Autobiography and life writing studies

The article aims to analyse the experience of reading as a “sentimental education” in the life of some Spanish writers who decided to tell the story of their own life in some specific autobiographical texts. In these works, which represent a very interesting field to explore the characters of contemporary autobiography, the writers try to establish a peculiar relationship with their readers, by recollecting the past starting from their childhood. In that period, the narrators find out their literary vocation through the experience of reading, which becomes a fascinating way to move in a wonderful world, but also to learn their future profession. We propose to compare the autobiographical pages of Caballero Bonald and Soledad Puértolas, two Spanish contemporary writers, who both represent themselves, first of all, as readers. They are just two examples to understand the importance of reading in the “literary education” of writers because reading and writing are two sides of the same coin, two favourite ways to enter the world of literature, imagination, creation and life.

Memoirs and Madness examines memoir as a literary genre, investigates the creation of Leonid Andreev's posthumous legacy by his contemporaries, and explores the possibility that Andreev, Russia's leading literary figure at the beginning of the twentieth century, suffered from mental illness. Frederick White's primary focus is A Book About Leonid Andreev (1922), the most important collection of memoirs dedicated to the Russian author, presented here in the first English translation. The agendas of the memoirists resulted in portraits that have influenced how Andreev is read and spoken about to the present day. White pays special attention to Andreev's history of mental illness, which the memoirists described with vague terms such as "creative energy" or "inner turmoil." Past scholarship has focused on philosophical and sociological factors in the author's life but this concentration on his mental health provides a fruitful approach to deciphering the literary portraits.

This Introduction presents the European literary and historical context of Swedish author and artist August Strindberg's novel _Le Plaidoyer d'un fou_, first published in 1893. Known in Swedish as _En dåres försvarstal_, the Introduction complements a new translation by Sarah Death and Rochelle Wright.

SESSION I: INTERTEXT AND GENERIC FORM
(sponsored by RSA's Humanism discipline)

"Parody and the Abstraction of Character"
Samuel Fallon, SUNY Geneseo, USA

"Characters in Search of a Plot:
Intertextual Dynamics in Gascoigne’s Adventures of Master F. J."
Robert H. F. Carver, University of Durham, UK

"Character As Meme"
Katherine Schaap Williams, University of Toronto, CAN


SESSION II: TECHNIQUE AND TECHNOLOGY
(sponsored by RSA's Humanism discipline)

"Poor Painted Shadows: Non-Shakespearean Characterization in Shakespeare"
Lara Bovilsky, University of Oregon, USA

"'Sparks of living fire': Ethopoeia and Ovid’s Heroides in the works of Christopher Marlowe"
Asa Olson, Gustavus Adolphus University, USA

"Navel-Gazing and Performance:
The Creation of Character in Ralph Josselin’s Diary (1641-1683)"
Anne M. Myers, University of Missouri, USA

Everybody is born into a family. Each has its own history, therefore, 'our history' is not made by us, but by previous generations. The rise of International migration and the crumbling of family structures, however, only make it harder for descendants to learn about their family history. Inhibited by language and geographical barriers as well as lost connections to the bearers of knowledge, many offspring of migrant families year for answers to questions such as 'Where do I come from?' or 'How did I get here?' Answering these requires re-establishing lost connections and meeting family one previously did not know. This paper illustrates how the juxtaposition of two generations of Chinese Australian migrants' narrative (a 'pioneer migrant' and an 'overseas born Chinese' are vital to piecing together a segment of family history.

Rules of this autobiography

This autobiography mentions personal details, but not private details.
This autobiography is not in chronological (or any other) order.
This autobiography does not reveal feelings or thoughts.
This autobiography provides no insights.
This autobiography is open to interpretation.

The study draws upon Lawrence Venuti’s concept of foreignization as a strategic tool employed in the translation of CK Janu’s Mother Forest: An Unfinished Autobiography. The translation works to mould an ethnic autobiography and represent a subaltern subject through explicit signifiers of subalternity, masqueraded as an attempt to “retain the flavour of Janu’s intonation and the sing-song nature of her speech in translation”. As a mode of representation, this study identifies the text as catering to a transnational publishing industry and the global academic marketplace, transforming the cultural value of an ethnic subaltern text into what Graham Huggan describes as “tawdry ethnic goods” in the late capitalist supermarket.

