Читать книгу Constructing the Self. Essays on Southern Life-Writing онлайн

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ssss1 In his recent edited volume On Life-Writing (2015), Zachary Leader defines life-writing as a generic term used to describe a range of “writings [which] include not only memoir, autobiography, biography, diaries, autobiographical fiction, and biographical fiction, but also letters, writs, written anecdotes, depositions, court proceedings . . . marginalia, nonce writings, lyric poems, scientific and historical writings, and digital forms (including blogs, tweets, Facebook entries)” (1).

ssss1 Different scholars have included travel writing as a form of life-writing. See, for example, Timothy Dow Adams’s Light Writing and Life Writing (2000), where he specifies that the term life-writing includes not only “biography, memoir, and diary” but also “journal, letters, personal literary criticism, confession, oral history, daybook, documentary, travel writing, testimonio, film and television autobiographies, performance art, and as-told-to autobiography, as well as poetry” (xi).

ssss1 In “African American Autobiographies,” included in DiBattista and Wittman’s The Cambridge Companion to Autobiography (2014), Trudier Harris discusses Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road, James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X as examples of African American autobiographical writings in which the impulse is to bear witness to a collective experience.