The Palgrave Handbook of Auto/Biography
The Palgrave Handbook of Auto/Biography
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帕尔格雷夫自传/传记手册
DOI：
10.1007/978-3-030-31974-8_8
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发表时间：
2020
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
Stanley L
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Stanley L
这本手册的贡献讨论普通书信写作在自动/传记的框架内，围绕分析的关注，我一直非常关心有关日记，传记和自传，以及信件和其他'文件的生活'。重点是那些不出名或不重要的人的信件，他们写这些信件是为了方便他们与其他人打交道，从而帮助使日常生活的方方面面发生。人们通常认为信件是私人交流，涉及个人的，有时是私人的事情，是需要大量技巧的文学作品等等。然而，环顾世界各地档案馆的内容，却表明了一些完全不同的东西。这是因为大多数书信都是由普通人写的，他们通常没有什么正式的识字技能，关心的是社会生活中更平凡和更世俗的方面，或者是灾难性的社会或个人事件的极端情况，很少有文学价值，因为这是普遍认为的，它通常是更广泛的共享交流的一部分，这些交流发生在面对面的交流中，并结合在一起，而不是涉及亲密关系。“事情的实际进程”涉及到不同形式的自传和传记的日常和例行生产，例如，八卦和谈话是汽车/传记学者和名人传记一样富有成果的来源。这种想法与自传/传记的纲领性方面是一致的，它拒绝了过于简单的体裁分离，而是关注日常用法实践的复杂性。特别是，做“生意”强调了关注产生自动/传记形式的写作或视觉/口头表达的实践的重要性，而不仅仅是产品。这些想法是探讨正在进行的研究，在南非的普通信件收藏。书信写作的做法，特别是书信作家进行了讨论和比较，从而牵制了什么'业务'在这个意义上的普通书信写作的做法组成。这些都是从一系列的收藏中挑选出来的，每一个都是“普通的”，因为它们关注的是埃塞俄比亚的事务，而不是文学、政治或其他元关注。这些信件分别来自一位住在南非北方边境（莫法特）的传教士妻子、一个在比勒陀利亚（沃斯）的南非白人民族主义者的公务员和学术家庭，以及一个东开普省小镇的印刷工和报纸老板（白色）。他们还比较信件的德兰士瓦农业家庭成员的苏格兰提取（福布斯）。我早期对“多事的我”的分析工作和最近对书信写作作为一种“写作实验室”的研究，都是在分析这些信件中所写的“我”、“我们”和“你”的关系时得出的。
This handbook contribution discusses ordinary letter-writing within an auto/biographical framework, around analytical concerns I have been much concerned with in relation to diaries, biography and autobiography as well as letters and other ‘documents of life’. The focus is on letters by people who were not famous or important and who wrote them as part of doing the business of facilitating their dealings with other people, thereby helping make the quotidian aspects of everyday life happen. The assumption is often that letters are private exchanges, are concerned with personal and sometimes intimate matters, are literary productions requiring a good deal of skill and so on. However, casting an eye around the contents of archive collections in different parts of the world indicates something rather different. This is that most letter-writing has been produced by ordinary people often with few formal literacy skills, is concerned with the more mundane and quotidian aspects of social life, or else the in extremis ones of cataclysmic social or personal events, little of it has literary merit as this is generally seen, and it is typically part of wider shared exchanges that occurred in and joined together the face-to-face rather than concerned with intimacies. The ‘actual course of things’ involves the everyday and routine production of different forms of autobiography and biography with, for instance, gossip and conversation being as fruitful a source for auto/biography scholars as biographies of the famous. This idea is in harmony with the programmatic aspects of auto/biography, which has refused over-simple genre separations and instead attended to the complexities of the practices of everyday usages. In particular, doing ‘the business’ emphasises the importance of looking at the practices which produce auto/biographical forms of writing or visual/oral representation, and not just the products. These ideas are explored by reference to ongoing research on ordinary letter collections in South Africa. Letter-writing practices by particular letter-writers are discussed and compared, thereby pinning down what ‘the business’ in this sense of ordinary letter-writing practices consists of. These are selected from a range of collections, and each of them is ‘ordinary’ in the sense of being concerned with quotidian matters rather than literary, political or other meta-concerns. They are the letters of a missionary wife living in South Africa’s northern frontier (Moffat), a civil service and academic family of Afrikaner nationalists in Pretoria (Voss), and an Eastern Cape small town printer and newspaper owner (White). They are also compared with letters by members of a Transvaal farming family of Scottish extraction (Forbes). My earlier analytical work on ‘the eventful I’ and recent investigation of letter-writing as a kind of ‘writing laboratory’ are drawn on in analysing the ‘I’, ‘We’ and ‘You’ relationships inscribed in these letters.