Autobiografische boeken hebben net als historische romans en literaire non-fictie een paradoxale status. Ze gaan over werkelijk gebeurde feiten en reële ervaringen, maar ze willen tegelijk ook literatuur zijn, een hoedanigheid die vele lezers verbinden met verzonnen gebeurtenissen.
De spanning tussen die twee eigenschappen en de vraag in hoeverre het vertelde echt gebeurd is, bepalen in vele gevallen mede de waardering voor het boek. In recensies van autobiografische romans wordt het gebrek aan literaire kwaliteit vaak direct verbonden met het autobiografische karakter van een boek: het is “plat autobiografisme”, “gemakzuchtig proza”, “toegeven aan de smaak van de doorsneelezer”. De literaire kwaliteit van wat het grote publiek graag leest, geldt dan per definitie als bedenkelijk. Maar ook het feit dát het om een persoonlijk relaas gaat, kan een gunstige waardering van een autobiografisch boek als literair en kunstzinnig product in de weg zitten. Recht uit het hart schrijven staat dan op gespannen voet met kunst maken

My interview with Daniele Santi, of Senzatomica (Italy). Published 'Our aim is to raise public awareness about the threats of nuclear weapons and to empower each individual to speak out for a world free of nuclear weapons.' In order to create an unstoppable force for peace, we launched a touring exhibition, believing that it is people's right and duty to speak out.'

This is a paper I gave at the Representing Modern War(s): Fields of Action and Fields of Vision International Conference, hosted by the Research Group on Identities and Cultures, University of Le Havre, France, March 19-21st, 2014. The paper focuses on different kinds of censorship influencing British women's international correspondence during WWII. It has also been recorded as a sound file and stored at the University of Le Havre radio station.

professeur au département de psychosociologie et travail social de l'Université du Québec à Rimouski. RÉSUMÉ : Narration écrite à la première personne du présent singulier afin de, en quelques mots, vous partager ma vision de l'approche autobiographique en recherche. J'introduis ici une manière de faire peu connue : l'Écriture Performative. J'utilise une analogie fondée sur le nombre trois. Trois triades contenues dans une analogie que j'appelle « la tornade analogique ». Il s'agit d'une réflexion fondée sur des éléments venant de la phénoménologie, du cognitivisme et de la notion de culture dans une perspective humaniste, interprétativiste et compréhensive.

En el presente trabajo, parte de las tareas del proyecto de investigación “Escrituras de minorías, heterogeneidad y traducción. Perspectivas y enfoques diversos” (IdIHCS, UNLP-CONICET), nos proponemos analizar la novela autobiográfica de Judith Kerr, When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit (1971) –la primera de la trilogía Out of the Hitler Time– que cuenta el exilio de la protagonista de 9 años y su familia políticamente activa (el padre era un intelectual abiertamente anti-nazi) y judía no practicante. Este exilio –primero a Suiza, luego a Francia, y finalmente a Inglaterra– comienza con el ascenso de Hitler al poder. La perspectiva infantil en la narración hace que un tema traumático sea contado de manera natural y espontánea. Así se relatan conflictos de identidad referentes a las culturas en las que la niña protagonista se ve obligada a insertarse, y a las lenguas que debe adquirir –lo cual es problematizado en la narración– en la vida cotidiana y en la escuela. El texto original está escrito en inglés, la tercera lengua de la autora (después del alemán y del francés).

