Ce travail, qui propose une lecture de l’ensemble de l’œuvre autobiographique de Beauvoir, ne vise pas l’exhaustivité. Il cherche plutôt à restituer une image plus exacte de la trajectoire, de l’évolution et des infléchissements de ce projet monumental. De nombreux écrits jusque-là ignorés ont été publiés, dans des temps récents, de façon posthume. Ces textes nouveaux contribuent à ébranler une image simplificatrice ou réductrice de Beauvoir – celle qui le plus souvent se profile, de manière exclusive, soit à travers Le Deuxième sexe, soit à travers le couple Sartre-Beauvoir, soit à travers la conversion politique. Lire de manière méthodique les écrits autobiographiques de Beauvoir, c’est tenter de comprendre comment une intellectuelle et une écrivaine se construit et se distingue. Elle prend certes le contre-pied de ses origines familiales et culturelles. Mais elle va aussi parfois à l’encontre de ses propres tropismes. Une lecture précise, chronologique, mettant en rapport les différentes strates du texte, révèle de telles contradictions. Dans ce dispositif, les Cahiers de jeunesse, récemment publiés en 2008, jouent un rôle particulier. Ils montrent comment la vie intellectuelle de Beauvoir est d’abord une vie intérieure, spirituelle, qui prend même parfois des allures mystiques. Ils montrent surtout, au départ de la vocation littéraire et philosophique, une veine introspective qui fut contrariée un temps par deux tendances antinomiques : d’une part la fascination pour le roman (genre nettement valorisé aux yeux du couple Sartre-Beauvoir) et d’autre part, l’obsession grandissante à l’égard de l’Histoire majuscule. A ces deux facteurs, il faut en rajouter un troisième : le refoulement lié à la défiance à l’égard de l’intime, nettement alimentée par le compagnonnage intellectuel avec Sartre. Dans cette perspective, il m’a paru essentiel de confronter les journaux de Beauvoir, en particulier son Journal de guerre, au texte des Mémoires, qui d’ailleurs y fait constamment référence – sans compter qu’ils intègrent parfois des fragments de journal. Il apparaît, d’une façon générale, que la relecture des journaux, œuvre de toute une vie, a été constante, qu’elle a nourri l’écriture des Mémoires, que celle-ci, conséquemment, a oscillé, selon un mouvement pendulaire, entre l’introspection et la rétrospection. Les Mémoires sont à l’évidence une reconstruction du passé comme tout récit mémorial. Ils le sont plus encore lorsqu’on songe au texte princeps qui les a précédés, et lorsqu’on prête attention à leur archéologie.L’entreprise des Mémoires se présente comme une solution de compromis à l’égard de ces pulsions contradictoires. Elle propose une combinaison originale entre l’écriture de l’intime et l’écriture de l’Histoire, l’écriture de soi et l’écriture des autres. Mais c’est l’ensemble du projet, l’ensemble des écrits autobiographiques qui met en évidence la complexité des intentions et des registres, c’est cet ensemble qui donne pleinement la mesure du projet singulier de Beauvoir.Tous les gestes d’écriture qui composent l’entreprise mémoriale sont indissolublement liés, et en même temps, ils ne se ressemblent pas tout à fait. Une telle diversité des écrits intimes et mémoriels, à la fois totalisatrice et foisonnante, pourrait contribuer à revisiter une théorie parfois un peu figée de l’autobiographie qui tend à classer des sous-genres cloisonnés en les rapportant à des critères distincts, ou en les considérant sous la catégorie générale de l’écriture de soi. / This study, which offers a reading of all the autobiographical writings of de Beauvoir, is not intended to be exhaustive. Its aim is rather to provide a more exact picture of the trajectory, the evolution and the shifting movement of her massive project. Many previously unknown writings have been published posthumously in recent times. These new texts contribute to the undermining of a simplistic and reductive image of de Beauvoir, an image drawn exclusively either from The Second Sex, from the Sartre - de Beauvoir couple, or from her political conversion.In a methodical reading of de Beauvoir’s autobiographical writings, one can attempt to grasp how a woman intellectual and writer constructs herself and marks herself off from others. She undoubtedly turns against her familial and cultural origins, but she is also capable of going against her own tropisms. A precise chronological reading that relates the different strata of the text reveals such contradictions. In such an approach, the Cahiers de jeunesse, published in 2008, play an important role. They show how de Beauvoir’s intellectual life is at first an interior, spiritual life that sometimes even has something mystical about it. Above all, at the outset of a literary and philosophic vocation, the Cahiers show an introspective vein that was for a time thwarted by two opposite tendencies: on the one hand a fascination with the novel (a genre that was highly valued in the Sartre-de Beauvoir couple), on the other hand a growing obsession with History. To these two factors a third must be added: a repression linked to a distrust of the intimate that was clearly fed by the intellectual companionship with Sartre. In this perspective, I thought it essential to confront de Beauvoir’s journals, in particular her Journal de guerre, to the text of the Mémoires, which in any case constantly refer to it and even integrate fragments from it. It would appear in a more general way that her re-reading of the journals, the work of her entire life, was constant, that it fed into the writing of the Mémoires, which as a consequence oscillate in a pendulum movement between introspection and retrospection. The Mémoires are clearly a reconstruction of the past, like all memoir narratives, but that becomes even more true when one thinks of the original text that preceded them and when their archaeology is taken into account.The Mémoires as a project are to be seen as a compromise between these contradictory urges. The enterprise provides an original combination of writing the intimate, writing History, writing the self and writing the other. However it is the project in its totality, the entire autobiographical corpus, that demonstrates the complexity of intention and register, it is this totality that makes it possible to take the measure of de Beauvoir’s singular project.All the gestures of writing that make up the memorial enterprise are indissolubly linked and at the same time different from one another. Such a diversity of intimate and memorial writing, at once systematic and multiple, may contribute to a revisiting of a somewhat rigid theory of autobiography that tends either to isolate sub-genres, classifying them by reference to distinct criteria, or else to bring everything back to the general category of writing the self.

