研究鲁迅五十年

我是以一本失败之作开始自己的学术生涯的。摸索了几十年,才逐渐走上正轨。如果说也有什么经验值得贡献给后来的同行,我想只有一点,就是我胆大。在完全不具备写作鲁迅传记的条件之时动手来写它。后来我看到了苏联作家格拉宁的《奇特的一生》,昆虫学家柳比歇夫的传记,里面有一句话给我留下了深刻的印象：“你比你感觉到的要能干得多。”你还不知道你有多么能干哩!一个人为什么要等到条件具备之后才开始去做,而不是在工作中去改善条件呢？     

南朝编年史述略

南朝时期是整个编年史发展进程中一个不可或缺的历史阶段。其时编年史作风起云涌,编年史体不断完善,编年史家的史学思想在承继前人基础上更趋丰富。诸如此者,不仅进一步巩固了编年与纪传二体角力争先、并行于世的格局,而且对后世史学的发展产生了深远的影响。     

回顾太行山抗日根据地的斗争历程

文章以自己的亲身经历,回顾了抗日战争时期八路军挺进太行山、太行山抗日根据地的创建和巩固以及太行山抗日根据地军民艰苦卓绝的战斗历程。     

翁同龢与实录圣训编纂

晚清实录、圣训纂修是清代实录馆常态化的工作。翁同龢在宣宗、文宗实录、圣训编纂中都发挥了一定的作用。特别在文宗实录、圣训编纂中,翁同龢以帮办总纂官、总校官的身份,全力从事实录编纂和恭阅圣训的工作,在实录、圣训的体例设计、史料征引、人事安排、实录编纂程式、赏叙机制等方面都有清晰、明确的记载,为我们进一步了解清代实录馆运行的实态提供了重要的史料。       

Recuerdos de Nuestro Pasado

Following is an interview with Erin Segal, group worker and coauthor of Recuerdos de Nuestro Pasado (Memories of our Past), a multivocal memoir about growing up in El Salvador and growing old in Washington DC, which emerged from a storytelling group at Mary’s Center’s Bernice Fonteneau Senior Wellness Center. The group members and coauthors are Angela Celaya, Sergio Guzmán, Jose Lovos, and Gloria Revelo. Using alternating English-language stanzas, the book expresses the life stories of four senior citizens and includes the images of their photographs and objects as well as illustrations by the book designer Julie Cho. Segal and Cho are cofounders of Thick Press. All profit from this book will go to St. Jude Children’s Hospital.     

Life-Stories and Storied Lives: Genre and Reports of Lived Experience in Gay Personal Literature

ABSTRACT

Personal literature may be written either as a life story such as an autobiography or memoir or as an autobiographical novel. Using the three volumes comprising the memoir of author Paul Monette and the three volumes comprising the autobiographical fiction trilogy of journalist and novelist Edmund White, this article explores the goal of each author for selecting a particular genre in which to write about lived experience. Each author enjoyed an elite education and came to adulthood in postwar America in the decade prior to the gay rights era beginning in the 1970s, and each writer participated in the sociosexual culture emerging over the succeeding decade. Each writer became HIV+ in the 1980s (Monette died of complications attending AIDS in 1995), and each writer experienced the loss of his lover to AIDS. While Monette and White each experienced the anti-gay prejudice of postwar American society, Monette's youth was less troubled than that of White who grew up in a complex family with a distant yet harsh father toward whom he was also sexually attracted. While Monette's goal in writing a memoir was that the suffering of his generation of gay men should be remembered, White's goal was more personal, choosing autobiographical fiction in his effort to overcome his feelings of shame about being gay founded on his desire for his father.     

Silence,Death, and D/discourse: Critical Literary Practices With Lesbian Seniors

This article reports on a federally funded research project in which old lesbians were invited to separate out and examine the complicated strands of lives lived through times of great social change—times in which notions of “woman,” “sexuality,” and “subjectivity” have been both over- and under-determined by dominant discourse (Stein, 1997). We argue, with Haug (1992), that close attention to the personal is central to critical feminist perspectives and that writers can become more aware of normalizing cultural influences when they pay close attention to language. In this article, we support our position with a case study of one participant in our “language school” (Haug, 1992). As we analyzed her written life narratives and oral testimony, we conclude that she was able to reconsider comfortable “coming out” narratives in order to construct new meaning and to challenge her understandings of the past.     

Representations of Jewish Childhood From 1950s Communist Romania in Memoirs by Women Émigré Authors to the United States

ABSTRACT

This article examines the memoirs of three Jewish women – Marianne Hirsch, Anca Vlasopolos, and Haya Leah Molnar – to understand how they remembered childhood in 1950s communist Bucharest. I first show how Marianne Hirsch’s part-memoir, part-critical book, Family Frames, uses her personal experiences to theorize tropes of transcultural dislocation as specific features of post-World War II Jewish children’s identities in 1950s Romania. I analyze how these tropes equally permeate the memoirs by two of her generation’s peers, Anca Vlasopolos and Haya Leah Molnar, highlighting how the two authors deploy them in their narratives. Overall, I show that writings of one’s 1950s childhood experiences in Bucharest by Jewish emigrées to the US offer new alternative discourses about facing the past and the present in Eastern Europe and the US by the tropes of initial transcultural, dislocating experiences at the start of their lives.     

Chick Non-Fic

This paper identifies a new variant of chick lit, a non-fiction variety derived from contemporary memoir that could be called “chick non-fic.” An emerging group of young women writers is capitalizing on the essential comedic nature of chick lit, but, rather than producing fictional texts, has taken the genre in the direction of creative non-fiction. Chelsea Handler, Tina Fey, Sarah Silverman, Samantha Bee, and Olivia Munn—all young(ish), female comedians with loyal fan followings—have each penned memoirs that adopt literary conventions of chick-lit novels and invoke the same post-feminist or third-wave feminist concerns. Their texts embroider on the established conventions of two genres—chick-lit fiction and the memoir—to produce a provocative new variant.     

Memoir and the Sociological Imagination1

This essay responds to Peter J. Stein’s 2019 memoir, A Boy’s Journey: From Nazi‐Occupied Prague to Freedom in America, and his December 2020 essay in The Forum, “Biography, Trauma, Holocaust, and the Sociological Eye” (Stein 2020). Underscoring the resonance between sociology and literature, I use Stein’s work as a springboard for identifying four parallels between memoir’s capacities and sociology’s: (1) capturing the role and weight of contingency in human life, (2) offering audiences a window onto worlds they cannot experience firsthand, (3) cultivating “humane sympathy” (Abbott 2007), especially by probing “meta‐feelings” (Pugh 2013), and (4) fueling the imagination.