Prison NarrativesThe Year in South Korea Heui-Yung Park (bio) One of the most significant roles that life narratives have played in South Korea has been giving voice to those who have suffered social injustice and want to be heard. Lifewriting texts often serve as trial sites outside the legal systems, where writers can tell their stories to the reader without judicial authority being present. In their prison narratives, Im Pang-gyu1 and Ch'oe Sŏ-wŏn2 both turn to autobiographical representation beyond the jurisdiction of the court to present their cases in public and to disclose the injustice that they believe they have suffered. This year's essay examines how Im's Pijŏnhyang changgisu Im Pang-gyu chasŏjŏn (2019) and Ch'oe's Na nŭn nugu in'ga: Ch'oe Sŏ-wŏn okchung hoeogi (2020) defend their writers, and try to convince others of their innocence. Im was a pro-North prisoner for more than thirty years who rejected conversion to democracy following his imprisonment during the Korean War (1950–1953). His autobiography describes how he became a ppalch'isan—a communist guerrilla—who fought against the Korean military and its allies during the war. Ch'oe, on the other hand, was accused of manipulating state affairs during the presidency of Park Geun-hye, the eighteenth president of South Korea. Telling her own story in the form of a memoir, she denies all such accusations. Im's and Ch'oe's prison narratives—in which each makes a case for themselves—show how recently published South Korean life writing has spoken for those who feel they have been mistreated, offering "a forum of judgment in which the subject may achieve a control over [their] story that [they] would not hold in court" (Gilmore 696). Outside the judicial system, Im's and Ch'oe's autobiographical representations enable them to speak for themselves, presenting their own stories that differ from what others assume they know. In so doing, their life narratives turn into alternative venues for telling the truth about themselves and seeking out justice. Examining these narratives, however, should also remind us of Paul John Eakin's proposal "to think of ethics as the deep subject of autobiographical discourse" ("Introduction" 6). Im's Pijŏnhyang changgisu works to correct the [End Page 91] stereotypical, negative views of unconverted communist prisoners—most of whom have suffered long-term imprisonment and state violence—and addresses the ethics of these laws. But Ch'oe's also raises questions about the amount of truth in the information provided to the public, and can therefore lead us to think about the ethical responsibilities of the autobiographer, and especially when demanding justice. Looking into these prison narratives sheds light on the empowering roles that life writing can offer these prisoners, and more generally, on the ethics of writing one's own life story. Unconverted Long-term Prisoners: National Heroes or Enemies? Pijŏnhyang changgisu (unconverted long-term prisoners in Korea) refers to those who have been imprisoned for an extensive period (the majority for more than thirty years) for maintaining their socialist ideology, or for participating in communist activities in South Korea since the 1945 liberation of the country. Im Pang-gyu was a communist imprisoned for twenty years (1952–1972) for his participation in a communist guerrilla unit. Five years after his release, he was reimprisoned without trial because he had refused to convert to democracy. While serving an additional twelve years (1977–1989), Im and other unconverted inmates were exposed to so-called conversion "maneuvering" imposed by the state in the form of physical abuse. Published years after Im's 1989 release, Pijŏnhyang changgisu Im Pang-gyu chasŏjŏn reveals the unfair treatment long-term prisoners like Im experienced, and also tries to change defamatory preconceptions about them by presenting their life stories. In South Korea, ppalch'isan and those with communist ideologies have aroused fear and hatred among people influenced by Cold War, anti-communist ideology. The still-famous story of nine-year-old Yi Sŭng-bok—reportedly killed in 1968 by armed North spies because he shouted "I...

This essay examines the absence of mobile phone technology from the narrative of No Friend but the Mountains in order to reflect on the centrality of mobile digital technology for the intellectual work the book undertakes. Examining a key scene from No Friend but the Mountains where telecommunications technology is represented as a limited resource within Manus Prison, it draws on media theory and life writing theory to argue that the affordances of mobile digital technologies enabled the emergence of a new, collaborative form of life writing that both affirms the value of an individual life, while also making powerful claims regarding the collective suffering and dehumanization at the heart of Australia’s mandatory detention policy.

