Memoirs & Reflections

International Education Journal, 2007

Education has never been more challenging and pertinent than in today's global world. It is considered as one of the most important factors in the development of a nation (Cobb, Darling-Hammond, and Murangi, 1995). Therefore, the education and preparation of ...

Oxford Handbooks Online, 2017

Emerging out of the traditions of exemplary lives and self-analysis at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the genre of spiritual autobiography writing is fluid and unstable both textually and generically. The individualism that has often been taken to define the autobiographical project is problematized in these accounts, which tend to foreground self-transcendence over self-assertion, collective over individual identities, and exemplarity over uniqueness. The spiritual framework provides a language of self-narrative and self-analysis, structured around affliction and redemption, and privileging inward over outward experiences. As a mode which insists on the truth of experience, it allows marginal selves (including women and lower-class men) a public voice, above all in the gathered churches of the revolutionary decades and after, while also containing those voices within tight conventions. The simultaneous restrictions and liberations of these various frames offer important ...

Symbolic Interaction, 2019

The business of sociologists is reading books about books-internal debates on the value of this or that theory, ad infinitum. Bringing War to Book is about books too, but in a refreshingly different manner: the core of its data derives from interviews with former service personnel who have published memoirs of their experiences of war. Military memoirs provide a rich source of data for various fields (including international relations and political science-Chapter 2). Impressively, the authors draw out the sociological relevances of military memoirs in and of themselves, and as sociological data. Following recent papers (Durkin 2015; Mair et al. 2013), readers of Symbolic Interaction will be very interested in this book. A narrative review of the literature is an impressive and purposive opening, not an obligatory, or cursory, constituent of a project; instead it identifies, refines, and sets the terms of phenomena that will be considered. To their great credit, Woodward and Jenkings eschew analyzes that distance readers from the phenomena under discussion. The authors make myriad connections, illustrating a complex topic of study; their vivid, insightful commentaries upon aspects of military memoirs are located in their data. Bringing War to Book poses a number of questions about the genre-if military memoirs constitute a "genre," that is. Who better to ask than authors of military memoirs? While the authors reference Janice Radway's (1991) classic study Reading the Romance, Woodward and Jenkings take an avowedly, distinctively sociological approach, replete with interviewees' understandings of memorializing, writing, editing, publishing, collaboration with others-in various ways-in the production of a memoir, and the ethics of writing memoirs, to which memoirists were remarkably sensitive.

Consciousness, Literature and the Arts, 2002

Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research), 2023

Autobiography is a record of the life story of an individual. The writer describes various experiences which he has come across. The writer narrates his owns story and writes about himself/herself. Autobiography is based on the autobiographer's own life prior to the text and interpreted as such by both the author and the reader. The process of writing an autobiography also serves as a pretext for self-discovery for both the author and the reader as they read the material and reflect on their own experiences. Writing an autobiography entail rereading one's past, making self-aware and selective recognitions, and then modifying the past to reflect the present.

Arts et Savoirs, 2016

Prose Studies, 2013

2012

Tanzim Aziz, 2021

Memory was the repository that furnished me with this life writing and reviews of the past. However, the unprecedented pandemic COVID-19, forced a break in my regular schedule, giving me time to think and reflect on the past. Throughout my life, I wanted to discover myself. This thoughtful life writing is a mélange of significant incidents of my life that are inseparable, intertwined individually, and made this solitary voyage of life meaningful. Many people helped me to sculpt this journey smoothly. My deceased father, Abba occupies the memorabilia the most, maybe that’s human nature- we look for those who left us, we miss them or we cherish the warmth and values embedded by them in us. I admire Abba for believing in empowering his daughters, four of us. I came across plenty of people on this journey– family members, friends, relatives, teachers, and colleagues whose fond memories are preserved in the archive of my memory with love and tenderness. Some of them have left this world for eternity but I still feel their presence. As I had entered a new phase of life, the trousseau I brought to my new family fifteen years ago seemed insignificant. Through this expedition of life, I have been learning to treasure those characteristics that are immeasurable-quality time spent with family in the past, our trips which made us rediscover ourselves, and even knowing the known people from a new dimension!

The English Journal, 2010