The internet is huge. People aren’t looking for yet another person to curate their intake. Instead, we all want original content. We all want to see the new and fascinating. Don’t sacrifice your writing in the name of promoting yourself. To share with others, you first need something worth sharing.
Alcoff, Linda Martín and Laura Gray-Rosendale. “Survivor Discourse: Transgression or Recuperation?” Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography. Ed. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1996. 198-225. Print. Dangers of Confessional Testimony Alcoff and Gray-Rosedale are looking at the ways in which confessional testimonies are often appropriated by hegemonic forces in order…
Ellis, Carolyn, Tony E. Adams, and Arthur P. Bochner. “Autoethnography: An Overview.” FQS 12.1, Art. 10 (2011). “A researcher uses tenets of autobiography and ethnography to do and write autoethnography. Thus, as a method, autoethnography is both process and product” (Sec. 1 History). In the history section, Ellis, Adams, and Bochner provide a nice introduction to postmodernism and…
Janice Haaken’s review of Kate Douglas’s Contesting Childhood: Autobiography, Trauma, and Memory indicates that Douglas has interrogated the genre expectations of the childhood autobiography: “Douglas gathers up a rich web of autobiographical writing on childhood trauma to tell a larger cultural tale of the search for an authentic past” (853). “Douglas describes the demand on…
Susannah Radstone points out the following scholars I should look up: Carolyn Steedman and Empathy Theory (23). David Alexander points out that “trauma sites and trauma victims frequently become the objects of voyeuristic, or triumphalist fascination” (23). James Berger, writing about 9/11, indicates that “while some events get labelled traumatic, others, quite patently, do not”…
Radstone indicates that the ethical goals of trauma theory are not entirely unproblematic. At a surface level, the goal of “cultural remembrance” for the “absent presence” is unchallenged: Though trauma analysis is in its early stages of development, its ethical imperatives do appear to have been accepted: trauma analysis positions itself by analogy with the…
Radstone writes that Something else gets lost, too, in trauma theory’s retreat from the significance of unconscious process of memory formation and revision. And emphasis on the centrality of unconscious process to all aspects of psychical life has the effect of reminding readers and analysts of two important aspects of that life. First, a fundamental…
Foundational Trauma: the sense tha traumatic events in the past may be adopted and internalized in such a way that “recovery” or “getting over it” is seen to “dishonor” the trauma, or as a betrayal to the victims. Thus, the identification with that past experience of trauma becomes foundational in the personal or collective identity.…
You can sprain your ankle. Arterial plaques can construct The blood flow to your heart. But we don’t have sufficient understanding of the brain to describe exactly how emotional trauma leads to cognitive injury. In the past, I thought it possible that PTSD was perhaps and adaptive response to Trumatic environments. The symptoms of restlessness,…
The reason why allegiance become so important in children is that the narrative of the family fundamentally determines how a child (and the parents, too, but certainly the parents) sees his or her own self fitting within the larger framework of adult society. As Alice Miller writes in The Gifted Child, “I had completed two…
“Allegiance,” as I’m seeing it, is about a deeper affinity that mere alliance, and it’s a bit different from relationship. Relationship would be that your life (or fate, or destiny) is tied to the life of another. A child has a relationship with parents, a CEO has a relationship with the corporation. But relationship does…
In this Dr. Phil Episode, an adult daughter says she was kicked out by her mom at 15, and the show sits down mother and daughter to talk about what happened. From the start, mother and daughter disagree on key details, and at one point the mother describes her daughter’s testimony as “false statements.” But…
Autobiography within the frameworks of Berlant’s intimate publics becomes a telephone game. “Normative” expectations become warped as informational integrity becomes attenuated. One person says something, then another person has to say something “more real” (i.e. more extreme) as a way to maintain authority within a shifting political framework. This doesn’t always happen. People like Ghandi,…
Perhaps one of the most important genre conventions of self help books is the personal narrative. In some cases, the personal narrative is used to describe the authors past life, past mistakes, and past successes – this personal narrative is meant as a kind of resume to support the author’s position as an authority figure.…
I have trouble “trusting” books by Susan Forward and some others because the examples seem rather inflammatory, possibly even exaggerated. But the experiences described are very, very relatable – clearly effective rhetorically due to that sense of interpersonal resonance, but does this also indicate epistemic validity? Is the ethos “real” as in authentic? Or manufactured…