Editor's Note Craig Howes This issue was entirely produced in the time of COVID. Though everyone everywhere has been dealing with rofound disruptions, fears, and fury, those of us at Biography have for the most part been spared the personal losses and the catastrophic impacts others have been suffering. (We've been OK.) But COVID has had its effect on our operations, and on how Biography's contents seem even more compellingly to reflect or comment upon the myriad of issues entwined with personal representation and witness that demand attention and action. The Center for Biographical Research office shut down on March 13, 2020. As Director, I still come in every day—the pilot light on the stove. I have seen our Managing Editor, Paige Rasmussen, twice—socially distanced, both of us wearing masks, in the same room only for seconds. Our reviews editor and graduate assistant, Zöe E. Sprott, has not been in the office at all. And neither have John Zuern and Cynthia Franklin, my Hawaiʻi-based co-editors. Everyone except me is working from home. Thanks to a few technological adjustments, many of our editorial routines have carried on as usual. Face-to-face roofreading—we do a read-out of every issue—now takes place on Zoom. Our regular editorial meetings do as well—with the unanticipated benefit that Anna Poletti, our co-editor abroad, now "attends" regularly from Utrecht. (The time zone is the biggest challenge.) We have learned that virtually all of our regular activities can be conducted virtually—including our weekly seminar series, now in its thirty-third year, which actually attracts larger audiences than the in-person version. It's when I look at this issue's contents, however, that I recognize just how important assessing the value and impact of life narratives continues to be in a transformed world—whether as a reminder that longstanding challenges still need to be addressed despite understandable pandemic distraction, or as a spur to considering how things will need to be different if there is an after. Our first four essays address how life writing can offer sharp and clear insights into how regional and national personal histories have shaped or counter the current state of affairs in Kashmir, Armenia, Turkey, and Poland. The politics of the personal. The next three are more literary and rhetorical—a sweeping overview of biography in France, a detailed exploration of self-narration in autobiographical texts, and a study of literary and personal inheritance in a famous American graphic memoir. A glance at the authors' biographies also confirms that while themselves part of the international life writing community of critics and theorists, they come from, and often still reside, in the nations and regions they study. [End Page vii] The international, interdisciplinary, and historical sweep Biography has always aspired to is reflected in the reviews as well. Their subjects' historical range spans from antiquity to the twenty-first century; the examined media comprise manuscripts, print publications, graphic narratives, and social media and digital economies; the geographic regions represented include Western and Eastern Europe, the Americas, and Asia; and collectively their interests are strongly interdisciplinary—medial humanities, political power differentials, image-and-text studies, gender performance and interrogation in online environments, literary and rhetorical self-representation, and post-humanist concerns. Our upcoming special issues, clusters, and forums will offer a similar variety. I have been sitting alone for nine months in an office that no one ever enters, Zooming with my impressive co-editors and editorial staff at a time when nativist, nationalist, and divisive impulses seem to be ascendent almost everywhere. I am nevertheless heartened that the work we are privileged to offer in each issue still speaks to the necessity of recognizing the importance of life stories as integral to preserving what we collectively value, to responding to the constant attacks on human dignity, and to sustaining a belief that careful attention to how we have represented lives up until yesterday will help us benefit from what they are telling us, and why. [End Page viii] Copyright © 2021 The George and Marguerite Simson Biographical Research Center

"The Absolute Genre"The Year in France Joanny Moulin (bio) The field of biography in France elicits a notable degree of reflection on genre, which is expressed either implicitly, by the prolixity and diversity of sometimes experimental productions, or explicitly in at least two books published in 2019 with very different, if not radically opposite, approaches to the question: Pascal Quignard's La vie n'est pas une biographie and Dominique Bona's Mes vies secrètes. Quignard's argument against "biographical narration" is that "On ne saurait faire un tissu si continu de ses désirs, ni des actions où ils se projettent ou qu'ils inventent, qu'il puisse passer pour vraisemblable" [One cannot make of one's desires, or of the actions into which they project themselves or which they invent, a fabric so continuous as to pass for verisimilar] (21). On the whole, Quignard is repeating the argument presented by Pierre Bourdieu in his 1986 essay "The Biographical Illusion." Furthermore, in Quignard's view, "Les rêves sont encore vivants, non les phrases" [Dreams are still alive, sentences are not] (20). Such a statement, as well as the affirmation of a "being" that would be different from "life," implies a surprising rejection of both psychoanalysis and the