This dissertation analyzes symbolic and political discourse in the works of three controversial intellectuals who participate in the contemporary debate on nationalisms in Spain. Basque poet and essayist Jon Juaristi (b. 1951), after brief involvement in ETA during the late 1960s and early 1970s, evolved into one of Spain's most outspoken critics of Basque nationalism, a position that led to death threats from ETA and eventually his permanent abandonment of the region. After founding his theater company Els Joglars in 1962, Catalan playwright Albert Boadella (b. 1943) used it as a vehicle to fight the Francoist dictatorship and promote a Catalan nationalist agenda. However, he eventually reversed his position on the issue of Catalan and Spanish nationalisms and became a political enemy to many in his home region. Finally, Basque filmmaker Julio Medem (b. 1958) caused outrage throughout much of Spain in 2003 with a documentary film exploring the clash between Spanish and Basque identities. In my examination of Boadella's and Juaristi's autobiographies and Medem's documentary I explore the ways each author portrays himself as subverting, transgressing, or transcending the sub-state nationalisms that are virtually hegemonic in their regions, and I reveal how each author's treatment of gender, especially his representations of masculinity, either undermines or substantiates the purportedly "non-nationalist" position he stakes. I argue that Juaristi's and Boadella's restrictive, traditionalist gender constructions reveal conservative Spanish nationalist discourses which prevent them from surpassing the rigid power structures that nourish the opposition between Spain's center and periphery, while Medem's cinematic work does present the possibility of breaking free from the boundaries of the conflict of national identities through the transcendence of patriarchal nationalist symbolism - both Basque and Spanish.

George Bernard Shaw exercised an above-average level of authorial control, which even extended to his relationship with his biographers. Shaw crafts a persona, with the help of his "authorized" biographer Archibald Henderson, which displays a process of evolutionary development and progress along the lines of the Shavian philosophy of the Life Force and the Superman. In essence, Shaw is casting himself as a prototype for the Superman through the autobiographical manipulation of his biographers and aesthetic modes of self-fashioning.

