Telling Tales

Autobiographies of Childhood and Youth

Kylie Cardell, Kate Douglas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781138059023
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317676300
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Young writers have historically played a pivotal role in shaping autobiographical genres and this continues into the graphic and digital texts which characterise contemporary life writing. This volume offers a selection of pertinent case studies which illuminate some of the core themes which have come to characterise autobiographical writings of childhood, including: cultural and identity representations and tensions, coming into knowledge and education, sexuality, prejudice, war, and trauma. The book also reveals preoccupations with the cultural forms of autobiographical writings of childhood and youth take, engaging in discussions of archives, graphic texts, digital forms, testimony, didacticism in autobiography and the anthologising of life writing. This collection will open up broader conversations about the scope of life writing about childhood and youth and the importance of life writing genres in prompting dialogues about literary cultures and coming of age.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Prose Studies.

Kylie Cardell and Kate Douglas

TELLING TALES: AUTOBIOGRAPHIES OF CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH

Introduction

Life writing has become an important umbrella term for considering the array of methods and texts which enable life storytelling. Written modes of biography and autobiography have rich traditions dating back for hundreds of years and crossing the globe. Oral and visual traditions go back much further – providing links, for example, to indigenous stories and histories predating the written word. Life stories have long offered a backbone to history, particularly in linking communities and in forging and recording experiences and identities. When we think of life writing, we perhaps conventionally think of mainstream publications. But life writing goes well beyond this: life narrative is a useful term for thinking about the ways in which the spoken words – songs and performances, for instance, contribute to a history of life writing. And of course, there is a growing awareness of the role that new and digital media play in life storytelling.

One of the central foci of life writing texts, particularly in recent decades, is childhood. This is unsurprising: everyone begins life as a child and whatever the age of the author, childhood has been, at least in part, experienced in the past. The presence (or indeed absence) of childhood in autobiographical writings reveals something of the cultural position of the child within society and culture of the time. Valerie Sanders explains how childhood was given little attention in European life writing until the eighteenth century (203–4). In the early nineteenth century, the Romantic poets wrote about childhood as a way to reflect on human development. By the twentieth century, the Bildungsroman – works focused on the growth of the individual – had become a prominent theme in fiction, non-fiction, and crossover forms. Of course, in the Bildungsroman, childhood is retrospective, although the narrative may proceed from the child’s point of view, as in Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, and even in nonfiction, such as Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes. Here, the narrator has the benefit of hindsight, and the ability to structure and shape a narrative to either explain or contest their current experience. The child, along with his or her experiences, functions to explain the adult self that the subject becomes, and the adult controls the way that representation is told.

The earlier modes of life writing about childhood are highly influential in the literature that has followed. However, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the representation of childhood in life writing has assumed a crucial place rather than an inevitable place. That is, childhood has become of interest in itself: no longer simply a piece of the puzzle in an illumination of the adult self. This shift mirrors broader changes in the cultural symbolism of the child and childhood and in cultural representations of childhood. In the early twenty-first century, a global community is interested in lives of children and youth; their rights and their citizenship have become a preoccupation. Childhood has come to be recognized as a diverse experience, located in cultural and temporal spaces, and the universal child figure of classical art is revealed as a myth. Life stories about childhood are cultural and collective rather than simply individual and the broad social and political issues of race, culture, class, gender, and sexuality all impact upon the experiences and representations of childhood and youth.

The “autobiography of childhood” (a term employed by Kate Douglas to examine different forms of life writing in which childhood is the central representation and theme) emerged strongly (particularly in the USA and the UK) in the 1990s and 2000s as a response to particular Western cultural moments. Authors such as Mary Karr, James McBride, and Frank McCourt “burst onto the American literary scene…paving the way for a plethora of similarly styled texts to follow. These autobiographies were distinctive for their depiction of challenging, often traumatic childhoods – characterized by abuse, poverty, discrimination, and identity struggles” (1). Such texts – often bestselling and critically acclaimed – were also highly influential in terms of paving the way for different considerations of childhood. The autobiography of childhood as a form endured into the 2000s, spawning a range of new subforms: such as memoirs of childhood illness and disability, graphic memoirs of childhood, and stories of youthful addiction and/or sexuality. In 2013, life writing about childhood is a literary trend that shows no sign of abating.