philosophy of deconstruction, which, to be convincing, would demand a much more serious philosophical effort than this. A great number of the most noteworthy biographical productions in France this year run against the grain of Quignard's thesis. Chief among them, Bona's Mes vies secrètes is an autobiography of a prominent woman biographer, in which she explains how she came to opt for life writing against the advice of her mentors, and her plaidoyer for biography expresses a radically different vision of the genre. For Bona, inasmuch as it is a work of literature, biographical writing at its best is not primarily a mimetic, but a hermeneutic process, by which the writer and readers together seek to imagine, over and beyond mere words, what it must have been like to live such a life. Conversely, because we are born and live in worlds that are always already inhabited by previously created forms, there is great insight in Oscar Wilde's apothegm: "Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life" (39). Likewise, Denis Demonpion argues that Michel Houellebecq composes his life like a novel in the new and augmented version of his 2005 biography, [End Page 69] Houellebecq: La biographie d'un phénomène. The novelist has abundantly spread lies about the facts of his own life, but he also cultivates ambiguity between his fictional characters and himself, between his narrators and his own figure as implied author. This very ambiguity is a crucial ingredient of his succès de scandale, for Houellebecq is a satirist, more Juvenalian than Horacian, always aiming to press where it hurts to denounce what he sees as the vices and errors of a French society far gone, in his eyes, on the road of inexorable decadence. No wonder he has more detractors than admirers in his own country. Jean-Marie Gleize's Denis Roche: éloge de la véhémence is certainly more significant in the debate implicitly raised by Quignard's La vie n'est pas une biographie, for Roche paradoxically seems to give credence to Quignard and to prove him wrong at the same time. Having all but proclaimed the death of poetry in La Poésie est inadmissible, Roche had this "vehemence" that also made him shift constantly from one genre to the other, and from literature to photography and back, as if he was permanently fretting lest he might get trapped in the discursiveness of one artistic form. A comparable example may be found in the figure of the Dadaist writer Jacques Rigaut, whose integral nihilism led him to put an end to his own life at the age of thirty-one. Jean-Luc Bitton's biography, Jacques Rigaut: le suicidé magnifique, is the kind that Rigaut himself wouldn't have liked, because it is too long. And indeed, Rigaut's life was one long self-abandonment to the death wish, with a final leap into...

Reviewed by: Girls, Autobiography, Media: Gender and Self-Mediation in Digital Economies by Emma Maguire Lucy E. Bailey (bio) Girls, Autobiography, Media: Gender and Self-Mediation in Digital Economies Emma Maguire Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, xiv + 216 pp. ISBN 9783319742366, $99.99 hardcover. The dedication to Emma Maguire's Girls, Autobiography, Media: Gender and Self-Mediation in Digital Economies captures the spirit of the book's empowering central message: "to the girls and young women who, despite it all, insist on taking up space." Maguire, a lecturer at James Cook University in Australia, offers an impressive feminist analysis of girls' "automedial" practices across varied media genres in the North American context from the 1990s to the present to convey how girls use media platforms to pursue the mission of claiming space (3). Because girls inhabit a structural position with little social power and face intense ridicule of their activities and pleasures (6), they use automedial practices to explore, consume, and importantly, produce discourses of girlhood digitally to take up public space in generative ways. Girls mobilize media to "write back" (142), to produce "possible selves" (Marcus and Nurius), and to engage in "cultural imagining of girlhoods" (Maguire 5) that circulate, transmogrify, and erupt into new expressions. In analyzing girls' media practices as forms of auto/biographical expression, this text extends the field of auto/biographical studies by situating digital platforms as key sites where young women theorize, perform, and indeed, narrate their lives. Maguire's text thus aligns gracefully with the Palgrave Series mission to extend the "global reach" of life writing and "challenge and extend how life writing is understood and practiced . . . especially in a world of rapidly changing digital media." Extending the field of life writing into digital platforms parallels social changes in how people, particularly youth, write their lives. The contemporary digital landscape has unleashed an array of potential vehicles for girls' self-narration that were simply not available previously. For social media scholar danah boyd, such sites allow youth to "write themselves and their community into being" (2). Considering young women as legitimate subjects and producers of life narratives requires focusing on the outlets they use to craft their self-presentations, an area of scholarship Maguire calls "drastically under-theorized" (10). This book is thoroughly feminist in framing young women as agents and their world-making as generative. It frames girlhood as a fluid, narrated period of being, rather than reflecting a particular age range. Unsettling common assumptions of what constitutes a legitimate