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Illinois State University, 2005. / Title from title page screen, viewed on April 12, 2007. Dissertation Committee: Anita Tarr (chair), Cynthia Huff, Karen Coats, Roberta Seelinger Trites. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 166-178) and abstract. Also available in print.

The subject of this thesis is Swedish author Åsa Nelvin’s writings. Five books are at the center of attention: The children’s books De vita björnarna (“The White Bears”) (1969) and Det lilla landet (“The Little Country”) (1971), the two novels Tillflyktens hus (“The House of Refuge”) (1975) and Kvinnan som lekte med dockor (“The Woman who played with dolls”) (1977), and the cycle of poems Gattet (“The Inlet”) (1981). The overriding aim of the the thesis is to characterize Nelvin’s literary works and her over-all literary enterprise. A major part of the thesis is devoted to textual analyses, the purpose of which is to identify fundamental themes and literary strategies in Nelvin’s works. Also treated is the author’s development from being a prose writer to becoming a lyric poet. In addition, the thesis examines how Nelvin’s writings relate to the cultural climate of the 1960s and 1970s; it deals with the reception of her works, and the question whether literary ideals and conventions have had any impact on her writings. Nelvin is generally associated with the emancipatory tradition of female autobiographers in the 1970s. Her works are considered to engage in psychological and/or gender issues and to be openly autobiographical. This thesis partly argues against that view by asserting that that the fundamental concern of Nelvin’s works is the experience of being and the creation of meaning. The textual analyses show that Nelvin’s writings in the main deal with existential matters such as time and death, art and eternity. They also show that the autobiographical elements in her works are not primarily directed towards the construction of womanhood or therapeutic confession. They rather serve as an aesthetic and meta-literary function, drawing attention to questions concerning the construction of the text (and life), and differences or correspondences between phenomena like fiction and reality.

This thesis examines five books by the American author Philip Roth commonly referred to as the “Roth Books,” which are The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography(1988), Deception (1990), Patrimony: A True Story (1991), Operation Shylock: A Confession (1993), and The Plot Against America (2004). These books, held together by the author’s proper name, are often viewed as texts that conflate fiction and nonfiction or demonstrate the “fictionality” of all factual narrative accounts in compliance with well-known postmodernist and poststructuralist theories. Contrary to this view, I argue that a valid understanding of the Roth Books demands that we acknowledge that these works represent a series of quite different ways for the author to transform his own life into written form, a creative act which is manifested in both fictional and nonfictional writing. In the attempt to argue this view, I turn to a field of study where the question about criteria for distinguishing fictional from nonfictional narrative literature has occupied a prominent place: narrative theory. However, my theoretical and methodological point of departure does not align itself with the “standard” paradigm in narrative theory with its origin in classical, structuralist narratology. Rather, the thesis promotes a pragmatic and rhetorical perspective which is argued to better account for how we read and make sense of different narrative texts. In opposition to standard narrative theory, where all narratives are considered to adhere to the same model of communication, I argue in favour of a view where narrative fiction and narrative nonfiction are conceived as distinct communicative practices. I open the thesis by showing that Roth’s books contribute to the discussion on how to distinguish fictional from nonfictional narrative texts (Chapter 1). I then continue by approaching the distinction between fiction and nonfiction in general theoretical terms (Chapter 2). And in what follows (Chapters 3-5), I present a reading where the Roth Books are juxtaposed against each other. This reading demonstrates how these texts, although in some sense related, because of their divergent qualities and differing intentions still communicate differently with their readers, inviting a readerly attention that is dissimilar from one work to the other.

