Please enable JavaScript.
Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.
Telling True Stories Week 2 Leecture - Coggle Diagram
Telling True Stories Week 2 Leecture
Hysteria
How to wright a biography of someone who is unknown.
Have you read a biography in the last two years?
Have you read more than 4 in the past two years.
Have you written something biographical yourself.
Have you written something non fiction
Are you interested in reading biography.
Define Biography
A written account of a person from birth to death.
Self, personality and character.
Tension between what a person experiences and what they are.
Institutional records only tell part of the story
Cannot tell us what it was like for an individual to grow up in that environment.
Not a true factual article
History of Biography
Generally history
It's not history I'm writing it's lives.
A.D. 100 Plutarch's Parallel lives
Biography as searching
The biographer is one peering into the dark.
Rowing at night on a lake, all looks alike but relying on previous knowledge you become accustomed to the dimness and come to see more.
Like a professional burglar
Subverting tradition
Research brings a subject and author together into a relationship of intimacy
How is the writer present in the final product.
Even if being subjective is possible it alters what you think is important
Each persons account would be different.
Biographer/Biographee relationship
The relationship between biographer and subject is formed in imagination
Helps when there are parts of the person you cannot know.
Expose this imagination rather than presenting it as true and rational.
Edit a life for presentation does not mean that the biographer is not editing their own life with their imagination.
Non traditional Biographies.
Hearing Maude
Charts how she was estranged from people.
Central to the story is Maud.
Was taught how to speak and not sign.
Admitted to an asylum at 28 because she was deaf.
How it contributed to her life, writing and personality.
I can sense when something isn't working and shift it around until it does
The resurrection of Winne Mandela
Implicated in murder, Kidnapping and other crimes.
Not witch but warrior.
What it means to reclaim this powerful woman.
Writer uses you to connect the subject and reader.
In search of the woman who sailed the world
Returned with no fanfare
Travelled the world in search of the details of her life.
Charted her own course for others to follow.
Persued an uncharacateristic life.
Model for women who don't fit the mould.
Tracker
Collective memoir of an indigenous gentleman and the events of his life.
His and his families stories woven together.
Multiple first person accounts.
Disability within auto/biography
A cultural manifestation of a human rights movement
Tools for social justices and awareness for social sciences.
Hearing Maud
Jessica White charts her early life with disability
What they cannot access still compared to back then.
Gave a sense of purpose.
The deaf part of myself had been ghosted.
Hysteria
Juxtaposes her own story with that of her subjects.
Intertwining lives of disabled writers and subjects allows for a certain amount of reality.