autobiographical text, Maguire emphasizes that girls' media use is a form of autobiographical and cultural production. She focuses on platforms in which young women are primarily authors, subjects, and owners of their media content (17). Although such technologies are by no means equal in access, use, or visibility, girls have put them to use creatively to construct girlhood and perform selves. This text is an important contribution to girlhood and autobiographical studies. The book opens by illustrating common patterns of sexist shaming inflicted on young women today to situate the importance of their agential practices in the case [End Page 496] studies that follow. The text consists of nine chapters, seven of which focus on a media platform that has emerged within the last two decades. Stretching from "camgirls" and lifecasting practices in the late 1990s, to experimental narrative work on Instagram appearing in 2014, each chapter addresses girls' automedial practices in a platform, analyzes the platform's affordances for expressions of life writing, and explores the diverse articulations of youth and femininity it supports. Cumulatively, the chapters underscore the "complex interplay between users, producers, and consumers" (4) in young women's autobiographical practices. The case analyses holistically animate varied themes that include dynamic conceptions of girlhood, circulating anxieties about youthful femininity, the importance of context and affordances in shaping the limits and possibilities of narrative, feminine embodiment, creativity, authenticity and performativity, audience desires, and the enduring possibility of surveillance and exploitation of girls. The introduction, Chapter 1, productively positions the text within a range of media, girlhood, and autobiographical issues. Drawing on Smith and Watson, Maguire embeds her analysis in a multidimensional conception of the self or "I" who narrates, and in recognition...

"Filling in Puka"Interview with Ryan "Gonzo" Gonzalez Ryan "Gonzo" Gonzalez (bio), Bryan Kamaoli Kuwada (bio), and No'u Revilla (bio) Ryan "Gonzo" Gonzalez is the head of Network Engagement for Kanaeokana, a network of over sixty land-, language-, and culture-based schools and other organizations. Gonzo's Network Engagement team included content creators, videographers, and photographers who were a core part of Nā Leo Kāko'o, the kia'i media team. Mahalo nui loa iā 'oe, e Gonzo, for sharing your kūpa'a and imagination. June 16, 2020 Bryan Kamaoli Kuwada: Would you please just share some of your background and how you came into the work, and then also tell us what your role on the media team was and how you would describe your relationship with the Mauna before and after being on the team? Ryan "Gonzo" Gonzalez: My role on the media team was kind of just filling in puka wherever there were puka in regards to the communications that needed to go out. 'Ilima [Long] was kind of our conduit to the leadership circle, and then I would say that there was myself, Kēhau [Abad], and 'Ilima that kind of helped kind of just overall. And then we had a whole bunch of other people who were plugging in and filling in puka as needed. It was very organic. I don't know a lot. And I didn't come into all of this awesome cultural stuff until much later in my life, and so I think back to points in my life that made the lightbulb click in my head. Or if I don't understand something, I go ahead and seek out those who know, and through that process, it allows me to better articulate what it is I feel that will reach the particular audience that we're trying to hit. Often-times you're trying to hit, not the core so much, but those who are just adjacent to the core. That way we can start bringing more people into the core. My relationship to the Mauna before and after, although I do have some ancestors that come from Honoka'a and the Waimea area, I am totally malihini to [End Page 638] Moku o Keawe. All I've known is my life on O'ahu, growing up in Mō'ili'ili, and now in He'eia. I would say that I was kind of reborn in He'eia because that's where my relationships with 'āina became a little bit more concrete, and I could start to experience what everybody was saying for a long time. Because when you think about it, when you spend your whole life within a system that's telling you that things work a certain way and they're treating stuff like 'āina as like private property and things that you own, just a means to an end, something that you can just continue to take from and move onto the next thing, it's kind of a really huge ah-ha moment. For me, it was just jumping into the lo'i and seeing the kalo dance in the winds, seeing the lo'i breathe, feeling it breathe. Oftentimes you're just in there with your thoughts, and your senses are heightened in so many different ways. There's the spiritual, there's the emotional, there's the physical, cultural connections that are being made that you don't usually make time for in the modern, daily lifestyle. When I think about my relationship to food prior to starting to try to grow my own, I was like okay, cellophane wrapper, go to the store, I need something, it's on-demand. I don't know how long it takes to "grow poi." Nine months, what? It's going to take me nine months to grow this thing and I gotta go every day and I gotta maintain that thing? And I gotta have this relationship with it, and then I harvest, and then what, I have to pound it and stuff? It's crazy. And for me that was my journey in terms of trying to understand what people mean...

