The argument has been made that memoir reflects and augments the narcissistic tendencies of our neo-liberal age. Mediating Memory: Tracing the Limits of Memoir challenges and dismantles that assumption. Focusing on the history, theory and practice of memoir writing, editors Bunty Avieson, Fiona Giles and Sue Joseph provide a thorough and cutting-edge examination of memoir through the lenses of ethics, practice and innovation. By investigating memoir across cultural boundaries, in its various guises, and tracing its limits, the editors convincingly demonstrate the plurality of ways in which memoir is helping us make sense of who we are, who we were and the influences that shape us along the way.
Table of Contents:
Introduction
Bunty Avieson, Fiona Giles and Sue Joseph
Section One: Craft
Chapter1. Memory’s fracture: Instability in the contemporary memoir
Marie O’Rourke
Chapter2. Teaching memoir in neoliberal times
Megan Brown
Chapter 3. The ghost in the memoir machine: Exploring the relationship between ghost-written memoir and biography
Matthew Ricketson
Chapter 4. Re-presenting madness in the form of a quadrilogue
Simon Clarke
Section Two: Boundaries
Chapter 5. The other-directed memoir: Victim impact statements and the aesthetics of change
Fiona Giles
Chapter 6. After he shot Arthur Calwell: Peter Kocan’s use of the second person
Tony Davis
Chapter 7. Memoir for your ears: the podcast life
Siobhan McHugh
Chapter 8. The "I" and the "Eye": Mediated perspective in the documemoir
Kathleen Waites
Section Three: Sites
Chapter 9. Eco-Memoir: Protecting, Restoring and Repairing Memory and Environment Jessica White
Chapter 10. "Stories": Social media and ephemeral narratives as memoir
Kylie Cardell, Kate Douglas and Emma Maguire
Chapter 11. Memoir 2.0: the writing of the self as brand
Georgiana Toma
Chapter 12. Travel Memoir and Australia: From Twain to Tracks and the Present Day
Ben Stubbs
Section Four: Bloodlines
Chapter 13. Holding the memories: death, success and the ethics of memoir
Bunty Avieson
Chapter 14. First-person narratives and feminism: tracing the maternal DNA
Kath Kenny
Chapter 15. To begin to know: resolving ethical tensions in David Leser’s patriographical work
Sue Joseph and Carolyn Rickett
Chapter 16. The epistolary thread as collaborative writing in grief memoir
Freya Latona
Section Five: Recuperation
Chapter 17. Happy, funny and humane: South African childhood narratives which challenge the "single story" of apartheid
Anthea Garman
Chapter 18. Redressing the silence: Racism, trauma and Aboriginal women’s life writing
Willa McDonald
Chapter 19. Lest we forget: mateship, masculinity, and Australian identity
Jack Bowers
Chapter 20. Bridges across broken time: Armenian "minor-memoirs" of the turn of the 21st century
Gülbin Kıranoğlu
Notes on Contributors
Index
