By telling and retelling their life stories in everyday social interaction, adult learners describe times of continuity and change in their lives, and give an account of their self-formation. A disjuncture between the learners' life stories and events experienced either in their social context or in their inner life invites their reflection on its significance. Transformative learning occurs when reflection on such experience leads to interpretations which change the learners' meaning perspectives and their social practice. These changes are incorporated into a new version of the life story. Adult education approaches to perspective transformation have generally emphasised the interpretive role of critical reflection and thinking. Autobiography, as a metaphor for transformative learning, proposes that transformative learning also has the quality of a narrative constructed with imagination. Through ongoing interpretation of events in their inner and outer experience, learners compose their lives and their life stories. The social context is a dynamic setting for autobiographical learning. Its structures and institutions concretise the learners' social and cultural tradition, which has been shaped by design and historical circumstance. Through the prejudgments of their tradition, learners perceive reality and construct corresponding lives and life stories. Theoretical approaches to interpreting life experience differ in their estimation of the value of the learners' tradition. In adult education theory and practice, Habermas' critical theory has been enlisted as a conceptual basis for perspective transformation. Little attention has been afforded to either Gadamer's hermeneutic consciousness, or Ricoeur's critical hermeneutics as ways to understand the interpretive activity which leads to the learners' self-formation and the re-invention of their life story. Six former Roman Catholic priests participated in a cooperative inquiry, telling their life stories of remarkable change in life choice. They sought deeper self-knowledge, as well as an understanding of the widespread social phenomenon of Catholic priests choosing to marry. Their autobiographical accounts indicate that, as they gradually composed new life narratives, these learners gained personal authority as the authors of their lives. The stories also indicate that, at one time or other, a state of stagnation developed in the authors' lives. Despite the learners' lengthy periods of consciously attempting to resolve the stalemate, it was an act of spontaneous imagination which illuminated a way through. The explanatory understanding of autobiographical or transformative learning proposed here claims that imagination, which bridges the domains of conscious and unconscious knowing in the author, is a partner with critical reflection in interpreting the life in its social context. Through transformative or hermeneutic conversation, adult educators may foster and promote the formation of autobiography and transformative learning. Further research, linking autobiography and transformative learning, would purposefully explore the role of other internal processes in transformative learning, such as feeling, and examine their relationship with imagination. It is likely that the acknowledgment of imagination as integral to transformative learning would lead to research which considers models of personhood other than those which emphasise ego as the conscious director of knowing and learning.

Complicated Grief (CG) has been identified as a potential consequence of bereavement that is associated with unique and debilitating outcomes. This thesis investigated autobiographical memory in CG. This program of research focused on the specificity and content of autobiographical memories in the context of CG. Study 1 investigated memory retrieval specificity using a cue word paradigm. Bereaved individuals with CG displayed an overgeneral retrieval style (OGM) compared to bereaved individuals without CG. Study 2 found that CG participants were also less specific in imagining future events in response to positive cues. Further, there was a significant independent relationship between memory retrieval specificity and the specificity of future imaginings. Study 3 investigated the relationship between overgeneral memory and social problem solving. CG participants performed more poorly on this task; however, there was no independent relationship with memory retrieval style. Study 4 investigated the impact of treatment on OGM. Results indicated that as symptoms of CG reduced following treatment, individuals retrieved more specific memories to positive cues. Studies 5-7 examined proposed relationships between self construct and autobiographical remembering in CG, as outlined in Conway and Pleydell-Pearce??s (2000) self memory system model. In Study 5, individuals with CG were more likely than bereaved controls to view their self-identity as being related to the deceased. Study 6 investigated the relationship between self-discrepancy, personal goals and memory content. CG individuals were more likely to recall loss-related memories, and there was a relationship between personal goals and memory content. Study 7 extended examination of these factors to future-related thinking. Finally, the program recognised the importance of investigating the impact of the cognitive strategies that individuals may adopt to manage painful memories. Using an experimental Stroop procedure as a measure of thought accessibility, Study 8 investigated thought suppression in CG. The results suggested that CG individuals experienced greater interference from death-related cues. In summary, these studies highlighted some of the key memory processes that may be involved in the maintenance, and potentially the resolution, of CG.