Eakin and Santiago—Contributions to Life Writing ScholarshipThe Year in Brazil Sergio da Silva Barcellos (bio) During the last year in Brazil, freedom of expression, education, academic research, and artistic manifestations have been under attack by the current populist rightwing government. Choosing a relevant topic for this review proved to be an arduous task. With drastic cuts of funding for arts and research, the year went by with few notable works in life writing and with little hope for the future. However, a magical chance alignment contributed to the fortunes of auto/biographical studies in Brazil: the memoirs of the "grand dame" of Brazilian theater, cinema, and performing arts, the actress Fernanda Montenegro, emerged alongside the works of two leading exponents of literary studies. The writer, literary critic, essayist, and scholar Silviano Santiago published his long-awaited memoirs, and for the first time a book by Paul John Eakin, a staple name in the field of autobiographical criticism, appeared in a Portuguese translation. Fernanda Montenegro launched her memoirs amid a vicious onslaught by a minor theater director and current director of Fundação Nacional de Artes (FUNARTE). The acclaimed actress1 posed for the cover of a literary magazine dressed as a witch standing on top of a pile of books. In an interview in the magazine celebrating her ninetieth birthday and promoting her memoirs, the actress offered an x-ray of the current dangers of the conservative shift in the country's political scene and the increase in censorship through the extinction of public funding for arts and education. The director reacted to her interview by trying to taint Montenegro's image and reputation by calling her a sordid liar. The consequence was a national wave of sympathy and support for our most distinguished and iconic artist. With her Prólogo, Ato, Epílogo: Memórias, written in collaboration with journalist Martha Góes, Montenegro reminds us of the necessity to resist. [End Page 15] The Boy Without A Past The title of Silviano Santiago's autobiographical project, O Menino Sem Passado, seems to be an oxymoron for a narrative defined by the metaphor of a look into the rearview mirror. The existence of a past in autobiographies and memoirs is mandatory, but Santiago's lavish essayistic and fictional production during the last forty years proves his predisposition to subvert rules of genres. Dwelling in several works with the boundaries between fiction and reality blurred, Santiago defines his creative process of blending life and fiction as both a supporting structure and an interpretative tool. Santiago's dissertation about André Gide, presented at the Sorbonne University in the 1960s, certainly left an indelible mark on his future works. Gide's explicit use of autobiographical material in different works of fiction, both as an experiment and as a means of approaching sensitive topics that permeated his life, resonates in several of Santiago's fictional works. Novels such as Em liberdade (1981), Viagem ao México (1995), and O falso mentiroso (2004) treat relevant topics such as the frontiers between fact and fiction, debates on authorship and representation, as well as issues of subjectivity and identity that have always been at the core of Santiago's oeuvre. For instance, the novel that can be considered his most famous, Em liberdade, represents an arena where the author develops not only his fictional verve but also exercises his theoretical and critical ideas. Described by Santiago as an essay-novel, he structured Em Liberdade as a continuation of another Brazilian writer's memoirs, Memórias do Cárcere, by Graciliano Ramos. The dictatorial regime of Getúlio Vargas kept Ramos imprisoned for one year in 1936. Posing as an editor of Ramos's unpublished diary, Santiago establishes a dialogue with this faux diary, explicitly using postmodern narrative devices. Moreover, with this novel disguised as an autobiographical account of Graciliano Ramos, Santiago moves ahead by not only exploiting cultural codes but also by questioning them. Santiago continued blurring the frontiers between fact and fiction with his 1995 novel Viagem ao México, introduced by publishers as a hybrid of fictional prose, biography, and essay. In this novel, the narrator establishes a dialogue with Antonin Artaud...