Historically, life writing about childhood has been dominated by adult writers retrospectively reimagining their childhood self. But as new cultural terms have emerged to consider and define childhood (child, tween, teenager, youth, and generation) – and young people’s relationship with culture has reorientated, there has been a greater cultural awareness of the ways in which young people author their own lives (both in the present and the past). For example, although writing a century apart, World War I poet Wilfred Owen and “Baghdad Blogger” Salam Pax each write about their first-hand experience of warfare, drawing our attention to the significant contribution young writers have made to life writing about war. Young life writers emerge across a range of autobiographical genres – from poetry and art, self-publishing (for instance, zines), through published forms, and (perhaps most notably) into the digital realm (see Buckingham and Willett; Poletti; Spencer). Scholars have noted the rising preoccupation with the so-called digital generation, in which young people not only consume but have begun to produce digital media (Buckingham and Willett). Young writers as cultural makers have employed life narrative forms for self-determination – to write themselves into culture, to make art, to build communities, and to control the public representations of childhood and youth.

In the Australian winter of 2012, supported by generous assistance from the Flinders Institute for Research in the Humanities, we invited a small group of life narrative scholars with a particular interest in childhood studies to a mini-symposium at Flinders University in South Australia. In the presentations and workshopping that followed, clear synergies began to emerge: many of us were interested in new and marginal forms (the graphic, the “non-book,” and the performance), were inspired to explore controversial subjects (sexual abuse, trauma, racism, and sexuality), and were attentive to the diverse and significant ways in which narrative about and of childhood garner attention in the twenty-first century literary marketplaces.

Emerging from that symposium, this special issue of Prose Studies responds to the growing significance of young people in both the production and consumption of autobiographical narrative. Indeed, though it is often to the consternation of cultural commentators, young people are speaking about and revealing their lives in increasing numbers. While social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, instagram or YouTube are some of the most visible locations in which young people formulate representations of their own lives, the production of literary memoir and other traditional published forms by young authors is also on the rise. Some forms, like the graphic (comics) memoir, have been particularly resonant with young authors, a product both of comics lingering status as a “childish” form and its subversive and disruptive appeal. Rocío G. Davis is among several contributors in this issue to consider graphic narrative, an emerging literary form that has been taken up very energetically by young life writers in particular. In “Childhood and Ethnic Visibility in Gene Yang’s American Born Chinese,” Davis explores how Asian-American memoirist Gene Luen Yang uses the medium of comics to make literally visible the cultural stereotypes and racism that have characterized images and representations of Asians in American mainstream media. Written for a young adult audience, the comic narrates through its teenage protagonist the experience of being simultaneously “visible” – in the prevalent pop cultural stereotypes and iconography of the “Oriental” – and “invisible” when individual histories and experience are collapsed into broad categories of “Asian.” Tracing how Yang deploys conventional narrative arcs such as the Bildungsroman, as well as traditional Chinese mythology, Davis energetically argues that Yang’s protagonist shows how childhood is universal in its diversity, a representation that equally powerfully relates to (and unsettles) stereotypes of ethnicity.

