Naslov
The Place of Women's Autobiographical Heritage in Women's History

Autori
Ott Franolić, Marija

Vrsta, podvrsta i kategorija rada
Sažeci sa skupova, neobjavljeni rad, ostalo

Skup
Re-Thinking Humanities and Social Sciences

Mjesto i datum
Rijeka, Hrvatska, 06.09.2012. - 09.09.2012

Vrsta sudjelovanja
Predavanje

Vrsta recenzije
Nije recenziran

Ključne riječi
autobiograpy; feminism; history
(autobiography; feminism; history)

Sažetak
In order to understand women’s everyday lives in the past and compare them to the lives of women today, I explore women’s past lives from their autobiographical texts (autobiographies, letters, diaries etc.). Reading the manuscript diary of Croatian scientist and poet Divna Zečević (1937-2006), my aim was to reconstruct her everyday life and understand what it meant to be a woman outsider and a woman intellectual at the time. Instead in the construct of collective identities, nation states, feelings of belonging and common origin and heritage, I am interested in lessons we can learn from feelings and views of individual participants in our common heritage. No discourse can be viewed as completely reliable, but exploring and contextualizing of women’s discourses can reveal women’s place and significance in history and hopefully revise male models of truth. If we dismiss autobiographical texts as mere fictionalized forms, having nothing or little to do with the life of the author, we have denied ourselves the possibility of learning from the past, as well as regarding personal genres as historical documents, even if they are not completely reliable because of author’s subjectivity and/or instability as well as the fragmentation of memory. The questions I will try to address in this paper are the following – how women’s autobiographical texts help us understand the complex relationship between life and text – how much can they tell us about the real lives of women? To what extent were the texts fictionalized, by unreliable memory of authors, constraints of society or by the authors’ need to fictionalize, ‘reinvent’ themselves? And how much of real everyday life is present in the text?

Izvorni jezik
Engleski

POVEZANOST RADA