Anglica Wratislaviensia

The Transfer of the New Biography: Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey in Interwar Poland

Paulina Pająk — Thu, 19 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0100

This article presents the cultural transfer of the new biography, which attracted avid interest in interwar Poland. It reconstructs how modernist publishing networks circulated Virginia Woolf’s biofiction and Lytton Strachey’s modernist biographies, using previously unexamined archival correspondence from the UK and Polish archives, along with interwar newspapers and magazines from digital and print repositories in Poland. The article focuses on strategies of cultural transfer as developed by the publishing house Rój that launched Strachey’s books, as well as on diverse cultural mediators who reviewed and popularized Woolf’s and Strachey’s works. The early reception of Woolf’s and Strachey’s biographical experiments is examined in the context of the growth of Central European modernism(s) and interwar changes at the global literary marketplace.

“We Are Changed by What We Change”: W. H. Auden’s New Year Letter

Rowland Cotterill — Thu, 19 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0100

This paper considers representations of change, internal and external to a changeable and changing subject, in W. H. Auden’s New Year Letter. This long poem focuses on three aspects of change: personal responses to a sense of accountability, as experienced especially by poetic artists; diagnoses of change, across three historical epochs, within a world exposed at once to individual and public pressures, most recently those of crowd-consciousness and Fascist dictatorship; and a possible embrace of performative genres and modes, including dramatic conversation and Horatian epistolography, through which these lines of personal and conceptual discourse may tend towards convergence.

The New Age Spiritual Life Narrative: New Wine in Old Wineskins?

Magdalena Ozarska — Thu, 19 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0100

This article sets out to discuss the structure of New Age spiritual memoir as distinct from the Christian spiritual memoir. I look at the notion of spiritual seekership which drives the plots of New Age spiritual memoirs, and the various patterns of seekership that have been identified. Seeing that the major structural difference between New Age and Christian spiritual memoirs lies in the number of turning points (several “awakenings” vs one conversion experience, respectively), I present the most common types of turning points featured in the studied texts (psychedelic-induced and non-dual awakenings, as well as energy-like somatic experiences). The above are illustrated by brief overviews of selected memoirs (by Stanislav Grof, Richard Alpert/Ram Dass, Tony Parsons, Richard Sylvester, and Suzanne Segal).

Alcoholics Onymous: Experience of Change in British Women’s Recovery Memoirs

Wojciech Klepuszewski — Thu, 19 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0100

The present article focuses on recovery memoirs, a sub-genre of life-writing, in particular those written by British women. Recovery memoirs have been burgeoning in the past two or three decades, yet they seem to be generally ignored as far as literary criticism is concerned. The main objective here, apart from shedding light on such memoirs, is to analyse how they reflect the process of personal change from alcohol dependence to sobriety.

Fiction at the Root of My Existence

Astrid Joutseno — Thu, 19 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0100

In this essay I examine abuse narratives and their impact on narrating my life. The essay is set in the USA, mostly in Los Angeles, of the early 2000s. I focus on the time when I travelled with my then manager in search for music business contacts and the following year promoting my first album, Poverina (2007). The music business itself, as well as the city, evoked disassociation from reality, from places and events. Simultaneously, I describe the impact of a lack of language around abuse and the pre-emptive liberalism of consumer-focused culture in which I, a young songwriter, became an impossible object. The essay examines narrative transformation over time. Considering tellability, interpretation, as well as the unforeseen unfolding of life.

Greta Thunberg’s Life-Writing on Facebook: A Quantitative Analysis

Oleksandr Kapranov — Thu, 19 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0100

Greta Thunberg is an iconic figure, whose engagement in the issues of the environment and climate change has made her a household name (Molder et al. 668). Another factor that contributes to her recognizability by millions of people globally involves her active online presence on social networking sites (SNSs), which she utilizes to communicate her views on climate changeand environment-related issues (Bergmann and Ossewaarde 267). The article presents a quantitative study on Greta Thunberg’s status updates on Facebook, which are problematized as instances of life-writing in digital personhood, which involves an online diary afforded by SNSs in general and Facebook in particular (Ortiz-Vilarelle 9). The study aimed at collecting a corpus of Thunberg’s Facebook status updates and analysing them quantitatively in order to establish frequently recurring lexical patterns, which shed light onto her preferred ways of construing climate change- and environment-related discourse. The corpus analysis, which was executed in the software program AntConc, revealed that Thunberg’s life-writing on Facebook was characterized by such frequently occurring lexical items, as self-mentions (e.g., we) and the words climate and strike. The findings were further discussed in detail in the article.

Tracking Change in Data-Driven Autobiography: Nicholas Felton’s Annual Reports, 2005–2014

Wojciech Drąg — Thu, 19 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0100

This article examines Nicholas Felton’s self-tracking project titled Annual Reports, which he carried out from 2005 to 2014. In each instalment, the author offers a visually appealing presentation of a selection of data pertaining to specific aspects of his daily life, such as work, food, drink, travel, music, photography, etc. This article aims to examine this work as an instance of data-driven autobiography—an experimental form of autobiography whose structure and content are determined by the empirical data that has been systematically gathered—and to consider its capacity to register various aspects of change in its author’s life, such as his work–play ratio, food and alcohol intake, and reading habits. The analysis is embedded in the context of a critical discussion about the quantified self (QS) movement and its positivist outlook on the possibility of enhancing one’s self-knowledge through a close engagement with personal data. The article argues that while Felton shares the belief in the revelatory nature of data, he resists the naivety associated with so-called dataism.

Editorial: Experience of Change in Practices of Life-Writing

Teresa Bruś — Thu, 19 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0100