The graphic memoir is also a focus for Leigh Gilmore and Beth Marshall in “Trauma and Young Adult Literature: Representing Adolescence and Knowledge in David Small’s Stitches: A Memoir”; they are equally interested in the disruptive and political power of the form. A controversial National Book Award finalist in the young people’s literature category, Small’s memoir, Stitches, became the latest example in “an ongoing debate about the limits of knowledge, agency, and youth that plays out in conflicts over genres, audiences, markets and texts”. Like Davis, Gilmore and Marshall point to the significance of form in both the memoir’s circulation and its success – the graphic narrative has a special role to play in representing young lives and in speaking to young readers. However, while Stitches represents the successful deployment of a genre associated with childhood and childishness, the content of the memoir as a trauma narrative emphasizes that cultural boundaries around appropriate representation and young lives, especially in contexts where the readers are also young, remain strong and are anxiously monitored. Moreover, as a narrative that resists “ameliorative or neoliberal agendas” by sidelining the convention of an “uplifting” arc, displacing the dominance of “strategic trauma” in representations of childhood, the controversy around Stitches shows how powerful idealizations of childhood are to the national political imaginary. In their incisive exploration of this memoir and of its reception, Gilmore and Marshall argue that this is a memoir that literally, as well as figuratively, makes visible the fractured landscape of diverse “childhoods” and so ultimately contests the fantasy that fuels neoliberal and conservative agendas.

In “Indecent Exposure? Margaux Fragoso and the Limits of Abuse Memoir,” Kylie Cardell and Kate Douglas consider another contemporary memoir of childhood that has encountered a particularly strong, and frequently hostile, reception. Deemed “the year’s most controversial memoir” in several culturally prestigious venues, Fragoso’s memoir of the author’s childhood sexual relationship with a 57-year-old man, a relationship she by turns paints as exploitative, manipulative, and loving, produced a flurry of cultural commentary on “appropriateness”: critics questioned Fragoso’s subjective point of view, her representation of her experience, the literariness of her style, and repetitively asked why a reader should “bother” given the traumatic and unsettling material narrated. In tracing the debate that emerged around this text, Cardell and Douglas reveal the ways in which depictions of childhood sexual abuse in particular can provoke strong and conservative public discourse, particularly, as in the case of Fragoso, where the representation deviates from (and so makes visible) culturally decreed “scripts” for appropriate representation around young lives and experience.

In “Potential: Ariel Schrag Contests (Hetero-)Normative Girlhood,” Emma Maguire continues this issue’s interest in graphic forms, as well as in marginalized experiences, by exploring the work of teenage author Ariel Schrag. Schrag, who began self-publishing her comics recounting high school life while herself still a student, documents her high school experiences and her identity as a lesbian girl. Emphasizing the significance of Schrag’s narrative for its explorations and contestation of what “girlhood” is and should be, Maguire convincingly argues that Schrag uses both visual form and narrative exploration, and particularly, the cultural tropes of teenage experience (prom virginity and rebellion) as a way of making visible the oppressions, limitations, and subjugations of teenage girlhood.

Also considering identities that have been marginalized or heavily stereotyped in mainstream discourse, in “Alice Pung’s Growing up Asian in Australia: The Cultural Work of Anthologized Asian-Australian Narratives of Childhood,” Pamela Graham performs a fascinating analysis of a popular anthology of Asian Australian life narrative in which contributors have frequently focused on representations of their childhood experience. Noting that the work seeks to be both a popular publication and an accurate representation of frequently difficult or marginal childhood experiences, where discrimination, racism, and isolation are common features, Graham explores how the anthology form in particular might unsettle hegemonic notions of an “Australian” childhood and create space for the articulation of more diverse experiences and identities.

The potential of childhood as a highly strategic site in the representation or consolidation of adult identity is also explored by Tully Barnett in “‘Reading Saved Me’: Writing Autobiographically About Transformative Reading Experiences in Childhood.” Identifying a sub-genre, namely, memoirists of childhood who are also cultural gatekeepers, Barnett explores how adult memoirists employ nostalgic, sentimental frames and deploy Bildungsroman-esque structures in ways that are strategically aligned to both their adult achievements and their sense of a need to protect and advocate for book culture, the book object, and literature in general. As implicit members of a “literary elite,” writers, academics, and other literary/cultural gatekeepers have a particular investment in mythologizing a bookish childhood and Barnett’s argument that this has consequences for contemporary understandings of literary culture, and the book itself, as well as for a particular branch of memoir culture, is a stimulating new insight.