Česká literatura 2015/1, s. 49-72.
Studie se věnuje teoretickému vymezení a definici žánru autobiografie, který tradičně stojí na pomezí mezi fikční a faktuální literaturou. Za výchozí si bere práci Philippa Lejeuna a jeho koncept tzv. autobiografického paktu, který blíže rozebírá. Postupně analyzuje jednotlivá kritéria, kterými Lejeue autobiografii vymezuje, a na příkladech z české i světové literatury ukazuje propustnost hranic mezi autobiografií a dalšími žánry. Na textu Gertrude Steinové Vlastní životopis Alice B. Toklasové jsou v závěru prezentovány možnosti experimentování s žánrovými konvencemi a důsledky, které z toho plynou pro literární teorii.

This article discusses cannibalism and embodiment in the autobiographical space of Maryse Condé. Autobiography in the tradition of Rousseau and Montaigne is a genre associated with a white male identity. The genre as such poses questions of inclusion towards other identities, such as the non-male, non-white. From an ethical engagement, literary criticism has put a focus on life writing instead of autobiography. Life writing has an emancipatory function in disability studies and feminism, but is also compatible with postcolonial criticism. In this article I claim that the whole oeuvre of Maryse Condé can be read as an autobiographical space, blurring the lines between the genre of autobiography and life writing. This is interpreted as an ethically engaged postmodern game, where the traditional genre of autobiography is parodied and criticised from the perspective of the Caribbean female. The claim is that by appropriating tropes such as cannibalism and female disability, Condé establishes an autobiographical space for her female characters, thereby opening up the genre of autobiography to the hybrid identity of the Caribbean woman.

This doctoral thesis is a theoretical and an interpretative study that deals with the genre of autobiography, its position in the contemporary literary theory and problems related to an interpretation of autobiographical texts. Autobiography as a genre of non-fictional literature refers to real characters and events, but at the same time it is a literary work of art, a verbal construct in which the representation of reality is subject to the intentions of the author and to the rules of construction, that are close to the compositional techniques of fictional texts.
The first part of the thesis concentrates on the theory of autobiography and its interdisciplinary context. It summarizes the development of theory of autobiography from the late 19th century to the present. Also, the concepts of the memory studies (especially the concept of collective memory) and the problem of distinguishing fiction and non-fiction (discussed in philosophy of history in 1970s and 1980s, fictional worlds theory, pragmatics of fiction, etc.) are taken into account. The theoretical chapter critically reflects P. Lejeune’s definition of autobiography, based on the concept of the autobiographical pact. In relation with the problem of how to define autobiography, the influence of genre norms and models on the form of particular autobiographies and life stories (Ricœur’s concept of three-fold mimesis) is also discussed. With regard to the performative character of autobiographies, the opening chapter summarizes how the concept of an autobiographical subject developed in the theory of autobiography and proposes a more adequate approach inspired by the socio-constructivist positioning theory (R. Harré, L. Van Langenhove) and based on narrative analysis of texts (concept of narrative identity). Also, specific text areas with semantic potential to be focused on in the narrative analyses are described.
These theoretical and methodological bases are verified and described in the analytical chapters that analyse and interpret the three chosen autobiographies. These autobiographies were written in the same language, originate from the same cultural context, depict a similar period of the historical development of the Czech society and therefore comparative analysis can be applied.
The second chapter contains the analysis of Heda Margolius Kovály’s (1919–2010) autobiography Under a Cruel Star. Heda Margolius Kovály was wife of a prominent communist officer – Rudolf Margolius. Her husband was found guilty of conspiracy during a show trial, sentenced to death and executed, her property was confiscated, she and her young son Ivan were persecuted. The analysis demonstrates that Heda Margolius Kovály takes on the role of a victim and constructs her autobiography according to the narrative scheme of tragic love story.
In his autobiography My Crazy Century, Ivan Klíma (* 1931) tells the story of his opinion development from a whole-hearted communist to a dissident and tries to explain his attitude and his actions. The analysis (in the third chapter of this study) concentrates on the literary representation of membership in the Communist Party and shows that the author tends to marginalize his allegiance to the Party with the help of narrative techniques. Klíma displays his “past self” as naïve, while presenting his “present self” – in essayistic subchapters added to his life story – as wise. Model reader sympathises with the author because he combines confessional and picaresque narrative types in his story.
The fourth chapter is devoted to the literary critic Václav Černý (1905–1987) and his three volumes of autobiographical Paměti (Memoirs). Firstly, it summarizes the complicated publishing history of Černý’s book. The three examples (J. Mukařovský, F. X. Šalda, F. Halas) show how Černý constructs his position in relation to the other characters and then chapter’s focus shifts to the analysis of the author’s self-depiction, characterized through the role of critic, professor and scholar, and through categories of exceptionality, freedom, wilfulness and aggrievement.
The final chapter compares the three autobiographies and summarizes the results of the analyses that are relevant to the theory of autobiography: The author displays him-/herself in the text in accordance with a specific pattern and plot and his/her positioning in the story is therefore a matter of selected and combined narrative – thematic and compositional – techniques.

