Life Writing. Contemporary Autobiography, Biography, and Travel Writing

Book excerpt: These proceedings of the international 2006 symposium ‘The Theory and Practice of Life Writing: Auto/biography, Memoir and Travel Writing in Post/modern Literature’ at Haliç University, Istanbul, include the majority of contributions to this event, some of them heavily revised for publication. A first group, treatments of more comprehensive and/or theoretical aspects of life and travel writing, concerns genre history (Nazan Aksoy; Manfred Pfister), typology (Manfred Pfister; Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson), issues of narration (Gerald P. Mulderig; Rana Tekcan), the recent phenomenon of blogging (Leman Giresunlu), and therapeutic narrative (Wendy Ryden). A second group—whose concern often heavily overlaps with the first in that it also pursues theoretical goals—concentrates on individual authors and artists: Sabâ Altınsay and Dido Sotiriou (Banu Özel), Samuel Beckett (Oya Berk), the sculptor Alexander Calder (Barbara B. Zabel), G. Thomas Couser and his filial memoir, Moris Farhi (Bronwyn Mills), Jean Genet (Clare Brandabur), Henry James (Laurence Raw), Orhan Pamuk (Dilek Doltaş; Ayşe F. Ece), Sylvia Plath (Richard J. Larschan), Edouard Roditi (Clifford Endres), Sara Rosenberg (Claire Emilie Martin), the dancer Mrinalini Sarabhai (Leena Chandorkar), Alev Tekinay (Özlem Öğüt), Uwe Timm (Jutta Birmele), and female British and American Oriental travellers (Tea Jansson).