Also offering new and innovative approaches, Anna Poletti and Claire Lynch separately consider ideas of a childhood archive and this is a catalyst for an analysis of the treasured detritus, ephemeral documentation, and diverse artifacts of childhood “play.” In a fascinating essay that reflects on the author’s own artifacts of childhood in the form of life writing produced in (and for) the author’s childhood educational setting, Lynch offers ways in which to understand the life writing produced by very young children, an interpretation that must also reflect and mediate with the structures (social/educational/familial) of that child’s life. In an essay that delightfully moves between innovative analysis and the author’s own childhood archive of lists, drawings and “about me,” Lynch explores how the often neglected or passed over archive of childhood can in fact reveal how deeply the social works in the formation of the individual, something the autobiography “proper” can often, consciously or not, elide or gloss.

In “Autobiography and Play: ‘A Conversation With My 12 Year Old Self,’” Poletti explores an archive of a different kind, one that remediates or is prompted by new technology. An analysis of a YouTube video that “went viral,” Poletti’s essay illuminates how the child self and the adult self are linked in a mutual continuum of self-creation. Encountering the child self through play (in this case, a VHS video made by the author as a child becomes the subject of adult reminiscence and a staged retrospective dialog, posted on YouTube) prompts the adult to reflect on or reassess their current identity. In a reading that engages extensively with Winnicottian psychology and theories of subject formation, Poletti innovatively explores how “playing” can be both performative and constitutive acts in the representation of identity, for the contemporary autobiographical subject, and for their past and future readers.

Concluding this issue, Leena Kurvet-Käosaar offers a moving analysis of the childhood autobiography of the well-known Estonian children’s author Leelo Tungal. In “‘Who knows, will I ever see you again,’ said the one-eyed duck’: Reflections on a Soviet Childhood in Leelo Tungal’s Life Writing,” Kurvet-Käosaar considers how Tungal’s representations of her childhood reflect and also subtly dismantle the oppressive ideologies of Soviet era Estonia, and especially the mythology of the “happy childhood.”

The inclusion of this paper on Tungal as well as the papers on Yang and Pung is significant as a reminder that life writing about childhood and youth circulates across the globe. Although this collection of papers focuses predominantly on US examples, this simply reflects the relative visibility of these texts – and the significance of the USA as a site for the emergence (and indeed negotiation) of life stories about childhood and youth. We hope that this special issue of Prose Studies opens up broader conversations about the scope of life writing about childhood and youth and the importance of life writing genres in prompting dialogue about literary cultures and coming of age.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Clare Simmons from Prose Studies for her support of this special issue. And they would also like to thank the Flinders Institute for Research in the Humanities and its director Associate Professor Karen Vered for supporting this event. Thanks to Professor Julie Rak for taking up the role of respondent for the symposium and for her ever insightful, generous, and invaluable comments for the revision of the papers. Finally, thanks to all who took part in this Life Narrative Research Group symposium and for their creativity, intelle...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Permissions
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Telling Tales: Autobiographies of Childhood and Youth
• 2. Childhood and Ethnic Visibility in Gene Yang’s American Born Chinese
• 3. Trauma and Young Adult Literature: Representing adolescence and knowledge in David Small’s Stitches: A Memoir
• 4. “Indecent Exposure? Margaux Fragoso and the Limits of Abuse Memoir”
• 5. Potential: Ariel Schrag Contests (Hetero-)Normative Girlhood
• 6. Alice Pung’s Growing up Asian in Australia: The Cultural Work of Anthologized Asian-Australian Narratives of Childhood
• 7. “Reading Saved Me”: Writing Autobiographically About Transformative Reading Experiences in Childhood
• 8. Ante-Autobiography and the Archive of Childhood
• 9. Autobiography and Play: “A Conversation with My 12 Year Old Self”
• 10. “‘Who knows, will I ever see you again,’ said the one-eyed duck.” Reflections on a Soviet Childhood in Leelo Tungal’s Life Writing
• Index