Keywords:
autobiography; positioning theory; memory; narrative identity; Heda Margolius-Kovály; Ivan Klíma; Václav Černý; Paměti; Under a Cruel Star; My Crazy Century

This article provides guidelines for understanding Irish socialist playwright Sean O'Casey as a disabled author, through analysis of the first volume of his autobiography, _I Knock at the Door_ (1939). The narrative describes the author’s experience as a poor child with a painful disease of the eyes, likely trachoma. Like O’Casey’s other works, the book strongly criticizes the inequalities brought about by capitalism. It also describes how ableist medical, religious, and educational authorities further contributed to his sense of alienation.

The article is a chapter in _Disability Experiences_, edited by G. Thomas Couser and Susannah B. Mintz. The collection provides overviews, historical and cultural contexts, and themes of hundreds of first-person disability memoirs, autobiographies, and other personal narratives.

Autobiographical piece, published in 2002 and modified in 2011. This is the last version). It´s a story where the affects and effects of immigration-- in this case Eastern European Jews to Argentina on the twentieth century is narrated from a personal perspective. It also tells the story of the crimes against humanity committed in the Argentina of the seventies, in this case to the children of these immigrants.

The paper points to the unique relationships among young girls and the games they play in order to belong and avoid being ostracized from social cliques in Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood. The sisterhood that once was described as an ideal in the beginnings of feminism by V. Woolf, is challenged by M. Atwood. It will be depicted how Atwood went about this idea, and through the games that young girls played, she actually portrayed a reversal in feminism – a broken bond of sisterhood in female friendships affected by internalized patriarchy. Furthermore, emphasis is given to how processes of healing forge after games had been won or lost, and in this way a conclusion is provided that where sisterhood is not respected, all parties involved must suffer and heal from internalized self-hatred.

Key words: Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye, women’s writing, feminism, broken sisterhood, patriarchy, ostracism, subversion.

If we look at the term autobiographical novel from a linguistical point of view, the noun designates, in the first place, a novel whose specifics are characterized by the attribute of being autobiographical. Without entering into many long discussions about the nature of the novel, we state that a novel is a narrative, fictional and literary text. (Genette, 1991) If the novel is further typified by the adjective autobiographical, this characteristic seems to come into conflict with the fictional nature of the text. The merging of fictional and autobiographical components is the most striking and most discussed feature of the autobiographical novel.

The article discusses the problem of addressivity (Bakhtin’s
adresovannost’) in the diaries of Soviet citizens, based on an understanding of the diary as an unсertain genre balanced between privacy and publicity. On the one hand, diarists can address a You who is,
paradoxically, both absent and present: a virtual addressee whose presence reveals the need for dialogue. On the other hand, the addressee can take the form of a We who is particularly meaningful for the diarist. The word We here refers to a community that the diarist considers sig-
nificant, which can be termed recognition groups. The diarist enters into an internal dialogue with these recognition groups, imitating their discourse. The variety of such forms of addressivity is demonstrated through the analysis of three diaries of young people in the Soviet period: Nikolai Belousov (1913-2002, diary written in 1937-1939), Nina Lugovskaia (1918-1993, diary written in 1932-1939) and Maria Germanova (1922-1997, diary written in 1941-1942).

