soi-disant: Life Writing in French, edited by Julian de Nooy, Joe Hardwick, and Barbara E. Hanna, p. 362
Reviewed by Cécile Hanania

Le Journal Intime: Genre littéraire et écriture ordinaire, by Françoise Simonet-Tenant, p. 364
Reviewed by Sonia Wilson

The Closest of Strangers: South African Women’s Life Writing, edited by Judith Lütge Coullie, p. 367
Reviewed by Sam Raditlhalo

Telling Lives in India: Biography, Autobiography, and Life History, edited by David Arnold and Stuart Blackburn, p. 375
Reviewed by Julie F. Codell

City Bushman: Henry Lawson and the Australian Imagination, by Christopher Lee, p. 380
Reviewed by Nathanael O’Reilly

Rethinking Orientalism: Women, Travel, and the Ottoman Harem, by Reina Lewis, p. 383
Reviewed by Gillian Whitlock

REVIEWED ELSEWHERE, p. 386
Excerpts from recent reviews of biographies, autobiographies, and other works of interest

LIFELINES, p. 420
Upcoming events, calls for papers, and news from the field

CONTRIBUTORS, p. 422

SPECIAL ISSUE: Self-Projection and Autobiography in Film

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

Linda Haverty Rugg
Keaton’s Leap: Self-Projection and Autobiography in Film, p. v
In exploring what we are talking about when we talk about a film as the self-projection of a filmmaker, this introduction suggests film’s potential for not only recrafting the act of self-representation, but also for examining the nature of selfhood and its construction, as the very impossibility of cinematic autobiography aids in the discovery of a more implicated, complex, and unrepresentable subject.

ARTICLES

Nadja Gernalzick
To Act or to Perform: Distinguishing Filmic Autobiography, p. 1
This article traces pivotal developments in the history of first-person filmic narration and subjective camera technique as the principal elements of filmic autobiography. Theoretical approaches to defining filmic autobiography, and critical distinctions between autobiographical fiction film and filmic autobiography are developed with reference to films by Robert Montgomery, Jim McBride, and Jean-Luc Godard.

Guy Barefoot
Autobiography and the Autobiographical in the Bill Douglas Trilogy, p. 14
Through an examination of the production and reception of Bill Douglas’s “autobiographical trilogy,” and a comparison with Douglas’s written description of his childhood, this article explores the problems of discussing film as autobiography, and differences between literary autobiography and autobiographical film, but also how the autobiographical remains central to our understanding of these particular films.

Christine Fanthome
The Influence and Treatment of Autobiography in Confessional Art: Observations on Tracey Emin’s Feature Film Top Spot, p. 30
This article explores the influence and treatment of autobiography in Tracey Emin’s confessional feature film Top Spot. Drawing primarily on observations by Michel Foucault, Susanna Egan, and Anthony Giddens, the essay comments on the inherent appeal of confessional art, and questions why it appears to be especially relevant within today’s society.

Peter Mathews
The Mandatory Proxy, p. 43
This article explores how Jean-Luc Godard’s film Vivre sa Vie (1962) sets about deconstructing—rather than reproducing—the autobiographical act within cinema. Central to Godard’s exercise is the decision to cast Anna Karina, his wife at the time, as the lead actress. Godard repeatedly demonstrates that the cinematic image functions as an opaque screen, a “mandatory proxy,” between actor and viewer that renders a truly authentic autobiography impossible.

Efrén Cuevas
The Immigrant Experience in Jonas Mekas’s Diary Films: A Chronotopic Analysis of Lost, Lost, Lost, p. 54
The article examines Jonas Mekas’s immigrant experience through a close analysis of his diary film Lost, Lost, Lost (1976). After explaining Mekas’s diary film practice, it studies the narrative of his American immigrant experience, helped by the chronotopic approach to literary analysis proposed by Mikhail Bakhtin.