Multiple Affiliations explores the autobiographical negotiations of memory and multilocality articulated by five (im)migrant women writers writing from, and being read (primarily) within, the US. Texts as diverse as Korean-American Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictée (1982), Polish (Jewish)-American Eva Hoffman's Lost in Translation: Life in a New Language (1989), Chinese-American Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts (1976) and China Men (1980), Caribbean/African-American Audre Lorde's Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982), and Pakistani-American Sara Suleri's Meatless Days (1989) highlight how various (cross-race and transnational) experiences of location, dislocation, and relocation resonate with each other and "immigrant America." Whereas the conventional immigration/assimilation paradigm assumes the resolvability of difference, (im)migration, related to the concept of diaspora, is sensitive to "different differences," related to race, class, gender, etc. Further, (im)migration points to the variability and mobility within the immigrant experience. I use the concept of diaspora, not as a metaphor, but as a lens through which to investigate subjectivities that disturb the assumed union between place, culture and identity. I further employ various exigencies of "locational feminism" to take into account shifting, unstable, postmodern identities and, at the same time, pay attention to historical and material particularities. Multiple Affiliations shows how "diasporic" dialectics - negotiations of here and there, continuity and change, roots and routes - continually shape (im)migrant subjectivities, even if the possibility of returning to the homeland is precluded and even if the experience of immigration is not firsthand. Acts of imaginative memory are called upon to re-configure diasporic identity by linking the present and the past, here and there, self and ethnic group, and with marked insistence, to rewrite history, frequendy to trouble national schemes. I propose that, far from inhabiting separate spheres, immigrant and diasporic sensibilities often overlap. / digitalisering@umu

Många kvinnor som överlevt bröstcancer får en rädsla för återfall. Trots avsaknad av sjukdom kan människan uppleva minskad känsla av välbefinnande. Människans livsvärld kan påverkas av att vardagen eller den fysiska kroppen ändras. Studiens syfte är att belysa hur rädslan för återfall påverkar svenska kvinnor som drabbats av bröstcancer. Datamaterial har samlats in från nio biografier och självbiografier. Materialet har samlats in och analyserats utifrån metoden att analysera berättelser. Resultatet presenteras utifrån fyra kategorier. De fyra kategorierna är återfallsångest, känslan att inte kunna lita på sin kropp, påverkan på vardagen och rädslan för återfall minskar. För flera kvinnor är rädslan så stark att den utvecklas till återfallsångest. Rädslan för återfall har gjort att kvinnorna känner att de inte kan lita på sin kropp och att de då blir oroliga om något med kroppen inte är som det brukar vara. Rädslan påverkar också vardagen då vissa kvinnor lättare kan se det positiva i små saker medan andra kvinnor har svårare för det. Däremot minskar rädslan för återfall med tiden men kan komma tillbaka vid speciella tillfällen. / Many women who have survived breast cancer still have a fear of relapse. The human can experience diminished sense of wellbeing despite the absence of disease. The life-world of the human can be affected by everyday life or by changes in the physical body. The aim of this study is to illuminate how the fear of relapse affects Swedish women who have had breast cancer. Data sets were collected from nine biographies and autobiographies. The material was collected and analysed from the model analysing narratives. The results are presented in four categories. The four categories are relapse anxiety, the feeling of not being able to trust your body, impact on the daily life and the reduced fear of relapse. For many women, the fear was so strong that it developed in to a relapse anxiety. The fear of relapse has made the women feel that they can not trust their bodies and that they are worried about something that is unusual with their bodies. The fear also affects the everyday life as some women can more easily see the positive in small things while others find it more difficult. However, the fear of relapse is reduced over time, but can come back at special circumstances.

Tails & Tales is a collection of work that explores the construction of identity within a contemporary painting practice. Based on an autobiographical use of my own body as source material, this series of paintings and drawings incorporates narrative strategies of representation alongside imagery that is reminiscent of childhood states of being.<p>This thesis exhibition and support paper explore the liminal period of pre-adolescence and poses questions about the positing of identity. There is a focus on the construction of masculinities and sexualities, with a particular interest in how cultural, social, and moral norms are encoded into being.