This article arises from some reflections on the role of the researcher in the context of writing an account of my educational experience (Roberts, 1998) and the realisation that I had written various accounts of my educational (university) experience within a short space of time as part of academic ‘routine’. It was also in the context of my longer interest in the role of the researcher in biographical work and the current (increasing) discussion of the topic in the fields of oral history, biography and auto/biography. Of course, such discussion originates in debates in the 1980s, for instance, in work on popular memory and feminist research practice, but perhaps we can take the issue a little further - in relation to the auto/biographical writing of the researcher. The influence of the researcher on the collection, writing, presentation of research, eg. on the lives of others, is commonly noted - it is obvious - but what does it entail? How much should or could we reveal - in achieving ‘reflexivity’ - about our lives and experience in the research process and wider relationships

Virginia Woolf has been recognised as a pioneering modernist writer creating a new literary voice. It is not unusual to discover in Woolf’s writings the aesthetic and literary traces of those past traditions and influences which have been woven into her modern narratives. One significant, but often overlooked, influence comes from the Romantic period and the essayist, Thomas De Quincey. De Quincey’s stylish essays inspire Woolf’s art. Both writers’ fascination with representing the self (and their devotion to creating a literary thinking about, and narrative of, the subject) indicates a shared affinity between these two writers in spite of important cultural, historical, and social differences between them. My treatment of the self in De Quincey and Woolf is aware of the aesthetic and literary affinities between them and those cultural and historical differences that divide them. Tracing important connections between these two important writers sheds light on the larger concerns and patterns of both the literary scenes of Romanticism and Modernism. Six chapters in three sections focus on three main aspects of the self central to De Quincey and Woolf—the art of literature, the representation of time and the question of autobiographical writing. Chapter One and Two investigate De Quincey’s literature of power and Woolf’s art of fiction to examine the relationship between literary representation and the self. Chapter Three and Four discuss issues of time and self in De Quincey and Woolf. The final two chapters contend that De Quincey’s and Woolf’s reflections on literary representation, and time as a philosophical problem are embodied in their writings of the self across their respective literary careers. A project of this kind is alert to and enriches a recent burgeoning critical interest from Romanticists and Modernists alike in the exchanges, interchanges, bequests, and legacies of Romanticism to Modernism

This thesis explores the construction of the central figure of a cycle of four works relating to Marguerite Duras' adolescence in Indochina: Un Barrage contre le Pacifique, L'Eden Cinéma, L'Amant, and L'Amant de la Chine du Nord. In these texts, biographical fact - the conventional foundation of autobiographical writing – is shown to be mutable, as Duras (re)creates and re-visions the past and self in question. The plurality of Duras' textual history suggests that the central figure's construction does not lie, as we might have anticipated, in a performative reading of her past. A new and alternative explanation for the central figure's construction is proposed: namely, that she is described by a series of mirror reflections within, between, and beyond the texts. The thesis is divided into four sections. Chapter I draws upon psychoanalytical and feminist theories to introduce the notion of mirror reflections in intra- and extra-textual contexts, with particular reference to interpersonal relationships, textual devices and reader involvement. Chapter II examines the deliberate alteration of the central figure's image and reflection, discussing questions of power, performance, and (self-) objectification. Chapter III focuses on the interaction between writing and written selves, on the re-visioning of self and history, and questions the 'autobiographical' status of these texts. Chapter IV suggests that the four accounts act as intertextual mirrors, forming contradictory reflections that profoundly shape the reading experience by destabilising any previously confirmed sense of the textualised selfhood. The iterative (dis)establishment of the written self is also explored in relation to Duras' perception of writing as a process that is concurrently creative, destructive and chaotic. It is concluded that the mirror trope is indeed useful in describing the construction of the central figure of these texts, yet it brings the reader no closer to locating the central self and her past in a form that is neither plural nor provisional

Keller B, Streib H. Faith Development, Religious Styles and Biographical Narratives: Methodological Perspectives. Journal for Empirical Theology. 2013;26(1):1-21.Narrative study of religious lives has formed part of numerous projects at the Bielefeld Research Center for Biographical Studies in Contemporary Religion. An essential instrument in our designs, which mostly combine qualitative and quantitative methods, is the Faith Development Interview (FDI). In response to longstanding criticism its cognitive structural framework has been revised in respect of styles and schemata. The religious styles perspective examines the self as articulated in narratives and associates it with affectivity and emotion. This article gives an overview of our theoretical and methodological revisions, which take cognizance of current developments in lifespan developmental and clinical psychology such as attachment, mentalization and wisdom. We illustrate the implementation of these advances with a case study from our current study of ‘spirituality’ , which we locate in the complex multi-method design, and outline the triangulation of qualitative and quantitative data

This project explores how the historical contexts of the Hispanic Caribbean, including the regions of the Circum-Caribbean and the Caribbean Diasporas in the United States, have sustained dominant racial and nationalist ideologies that continue to silence or negate the identity of Afro-Caribbean subjects in national letters. My research focuses on the autobiographical and biographical writing of four Hispanic Afro-Caribbean men: Autobiografía de un esclavo (1840) by Juan Francisco Manzano¾originally published and translated to English in 1840 by Richard R. Madden¾ Klabel (2002) by Víctor Virgilio López García, Down These Mean Streets (1967) by Piri Thomas, and Las criadas de la Habana (2001) by Pedro Pérez Sarduy. I examine how these authors reproduce, negotiate, and contest notions of race and nation through the representation of their identities. Arguably, in the context of a social history of marginalization and the silencing of black voices in national cultures, these autobiographies and biography represent a contestation of modern ideals of national unity as authors call attention to their racial alterity. At the same time, the multiple positionalities of black writers—along lines of gender, class, and national identity—complicate the process of constituting black identities. In other words, resistance to dominant discourses of race and nation is likely to be articulated through dynamics of fragmented reproduction and strategic negotiations with dominant ideas. This work will examine how autobiographical and biographical narrations encode discursive silences that, when read contextually, can uncover black resistance to or acceptance of oppressive ideologies

“If you could somehow reprogram a person’s brain and change a significant memory in someone’s life, would that individual become someone else entirely?” According to McAdams (1985), a loss of autobiographical memory (AM) can be seen as a loss of identity, as identity is based on our personal experiences. As it is not currently possible to target and then alter specific memories within an individual brain, the AM of a healthy older group were compared to a group with Alzheimer’s disease (AD). The main question of this thesis was, “does a loss in AM result in a loss of identity?” This thesis explores AM across the life course through a series of four experiments with young and older adults, including a group with AD. Results support the critical role of the working-self in determining the self-relevance of AM across the lifespan

Full version of a Biographical Memoir of Ray Freeman FRS written at the request of the Royal Society, plus a full publication list and a selection of Ray's autobiographical writings.</p