Milan Pribisic
Carousel: Erwin, Elvira, Armin, Fassbinder, and All the Others’ Autobiographies, p. 73
I read Fassbinder’s short story, film script, and the film In a Year of Thirteen Moons itself as a bi-level, intertextual web—an autobiography of Fassbinder’s “failed” homosexuality, and a biography of a generation of Germans growing up in the post-World War 2 West Germany to which Fassbinder belonged.

Michael Tratner
Lovers, Filmmakers, and Nazis: Fritz Lang’s Last Two Movies as Autobiography, p. 86
Fritz Lang’s last two movies are autobiographies of a peculiar kind. He remakes two early films, transforming them into allegorical representations of the intense romantic and political triangle which shaped his early career—the triangle connecting the director Lang, the screenwriter Thea Von Harbou (who was also his wife), and the Nazi Party.

Julie F. Codell
Playing Doctor: François Truffaut’s L’Enfant sauvage and the Auteur/Autobiographer as Impersonator, p. 101
Truffaut, impersonating/performing Dr. Itard, represents multiple layers of autobiographical content through allusions to film history, his life, cultural ideals, colonial upheavals, and critiques of the Enlightenment. Instead of the optimism critics have seen in this film, I suggest that it offers a criticism of colonialism and the Enlightenment through a convoluted autobiographical ity that shifts its central subjectivity from Itard to Victor.

Jason Sperb
Removing the Experience: Simulacrum as an Autobiographical Act in American Splendor, p. 123
This article articulates how American Splendor’s filmmakers deploy post-modernity and the seemingly antithetical logic of the simulacrum as the central means of documenting the real-life experiences of Harvey Pekar. Paradoxically, the film also attempts to reveal how these experiences neces-sarily continue to exist outside the simulacrum, in an affective realm.

Theresa L. Geller
The Personal Cinema of Maya Deren: Meshes of the Afternoon and Its Critical Reception in the History of the Avant-Garde, p. 140
Maya Deren’s role within the history of the avant-garde is irreducibly tied to the reception of her groundbreaking film, Meshes of the Afternoon. In its avant-garde aesthetics, Meshes challenges the psychic structures of gendered subjectivity. By examining how the film’s critique reflected Deren’s position as a woman filmmaker, Meshes emerges as a significant work of feminist cinematic autobiography.

Garrett Stewart
Vitagraphic Time, p. 159
Two screen narratives from 2004 take up autobio/graphic techniques of visual mediation from opposite sides of a division suggested long ago by Gilles Deleuze between “European humanism” and “American science fiction.” Pedro Almodóvar’s Bad Education, about a Spanish film director confronted with a script that implicates his own erotic past, carries the stylistic possibilities of the Deleuzian “time-image” to new digitally implemented extremes in the mode of elegiac melodrama. By contrast, Omar Naim’s futurist fable The Final Cut, about a digital implant that records one’s entire life and then requires a “cutter” to edit it down for the funeral rites of “rememory,” explores a dystopian reduction of human temporality to mere cybernetic storage. In response to such autobiographical extremes, an approach through “narratography” is able to chart the tracings of memory along the grain of the cinematographic and digitized image—and their ironic amalgams—in both films.

REVIEWED ELSEWHERE, p. 193
Excerpts from recent reviews of biographies, autobiographies, and other works of interest

CONTRIBUTORS, p. 270

Editors’ Note, p. iii

ARTICLES

Eugene Stelzig
A Cultural Tourist in Romantic Germany: Henry Crabb Robinson as Nineteenth-Century Life Writer, p. 515
Henry Crabb Robinson is mostly remembered for having cultivated the acquaintance of many of the leading writers of his time in Germany and England, and for his value as a source of historical information about his better known peers. This article argues that despite the fact that Robinson never completed his Reminiscences, his letters, diaries, journals, and other writing indicate that he deserves to be considered an important nineteenth century autobiographer.

