The indivisibility of change: the challenge of trauma to the genre of coming-of-age narratives

Evie Wyld’s novel All the Birds, Singing (2013) draws attention to the interrelation of personal history, trauma narratives, and coming-of-age stories. I will analyze Wyld’s novel with reference to two bodies of theory: Bergson’s model of the “indivisibility of change” (p. 263), which re-conceptualizes the past as part of a “perpetual present” (p. 262), and Pederson’s revised literary theory of trauma, which deviates from crucial tenets of traditional literary trauma studies. Due to the novel’s unconventional structure of a backward-moving narrative strand interlocked with a forward-moving one, the crisis the narrator experienced in adolescence moves centre stage, which shows that, in the case of trauma, coming-of-age requires a continual negotiating of this experience. The novel challenges “strategically grim” coming-of-age narratives which represent trauma merely “as part of a narrative of the young protagonist’s redemption or maturation,” so that “resolution occurs as a matter of narrative convention […]” (Gilmore and Marshall, p. 23). All the Birds, Singing demonstrates that the painstaking processing of a painful personal history in narrative by establishing a dialogue of voices – and thus of selves –is an essential prerequisite for maturation. The genre of coming-of-age narratives, beside including novels which present a crisis merely as a necessary step on the way to adult life, thus also needs to incorporate texts documenting the persistence of trauma in a protagonist’s life

Perpetual performance : selfhood and representation in Byron's writing

In Byronic texts readers are frequently confronted with questions concerning selfhood and self-representation. Drawing on performance theories, this study reveals that in Byron’s texts Platonic notions of the self are increasingly replaced by concepts of selfhood defined in terms of constant, playful transformation – concepts which anticipate postmodernist ideas of identity. Going beyond previous studies, which have often taken an autobiographical approach, Perpetual Performance: Selfhood and Representation in Byron’s Writing explores the Byronic self through a prism of modern literary theory, aiming to cast light on the various conceptions of the self which lie beneath the surface of Byron’s texts. In addition, theoretical questions related to Postmodernism, matters of theatricality and staging, the notion of performance as a poetic principle, and definitions of identity are addressed

Experiments in Self-Narration: Women's Scientific Autobiographies for the ELT Classroom

Scientific autobiographies are not merely chronicles of experiments and professional mastery; they are also a type of life writing where scientists tell their private stories. In the three female-authored scientific autobiographies to be discussed in this article – Juli Berwald’s Spineless, Hope Jahren’s Lab Girl and Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk – the writers employ intertextual references, metaphors and narrative patterns known from specific fictional genres to integrate their private experiences into their public life stories. Based on a close analysis of the function of these literary devices, this article outlines some distinct ways in which these scientific autobiographies can be used in the ELT classroom. While a first project connects the research of a natural science topic with the promotion of personal development and the aims of language learning, a second one shows that women’s scientific autobiographies also represent a valuable resource in an interdisciplinary science and foreign-language classroom