My theme is ‘life-writing’, understood as the shaping of one's life through the contemplation of values, although this activity is mostly unreflective. To become an art so that one's life can be shaped in greater accord with clearly held values, this process must become reflective. These values have an inescapably ethical dimension, because as we necessarily poetize our surrounding world, we contribute to our personal and communal ethos the character that arises from the culturally shaping power of guiding ideals. Even the immoralist cultivates life within an ethos where obscure feelings connect with some thing or other, whereby certain aims will then appear more valuable than others.

To understand how we cannot help but shape our lives according to dimly or clearly intuited values, I compare Coleridge’s primary imagination, the ‘shaping spirit’ ‘necessary for all human perception’ with Kant’s ‘blind though indispensible function of the soul, without which we would have no cognition at all, yet of which we are scarcely ever conscious’. With Coleridge, we find in imagination an impulse to connect profound but obscure presentiments and ideas with our surroundings. This impulse propels great art and everyday aesthetics alike. Whether we pursue merely what attracts us, or seek value beyond this, all lives are freely shaped, without excuses, as the existentialists say, but not always in the most pellucid consciousness. Our choices inevitably engage us in the poetic art of life-writing. Cast in medias res, we necessarily improvise. But this is no argument against lives being moral-aesthetic works, spontaneous compositions in value.

Autobiography in its simplest definition as the story of one individual tends to be 'monologic' in nature and yet the speaker 'self' of that autobiography can never be one composite, univocal 'self'. This very nature of the 'self' leaves room for multiple dialogues in the act of narration. Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of 'dialogism' deals with the presence of multiple 'voices', 'languages' in one otherwise monologic discourse where constant 'dialgoue' between these 'voices' and 'languages' help one understand the discourse better. The aim of this paper is to read two autobiographies from India The Story of My Experiments with Truth by M.K. Gandhi and The Tribal World of Verrier Elwin by Verrier Elwin under the notion of Bakhtinian 'dialogism'. The paper proposes that in these two autobiographies the presence of different 'selves' (as understood and realised by the speakers in the two texts) engage themselves in constant dialogue with each other in the act of self-construction.

This essay bears witness to the everyday and hidden nature of incest and offers some understanding of how and why the issue has been airbrushed out of the public discourse throughout its history. Incest is defined as any sexual activity that occurs between people who are related by blood or some other familiar connection as through marriage. Societal sensitivities and ambivalence about the extent of incest and its widespread effects under the weight of the incest taboo have encouraged its ‘privatisation’, whereby incest remains hidden in the ‘patriarchal’ home. In addition, more emphasis is placed on contemporary considerations of institutional sexual abuse, that which is perpetrated within the public sphere by so-called paedophiles or sex offenders. Today’s preference to focus on institutional sexual abuse rather than on such abuse in the home is fed by the mistaken view that ‘ordinary’ people do not commit incest. Every forward movement in unearthing the ubiquity and severity of incest – as through the recurring waves of feminism and Royal Commissions – has been met with neoliberal-type counter arguments in the form of the false memory movement and the psychologising of incest, whereby incest is considered an issue only for traumatised individuals and must be dealt with by helping professionals outside of the public purview. The author uses her own testimony as witness to her father’s sexual abuse of an older sister in childhood to tease out the hidden nature of this malignancy and expose governmental and societal reluctance – under the weight of patriarchal pressure – to promote a deeper discussion of incest within the public discourse.

Miscegenation was one of the leading ambiguities of empire. The intimacy forged in mix-raced relationships menaced empire’s reliance on whiteness as the main civilizing denominator and was, as a consequence, a determining source of imperial anxiety. Written from the postcolonial perspective of Rashid, Gurnah’s Desertion is constructed around the colonial romance between the Englishman Martin Pearce and Rehana Zakariya, which spuriously thwarts the fulfilment of their granddaughter’s, Jamila’s romance with Amin, Rashid’s brother. As a countermeasure against imperial anxiety, the grammar of this interracial romance designs a textual space in which hybridity is the marker of continuity, whiteness is the polluting element and the female body is licensed to desire. Therefore, in an attempt to disengage Desertion from tokenistic mainstream postcolonial narratives that treat “gender” as an accessory to “race,” this article locates Rehana’s and Jamila’s desired and desiring bodies as both a site of female liberation and female condemnation.