Thesis (Ph.D.). / Written for the Dept. of Anthropology. Title from title page of PDF (viewed 2008/08/04). Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1992. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [207]-230).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--West Virginia University, 2006. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains v, 271 p. Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 252-271).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2005. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 143-149).

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Centered on the universal search for home, The Ocean in Between is an autobiographical documentary about my bicultural identity and sense of guilt as a first generation Italian emigrant daughter. As I embark on a journey between Italy and the United States, I attempt to reconcile my American aspirations with my Italian roots. Using observational footage, direct interviews, and narration, this film provides a poetic and intimate look at family relations, love and death, bicultural identity, and sexuality.

Literary responses to Republican exile are diverse and autobiographical works have emerged as a significant modality of this exilic literature. Utilising poetics as a mode of inquiry, this thesis aims to examine some of the complex and nuanced ways in which exile has shaped autobiographical writing by both first and second-generation female exiles. To this end, I trace a poetics of exile in a selected corpus of nineteen autobiographical works by twelve authors: Constancia de la Mora, Isabel Oyarzábal de Palencia, Silvia Mistral, Clara Campoamor, Victoria Kent, Luisa Carnés, Remedios Oliva Berenguer, Francisca Muñoz Alday, Angelina Muñiz-Huberman, María Rosa Lojo, María Luisa Elío and Arantzazu Amezaga Iribarren. These texts were published across a seventy year period (1939 – 2009) in a number of geographical locations and written in a variety of circumstances. Exilic autobiographical texts are not homogeneous and relatively few have adhered to traditional models of autobiography. As such, the works examined are drawn from a variety of autobiographical sub-genres including propagandistic autobiographies, diaries, political essays, hybrid texts, autofiction, memoirs, childhood autobiographies, more experimental semi-autobiographical texts and a film. The main body of this thesis presents six aspects of a poetics of exile — the notion of the addressee, generic hybridization, polyphony, the propagation of collective memory, postmemory, and retroprogressive representations of childhood — and adopts a multi-disciplinary approach that draws upon a number of fields. This thesis aims to offer an illumination of the breadth and difference of women's exilic autobiographical writing as highlighted in the identification of six very different aspects of a poetics of exile.

The thesis comprises a novel – Interpreters and a critical commentary. Interpreters The novel explores the notion of identity, the interpretation of the past, the secrets and lies inherent in families, the parent/child relationship and the collective and personal guilt of a generation who grew up in Nazi Germany. It is a work of fiction that has grown out of memory and imagination, informed by original research, family memoirs, and oral history. Interpreters tells the story of Julia Rosenthal, a successful anthropologist, who returns to the suburban estate of her 1970s childhood. During her journey, both actual and emotional, the unspoken tensions that permeated her seemingly conventional family life come flooding back. Trying to make sense of the secrets and half truths, she is forced to question how she has raised her own daughter – with an openness and honesty that Susanna has just rejected in a very public betrayal of trust. Meanwhile her brother, Max, is happy to forge an alternative path through life, leaving the past undisturbed. In a different place and time, another woman is engaged in a painful dialogue with an unidentified listener, struggling to tell the story of her early years in wartime Germany and gradually revealing the secrets she has carried through the century. Critical commentary Autobiographical fiction as a genre can be laden with moral and ethical issues, and I have made their examination the centrepiece of my critical commentary. I have focused on the contractual understanding of the relationship between the author, reader and those written about, the issue of who “owns” memory, and issues relating to a writer's responsibility – and the limits of that responsibility – to their sources. I have examined the tension between “truth” and “fiction” and whether this is something that is particularly problematic in the writing and reading of autobiographical fiction. I have also considered what happens to the writer and the reader when the rules are broken by fake memoir, particularly fake memoir related to recent history and, most particularly, to the Second World War and its aftermath. My reflections on my own novel and its genesis are complemented throughout by discussions of other, mostly twentieth century, authors' and critics' works.