Gandhi’s Autobiographical Construction of Selfhood

Gandhi’s Autobiographical Construction of Selfhood
Author: Clara Neary
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 117
Release: 2023-03-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3031227867

This book addresses the topics of autobiography, self-representation and status as a writer in Mahatma Gandhi's autobiographical work The Story of My Experiments with Truth (1927, 1929). Gandhi remains an elusive figure, despite the volumes of literature written on him in the seven decades since his assassination. Scholars and biographers alike agree that “no work on his life has portrayed him in totality” (Desai, 2009), and, although “arguably the most popular figure of the first half of the twentieth century” and “one of the most eminent luminaries of our time,” Gandhi the individual remains “as much an enigma as a person of endless fascination” (Murrell, 2008). Yet there has been relatively little scholarly engagement with Gandhi’s autobiography, and published output has largely been concerned with mining the text for its biographical details, with little concern for how Gandhi represents himself. The author addresses this gap in the literature, while also considering Gandhi as a writer. This book provides a close reading of the linguistic structure of the text with particular focus upon Gandhi’s self-representation, drawing on a cognitive stylistic framework for analysing linguistic representations of selfhood (Emmott 2002). It will be of interest to stylisticians, cognitive linguists, discourse analysts, and scholars in related fields such as Indian literature and postcolonial studies.

From Split to Screened Selves

From Split to Screened Selves
Author: Rachel Gabara
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2006
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780804753562

This book is a study of recent autobiographies by French and Francophone African writers and filmmakers, all of whom reject simple first-person narration and experiment with narrative voice and form to represent fragmented subjectivity. Gabara investigates autobiography across media, from print to photography and film, as well as across the colonial encounter, from France to Francophone North and West Africa. Reading works by Roland Barthes, Nathalie Sarraute, Assia Djebar, Cyril Collard, David Achkar, and Raoul Peck, she argues that autobiographical film and African autobiography, subgenres that have until now been overlooked or dismissed by critics, offer new and important possibilities for self-representation in the twenty-first century. Not only do these new forms of autobiography deserve our attention, but any study of contemporary autobiography is incomplete without them.

Split

Split
Author: Maggie R Walters
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2024-05-16
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780648603801

How does a child survive years of unimaginable abuse? She splits. And splits again. And again. And again. And she does survive. But not without consequences. As a young adult, years after her physical abuse has ended, Maggie Walters (continually struggles with an unpredictable temper and socially difficult behaviour) has to leave yet another job due to her unpredictable temper and socially difficult behavior. After several false starts she finds a therapist who she trusts, just enough, to start talking about the childhood locked away behind the anger and isolation she has learnt to live with. Eventually she is diagnosed with Multiple Personality Disorder, MPD (now known as Dissociative Identity Disorder or DID). Gradually, she understands. It was not Maggie who survived her childhood. The instinct to survive created an alternative identity called Annie, who with a myriad of other 'alters', lived through the abuse inflicted on her. Decades later, with a husband and three much-loved children, Maggie strives to live a normal life despite a past which has left her internal world with a hidden, dark secret. Every day, unseen by those around her, trigger incidents fill her head with voices, the chaotic remnants of her other selves who lived the childhood she couldn't. This is the 'normal' which Maggie has learned to live with. In SPLIT Maggie tells the story of managing this 'normal', of understanding and accepting her past, and standing proud in the life she has built from the ashes of her broken childhood. It is a story not only of survival, but of self-acceptance, of the triumph to simply live. You will not read another book like it.

Tracing the Autobiographical

Tracing the Autobiographical
Author: Marlene Kadar
Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2006-01-01
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0889209073

The essays in Tracing the Autobiographical work with the literatures of several nations to reveal the intersections of broad agendas (for example, national ones) with the personal, the private, and the individual. Attending to ethics, exile, tyranny, and hope, the contributors listen for echoes and murmurs as well as authoritative declarations. They also watch for the appearance of auto/biography in unexpected places, tracing patterns from materials that have been left behind. Many of the essays return to the question of text or traces of text, demonstrating that the language of autobiography, as well as the textualized identities of individual persons, can be traced in multiple media and sometimes unlikely documents, each of which requires close textual examination. These “unlikely documents” include a deportation list, an art exhibit, reality TV, Web sites and chat rooms, architectural spaces, and government memos, as well as the more familiar literary genres—a play, the long poem, or the short story. Interdisciplinary in scope and contemporary in outlook, Tracing the Autobiographical is a welcome addition to autobiography scholarship, focusing on non-traditional genres and on the importance of location and place in life writing. Read the chapter “Gender, Nation, and Self-Narration: Three Generations of Dayan Women in Palestine/Israel” by Bina Freiwald on the Concordia University Library Spectrum Research Repository website.

Embodied Selves and Divided Minds

Embodied Selves and Divided Minds
Author: Michelle Maiese
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2016
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 0199689237

This text examines how research in embodied cognition and enactivism can contribute to our understanding of the nature of self-consciousness, the metaphysics of personal identity, and the disruptions to self-awareness that occur in cases of psychopathology.

Split

Split
Author: Suzanne Finnamore
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2008
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780525950462

A memoir of divorce and life after it describes the author's devastation at her husband's sudden decision to leave and struggle to rebuild her life and care for her son.

Consuming Autobiographies

Consuming Autobiographies
Author: Claire Boyle
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2017-12-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1351195298

"Since 1975, French literary writing has been marked by an autobiographical turn which has seen authors increasingly often tap into the vein of what the French term ecriture de soi. This coincides, paradoxically, with the 'death of autobiography', as these authors self-consciously distance themselves and their writings from conventional autobiography, founding a 'nouvelle autobiographie' where the very possibility of autobiographical expression is questioned. In the first book-length study in English to address this phenomenon, Claire Boyle sheds a new light on this hostility toward autobiography through a series of ground-breaking studies of estrangement in autobiographical works by major post-war authors Nathalie Sarraute, Georges Perec, Jean Genet and Helene Cixous. She identifies autobiography as a site of conflict between writer and reader, as authors struggle to assert the unknowableness of their identity in the face of a readership resolutely desiring privileged knowledge. Autobiography emerges as a deeply troubling genre for authors, with the reader as an antagonistic consumer of the autobiographical self."

The Divided Self

The Divided Self
Author: R. D. Laing
Publisher: Penguin UK
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2010-01-28
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0141962089

The Divided Self, R.D. Laing's groundbreaking exploration of the nature of madness, illuminated the nature of mental illness and made the mysteries of the mind comprehensible to a wide audience. First published in 1960, this watershed work aimed to make madness comprehensible, and in doing so revolutionized the way we perceive mental illness. Using case studies of patients he had worked with, psychiatrist R. D. Laing argued that psychosis is not a medical condition, but an outcome of the 'divided self', or the tension between the two personas within us: one our authentic, private identity, and the other the false, 'sane' self that we present to the world. Laing's radical approach to insanity offered a rich existential analysis of personal alienation and made him a cult figure in the 1960s, yet his work was most significant for its humane attitude, which put the patient back at the centre of treatment. Includes an introduction by Professor Anthony S. David. 'One of the twentieth century's most influential psychotherapists' Guardian 'Laing challenged the psychiatric orthodoxy of his time ... an icon of the 1960s counter-culture' The Times