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WR151: Narrating Identity (Spring 2023)

BU Library Guides

Research on Writing Identity

This guide is designed to help you find sources of background information, exhibitsarguments, and research methods related to the topic of the course and your own interests.

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Image: What would a writer do with this source? by Kristin M. Woodward/Kate L. Ganski is licensed under CC BY 4.0

Featured Resources

Arts & Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI)

Arts & Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI) accessed via Web of Science, provides comprehensive data on bibliographic and citation information. This database allows a researcher to identify which later articles have cited any particular earlier article, or have cited the articles of any particular author, or have been cited most frequently. Searches notable and significant journals across more than 25 disciplines. Date coverage: 1975 - present.

Narrative paths : African travel in modern fiction and nonfiction

[This book by] Kai Mikkonen argues that early twentieth-century European travel writing, journal keeping, and fiction converged and mutually influenced each other in ways that inform current debates about the fiction-nonfiction distinction. Turning to narratives set in sub-Saharan Africa, Mikkonen identifies five main dimensions of interplay between fiction and nonfiction: the experiential frame of the journey, the redefinition of the language and objective of description, the shared cultural givens and colonial notions concerning sub-Saharan Africa, the theme of narrativisation, and the issue of virtual genres. Narrative Paths reveals the important role that travel played as a frame in these modernist fictions as well as the crucial ways that nonfiction travel narratives appropriated fictional strategies. Narrative Paths contributes to debates in narratology and rhetorical narrative theory about the fiction-nonfiction distinction. With chapters on a wide range of modernist authors-from Pierre Loti, Andre; Gide, Michel Leiris, and Georges Simenon to Blaise Cendrars, Louis-Ferdinand Ce;line, Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, and Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen)-Mikkonen's study also contributes to postcolonial approaches to these authors, examining issues of representation, narrative voice, and authority in narratives about colonial Africa.

Available at Mugar Stacks   PN56.T7 M55 2015  

Girlhood = Bandes des Filles (2014)

 

Fed up with her abusive family situation, lack of school prospects and the "boys' law" in the neighborhood, Marieme starts a new life after meeting a group of three free-spirited girls. She changes her name, her style, drops out of school and starts stealing to be accepted into the gang. When her home situation becomes unbearable, Marieme seeks solace in an older man who promises her money and protection. Realizing this sort of lifestyle will never result in the freedom and independence she truly desires, she finally decides to take matters into her own hands.

Writing from Below : An online, open-access, peer-reviewed gender, sexuality and diversity studies journal

Broadly interdisciplinary in scope, we provide a forum for new and innovative research on gender and sexuality and the array of intersecting issues that shape their social expression. We invite submissions from as broad a range of disciplines as possible, as well as work that cannot be easily placed, in any style, genre, format, or medium. We welcome both traditional academic research as well as less conventional creative forms of research, and all things between. We welcome both academic and creative explorations (theory is art and art, theory, after all), and specifically encourage scholarly experimentation.

The Cambridge Companion to Narrative

In keeping with the overall purpose of the Cambridge Companion series, this book seeks to provide an accessible introduction to key ideas about narrative and an overview of major approaches to narrative inquiry. Further, like other Companions, the volume offers a variety of viewpoints on the field rather than an outline or summarization by a single commentator. By registering multiple perspectives on the study of stories, the book not only furnishes a synoptic account of this area of investigation but also constitutes in its own right a unique contribution to the scholarship on narrative. Hence, although it is like other Cambridge Companions targeted at student readers who need a reliable, comprehensive guide – a point of entrance into a complex field of study, as well as a basis for further research – the volume also aims to be a helpful tool for more advanced scholars needing a convenient, affordable, and up-to-date treatment of foundational terms, concepts, and approaches.