Pour Michel Autrand, Le Soulier de Satin constitue « un exemple unique d'autobiographie au théâtre 347. » Exemple il est vrai unique car jamais personne avant Pippo del Bono n'a prétendu réaliser en scène d'autobiographie, et que Le Soulier de Satin, écrit par Claudel entre ses trente-trois et ses trente-huit ans, fourmille de références à des lieux qu'il a visité, des événements qu'il a vécu, des personnages qu'il a rencontré… « Le Soulier est mon oeuvre la plus importante, celle qui règle toute ma vie » affirmait-il.

L'oeuvre de Blaise Cendrars s'est constamment placée sous le signe d'un imaginaire du crime. Le crime a permis à l'écrivain de rendre compte de sa conception de la création littéraire, de ses enjeux -l'appropriation de l'autre- et de ses pouvoirs -de refaçonnement identitaire-, voire des impasses auxquelles elle a pu se trouver confrontée. A ce titre, l'imaginaire du crime nourrit la cohérence de la production de l'auteur de Panorama de la pègre.

Put before the labyrinth and proliferation of critical perspectives, studies and readings on Virginia Woolf, entangled in articulations of teleologies and epistemologies, the critic faces a question: from where should she/he start writing, on what and from which critical perspective? These were the circumstances that dictated my choice of writing on "A Sketch of the Past", published in Moments of Being-A Collection of Autobiographical Writing, (1976, 1985) and of analysing the narrative strategies used by the author to tell herself, to construct her identity and power, giving voice and authority to herself as a discursive formation. In 1929, in A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf explained the non-existence of authoritative female figures, metaphorically represented by Shakespeare's sister: when wondering about the reasons why women had not written as much as men, her conclusion was that historically women had been deprived of education, money, status and a room of their own in which to write. Were women given the intellectual and material conditions-"[if we] have five hundred a year each of us and rooms of our own; if we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think; if we escape a little from the common sitting-room […] If we face the fact that there is no arm to cling to" (AROO 148-149)-, then Shakespeare's sister would be born. The repression of the feminine discourse condemned it to silence and Shakespeare's neglected sister was only born when women were given the power of the word and of representation, when women projected in history an identity which does not fit into the androcentric paradigm of inflexible egos; she was born when women revealed their identity by acknowledging the presence of the other, an identity that is both unique and relational-a flexible ego in a world characterized by relationships. While the masculine tradition of autobiographical writing has taken as a premise the capacity of the writer to create a mirror effect and has made use of a stable and fixed perspective to constitute the self as the unifying element

In 1951 Swedish writer Stig Dagerman wrote an autobiographical essay titled "Our Need for Consolation is Insatiable." It is a remarkable poetic meditation on the life-and-death stakes of the literary imagination from a writer who was likely suffering from an undiagnosed bipolar disorder, fighting for his life through one depressive episode after another. Written when his critical reputation and fame as Sweden’s greatest new literary phenom had been firmly established following a remarkable outpouring of critically acclaimed work in the late 1940s, the essay marked a point in time when the tides had turned for Dagerman, who now struggled with the opposite of this productive streak in the form of a debilitating bout of writer’s block that would eventually contribute to his suicide two years later. "Our Need for Consolation is Insatiable" lays bare the writer’s fragile psyche, not only his faltering ego but his selfless and far from sure-footed ambition to offer something of lasting beauty and meaning to a world indifferent to his very existence. While writing the essay, Dagerman managed to rise temporarily from the depths of his depression and identify the sources of his own consolation and hope in terms that have continued to resonate powerfully with many readers, and fellow writers, over the following 60 years.