Reviewed by: Autofiction in English ed. by Hywel Dix Aude Haffen (bio) Autofiction in English Hywel Dix, editor Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, xvi + 283 pp. ISBN 9783030078904, $109.99 paperback. The ambition of this volume edited by Hywel Dix is twofold. Acknowledging the French genealogy of autofiction, whose very name was coined by French novelist, critic, and academic Serge Doubrovsky in 1977, it aims to pave the way for an Anglophone canon of autofictional literature, for which the final select bibliography of primary texts provides a necessarily provisional and partial, but very useful outline. And it attempts to redefine this hybrid genre in a contemporary Anglophone context, by delving into the ways autofiction combines its two contradictory components: autobiography, committed to referential truth according to an "autobiographical pact," a contract between author and reader conceptualized by major French lifewriting scholar Philippe Lejeune in 1975; and fiction, which can involve the novelist's freedom to create imaginary alternative worlds and to demand that readers willingly suspend their disbelief, or simply the use of stylistic devices borrowed from the novel (e.g., flow of consciousness, analepses, meta and intertextuality). While Lejeune's definitions of autobiography and its "pact" are quoted [End Page 813] throughout the volume, the two broad-ranging theoretical chapters by Karen Ferreira-Meyers and Lorna Martens, as well as Todd Womble's and Bran Nicol's studies of American autofiction, also refer to another key French theorist, Gérard Genette (unfortunately omitted from the index), whose opposition between "narratives of diction" (meant to be received as a serious statement about the real world) and "narratives of fiction" (mimetic and borrowing from reality, but not pledged to referential truth) is a useful basis for narratological and literary analyses of autofiction. The thirteen essays, organized around four main themes ("Theoretical Approaches," "Writing After Trauma," "Rethinking Creativity," and "Beyond Post-modernism"), are introduced by a comprehensive overview by Dix of the theoretical, but also institutional and intercultural aspects, taking into account cultural capital, academic canon formation, and different national contexts of reception. Relevant echoes add to the volume's coherence and outweigh inevitable overlaps. In most chapters, the point of reference and the basis for comparison are Doubrovsky's tentative redefinitions of "autofiction" as he viewed and practiced it: a paradoxical "fiction of strictly real events," which requires the same stylistic experiments that can be found in novels (Dix 2; Martens 51; Jensen 71; Foust-Vinson 146; Walker 206; Womble 222); sociologically speaking, the work of "a nobody" creating him-or-herself through writing, as opposed to well-known canonical autobiographers recording their lives for posterity (Dix 3; Jensen 71; Menn 166); and his more thought-provoking elaboration on the term "fiction"—not only the ontological category of what never actually or verifiably happened, but more essentially, the provisional self-narratives of a writing subject bound to remain opaque to himor-herself, closer to a psychoanalytical process or to the half-familiar, half-estranged identities reflected in an artwork than to an introspective, confessional quest for final meaning and unique selfhood (Dix 5; Hunt 180–184; Nicol 259). Most of the essays focus on this third aspect and consider autofictional writers to be in search of self-narrative(s) otherwise hindered by the psychic effects of trauma or too marginal to follow preexisting narrative patterns. Since these writers are shown to be very much aware that one's "self" is produced by language as much as the other way around (Hunt 182; Walker 200), dialogism, intertextuality, and metatextuality are often highlighted. Even though Dix and Ferreira-Meyers, following in the footsteps of Max Saunders's work on late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century "autobiografiction," suggest that it may be possible to partly decontextualize the canon of autofictional works by opening it to a "prehistory" of earlier works like Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (7, 35), the deconstructionist and poststructuralist context of the late 1970s appears to be key to understanding not only the narratological features of the genre (Martens, chapter 3), but also its ethical and political potential. Indeed, so-called "subjectivities," writing and written about, narrating and narrated, far from being...