Birgit A. Jensen
Bawdy Bodies or Moral Agency? The Struggle for Identity in Working-Class Autobiographies of Imperial Germany, p. 534
Master narratives in Imperial Germany typically equated “the laborer” with immoral bodies. Proletarian autobiographers insisted that wretched existential conditions caused working-class bawdiness, and devised counterstories to the ideological theft of moral agency. Class-conscious male authors outlined a proletarian morality, while female authors in general claimed either a private or bourgeois respectability for themselves.

Phyllis E. Wachter and William Todd Schulz
Annual Bibliography of Works about Life Writing, 2004–2005, p. 558

REVIEWS

Understanding Our Selves: The Dangerous Art of Biography, by Susan Tridgell, p. 677
Reviewed by David McCooey

The Value of Solitude: The Ethics and Spirituality of Aloneness in Autobiography, by John D. Barbour, p. 681
Reviewed by Nicholas Paige

Fantasies of Witnessing: Postwar Efforts to Experience the Holocaust, by Gary Weissman, p. 684
Reviewed by Victoria Aarons

Marketing the Author: Authorial Personae, Narrative Selves and Self-Fashioning, 1880–1930, edited by Marysa Demoor, p. 688
Reviewed by Michelle Tusan

The Intimate Life of L. M. Montgomery, edited by Irene Gammel, p. 690
Reviewed by K. L. Poe

The Past Is Not Dead: Facts, Fictions, and Enduring Racial Stereotypes, by Allan Pred, p. 694
Reviewed by Richard M. Breaux

Hell Without Fires: Slavery, Christianity, and the Antebellum Spiritual Narrative, by Yolanda Pierce, p. 696
Reviewed by John B. Boles

REVIEWED ELSEWHERE, p. 699
Excerpts from recent reviews of biographies, autobiographies, and other works of interest

LIFELINES, p. 735
Upcoming events, calls for papers, and news from the field

CONTRIBUTORS, p. 738

INDEX, p. 740

Editors’ Note, p. iii

ARTICLES

Heidi Kolk
Tropes of Suffering and Postures of Authority in Margaret Fuller’s European Travel Letters, p. 377
This article traces the prodigal child mythos in Fuller’s autobiographical travel letters, arguing that the povera soletta and similar types appearing in her later correspondence were the culmination of the material realities and competitive practices inherent in nineteenth-century travel experience.

Peter Dickinson
Oscar Wilde: Reading the Life After the Life, p. 414
Oscar Wilde has repeatedly been subjected to posthumous conscription by scholars, critics, writers, and artists as the exemplary literary, sexual, and national outlaw. This article considers both the Anglo and the American production and reception of these other(ed) Oscars across two performative contexts: contemporary drama, where in the years preceding the centenaries of Wilde’s trials and death, several plays were staged which offered a mix of documentary and dramatic reassessments of his life; and recent cinema, where representations include Brian Gilbert’s earnest biopic Wilde and Todd Haynes’s queerly revisionist Velvet Goldmine. The article concludes with a few observations on Will Self ’s recent novel Dorian: An Imitation.

REVIEWS

Character and Conversion in Autobiography: Augustine, Montaigne, Descartes, Rousseau, and Sartre, by Patrick Riley, p. 433
Reviewed by Ann Hartle

Semiologies of Travel: From Gautier to Baudrillard, by David Scott, p. 436
Reviewed by Chris Bongie

“I Foresee My Life”: The Ritual Performance of Autobiography in an Amazonian Community, by Suzanne Oakdale, p. 441
Reviewed by Jonathan D. Hill

Gender, Genre and Identity in Women’s Travel Writing, edited by Kristi Siegel, p. 444
Reviewed by Helen M. Buss

Working Against Odds: Stories of Disabled Women’s Work Lives, by Mary Grimley Mason, p. 447
Reviewed by Marilyn Chandler McEntyre

REVIEWED ELSEWHERE, p. 452
Excerpts from recent reviews of biographies, autobiographies, and other works of interest

LIFELINES, p. 513
Upcoming events, calls for papers, and news from the field

CONTRIBUTORS, p. 514