Surviving the wreck : post-traumatic writers, bodies in transition and the point of autobiographical fiction

In autobiographical fiction, the repetition of specific ‘unprocessed’ tropes wherein contextual meaning remains unclear can be likened to the symptomatic ‘flashbacks’ endured by victims of trauma. Virginia Woolf’s compulsive use of images of sea, mirrors, and unspoken shame, Jack Kerouac’s brothers and angels, JG Ballard’s empty swimming pools, Melville’s tropes of Narcissus and madness and my own return to images of blood and wounding in my work, are part of each writer’s attempt to construct a new post-trauma narrative identity. Writing fiction enabled these writers to shake off the fixed subject position dictated by their pasts and construct new and more multifaceted identity narratives as survivor-writers. As Maggie Schauer’s work demonstrates, through narrativization a new ‘sense of perceived identity may emerge: ‘who I am now’ and ‘who I was’ when trauma struck. These narratives comprise the past as a story written post-traumatically, and a new identity (as a survivor/writer) they have narrated for themselves. Autobiographical fiction, therefore, may be central to understanding the function of self-narrative in the construction of post-trauma identities. This essay considers what such texts can tell us about trauma and the body, trauma narratives and autobiographical fictions, and writing and post-traumatic identity

Expressive writing and telling and participatory action research: developing a relational ethics of practice for story-based interventions in crisis settings

Recent work in Expressive Telling, an oral form of Expressive Writing, has demonstrated the usefulness of a Participatory Action Research (PAR) approach in the design of narrative therapeutic interventions in post-conflict and crisis settings. This paper outlines how a combined PAR/relational ethics approach informed a recent Expressive Telling project supporting vulnerable families in the Akkar region of Lebanon (2020–21) enabling the development of strong relational bonds among stakeholders that sustained the project in the face of Lebanon's social and economic upheaval and the COVID-19 crisis. This collaborative, iterative methodology enabled the development of thics in practice forged by attending to relationships and valuing the voices of all stakeholders, UK and Lebanon-based, through life storytelling practice, generating new knowledge and practices to meet the challenges of the crisis. This approach enabled stakeholders to jointly consider the effects of crisis settings on ethical research practice principles in wider creative narrative interventions

Ante-Autobiography and the Archive of Childhood

This essay examines the concept of children’s autobiography via several autobiographical extracts written by the author as a child. Although only a small proportion of people will compose and publish a full-length autobiography, almost everyone will, inadvertently, produce an archive of the self, made from public records and private documents. Here, such works are seen as providing access to writing both about and by children. The essay explores the ethics and poetics of children’s writing via the key debates in life writing; in particular, the dynamic relationship between adults and children, both as distinct stages of life and dual parts of one autobiographical identity. The term “ante-autobiography” is coined to refer to these texts which come before or instead of a full-length narrative. They are not read as less than or inadequate versions of autobiography, but rather as transgressive and challenging to chronological notions of the genre

Resilin and chitinous cuticle form a composite structure for energy storage in jumping by froghopper insects

RIGHTS : This article is licensed under the BioMed Central licence at http://www.biomedcentral.com/about/license which is similar to the 'Creative Commons Attribution Licence'. In brief you may : copy, distribute, and display the work; make derivative works; or make commercial use of the work - under the following conditions: the original author must be given credit; for any reuse or distribution, it must be made clear to others what the license terms of this work are.Abstract Background Many insects jump by storing and releasing energy in elastic structures within their bodies. This allows them to release large amounts of energy in a very short time to jump at very high speeds. The fastest of the insect jumpers, the froghopper, uses a catapult-like elastic mechanism to achieve their jumping prowess in which energy, generated by the slow contraction of muscles, is released suddenly to power rapid and synchronous movements of the hind legs. How is this energy stored? Results The hind coxae of the froghopper are linked to the hinges of the ipsilateral hind wings by pleural arches, complex bow-shaped internal skeletal structures. They are built of chitinous cuticle and the rubber-like protein, resilin, which fluoresces bright blue when illuminated with ultra-violet light. The ventral and posterior end of this fluorescent region forms the thoracic part of the pivot with a hind coxa. No other structures in the thorax or hind legs show this blue fluorescence and it is not found in larvae which do not jump. Stimulating one trochanteral depressor muscle in a pattern that simulates its normal action, results in a distortion and forward movement of the posterior part of a pleural arch by 40 μm, but in natural jumping, the movement is at least 100 μm. Conclusion Calculations showed that the resilin itself could only store 1% to 2% of the energy required for jumping. The stiffer cuticular parts of the pleural arches could, however, easily meet all the energy storage needs. The composite structure therefore, combines the stiffness of the chitinous cuticle with the elasticity of resilin. Muscle contractions bend the chitinous cuticle with little deformation and therefore, store the energy needed for jumping, while the resilin rapidly returns its stored energy and thus restores the body to its original shape after a jump and allows repeated jumping

Antibody Labelling of Resilin in Energy Stores for Jumping in Plant Sucking Insects

The rubbery protein resilin appears to form an integral part of the energy storage structures that enable many insects to jump by using a catapult mechanism. In plant sucking bugs that jump (Hemiptera, Auchenorrhyncha), the energy generated by the slow contractions of huge thoracic jumping muscles is stored by bending composite bow-shaped parts of the internal thoracic skeleton. Sudden recoil of these bows powers the rapid and simultaneous movements of both hind legs that in turn propel a jump. Until now, identification of resilin at these storage sites has depended exclusively upon characteristics that may not be specific: its fluorescence when illuminated with specific wavelengths of ultraviolet (UV) light and extinction of that fluorescence at low pH. To consolidate identification we have labelled the cuticular structures involved with an antibody raised against a product of the Drosophila CG15920 gene. This encodes pro-resilin, the first exon of which was expressed in E. coli and used to raise the antibody. We show that in frozen sections from two species, the antibody labels precisely those parts of the metathoracic energy stores that fluoresce under UV illumination. The presence of resilin in these insects is thus now further supported by a molecular criterion that is immunohistochemically specific

The Relationship between Proteinuria and Coronary Risk: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Vlado Perkovic and colleagues show, through a systematic review and meta-analysis of cohort studies, that there is a strong and continuous association between proteinuria and subsequent risk of coronary heart disease

How art constitutes the human : aesthetics, empathy, and the interesting in autofiction

This chapter examines ‘graphic autofiction’ in Lynda Barry’s One! Hundred! Demons! (2002) and What It Is (2009) and Phoebe Gloeckner’s A Child’s Life and Other Stories (2000) and The Diary of A Teenage Girl: An Account in Words and Pictures (2002), demonstrating how it allows feminist performances that visualize cartoonists’ authentic experiences of sexual and other forms of trauma. The chapter makes a valuable contribution to current debates on autofiction by moving beyond its literary expressions and investigating how the hybrid medium of comics accommodates the genre and how that, in its turn, complicates the representation of trauma. It also proposes that ‘graphic autofiction’ allows the formation of feminist counter-narratives to the silencing of female abuse victims and the latter’s representation beyond victimhood