Originally published in 1952 in the improbable venue of Husmodern (a magazine dedicated to home economics for Swedish housewives, analogous to American magazines like Good Housekeeping or Better Homes and Gardens), the essay was a profound response to a trivial commission from the magazine’s editors, who asked Dagerman to send them “something on the art of living.” The soul- and psyche-searching tour de force that Dagerman composed was not likely what the editors had in mind, but to their credit—and also possibly owing to his celebrity—they published the essay as written. The essay has since been translated into 10 languages and published / reprinted a great many times. This is the first literary translation of the essay into English.

This article analyses autofictional constellations and their role as
sources of humour in Günter Grass’s "Beim Häuten der Zwiebel"
(‘Peeling the Onion’). Keenly aware of the unreliability of memory
and the transient nature of self, Grass is suspicious of any
autobiography’s claim to accurately represent past experiences.
He therefore recreates his life story by blending fact and fiction,
experience and imagination, literature and reality. Addressing the
limitations of Philippe Lejeune’s notion of the autobiographical
pact by offering alternative definitions of the terms
autobiography and autofiction, the category of ‘autofictional
interference’ is introduced to analyse the narrative constellation
in "Beim Häuten der Zwiebel". The article demonstrates how many
of the seemingly authentic experiences presented in the text are
shaped by literary allusions, either to Grass’s own works or, most
prominently, to Grimmelshausen’s picaresque novel "Der
abenteuerliche Simplicissimus". Grass uses these picaresque
patterns to present himself as a trickster figure, which accounts
for much of the humour in Beim Häuten der Zwiebel. Additional
humour is provided by the contradiction between the claim of
authenticity inherent to all autobiographical writing and the
author’s strategy to fictionalise himself and his life, creating a
structural form of autofictional humour.

The task of studying the impact of social class on physical and mental health involves, among other things, the use of a conceptual toolbox that defines what social class is, establishes how to measure it, and sets criteria that help distinguish it from closely related concepts. One field that has recently witnessed a wealth of theoretical and conceptual research on social class is psychology, but geographers' and sociologists' attitude of diffidence toward this " positivistic " discipline has prevented them from taking advantage of this body of scholarship. This paper aims to highlight some of the most important developments in the psychological study of social class and social mobility that speak to the long-standing concerns of health geographers and sociologists with how social position, perceptions, social comparisons, and class-based identities impact health and well-being.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2017.11.037

Eine Biographie zu schreiben mag auf den ersten Blick als ein einfaches Unternehmen anmuten: Der „Gegenstand“ erscheint durch die Körperlichkeit und Endlichkeit des Lebens in Raum und Zeit gut abgrenzbar und – zumindest im Vergleich mit der Komplexität manch anderer Gegenstände der Geschichtsschreibung – leicht als „real“ zu denken. Doch nicht nur die Relevanz einer biographischen Thematisierung sowie Einordnungen und zeitliche Abfolgen können bei näherer Betrachtung verschwimmen, auch die fraglose Einheit des Forschungsgegenstandes kann unsicher werden. Gerade die scheinbar allgemeine Verständlichkeit des Zugangs wird dann zum Problem. Der folgende Text will diese Komplikationen entlang einer offenen Liste von Stichworten thematisieren und Überlegungen zum produktiven Umgang mit ihnen anbieten. Nicht intendiert ist das weitaus ambitioniertere Unternehmen der Formulierung einer konsistenten Theorie der Biographie  oder der Vorschlag zu einer konkreten Methode.  Von beidem kann angesichts der Vielfältigkeit biographischer Zugänge auch nur im Plural gesprochen werden. Ausgangspunkt dieser Überlegungen ist allerdings die Überzeugung, dass biographisches Arbeiten nicht nur der methodisch-theoretischen Reflexion bedarf, sondern dass sich eine Reihe von Fragen im Kontext jeder biographischen Forschung früher oder später stellt oder stellen sollte. Wenn dabei im Folgenden von „biographischer Thematisierung“ die Rede ist, so zielt dies auf eine möglichst große Offenheit gegenüber unterschiedlichen Phänomenen des Biographischen, die in diese Überlegungen einbezogen werden sollen auch wenn sie nicht ohne weiteres dem durch eine lange Geschichte der Normierung geprägten Konzept der Biographie entsprechen.