Today: Up, shower,
breakfast, New Years call to sister, blog, professional membership renewal,
article editing (what I’m doing is reading through the article and checking to
see that I really do what I say am going to do) and as I read I am also seeing
where I need to add stuff, especially theory references or a reference to a
secondary source, lunch, on-line shopping, procrastinating & Foucault, dinner, “Our
Mutual Friend” (bbc), chores, blog and bed.
Tomorrow: more work on
article—I should work out, write reference letters.
Here's an abstract of the article (from which I will extract a presentation for the 2009 NEMLA in Boston). I'm probably going to change the title, since I'm not even sure I will use the snippet from Bettine that was its inspiration (she climbs up a tree and has deep thoughts)
Going out on a Limb:
Eccentric Self- Representation in
Bettine von Arnim’s Epistolary Memoirs
In her epistolary memoirs, 19th
Century German woman writer Bettine von Arnim created a fictional, aesthetic version of
herself that allowed her to reframe her own past, thereby allowing her greater control over her
identity in the present. By creatively re-writing and re-creating the world she
once inhabited, von Arnim not only constructed an alternative life but she also,
to paraphrase Helene Cixous’ “put
herself into the text—[…] by her own movement.” In this sense her first three published books
represent a specific form of textual
emancipation. As Walter Schmitz states: “Im Freiraum
der Bildung entwarf Bettine ein eigenes Wunschleben.”
In this paper I would like analyze how this
projection of a female Wunschleben constructs
subjectivity in general, as well as the individual subject of its main
protagonist. Recent work by Ulrike Landfester has established a clear
connection between von Arnim’s literary and social project and a Platonic
notion of self-care. (Selbstsorge) In
this presentation I would like to draw attention to motifs I see as
complementary to the notion of self-concern, namely those of self-revelation
and self-confession. ( Selbstenthüllung /
Selbstentblößung). Throughout her first three published works we see the
Bettine character both literally and metaphorically unveiling herself on
numerous occasions. Publicly “revealing”
herself through her writing can be understood as both an act of self-creation
and self-fashioning. By uncovering herself
in public through her writing, to what extent was she actually creating a new and different type of
public persona? And how can such self-revelatory moments be linked to a concept
of Romantic self-fashioning.
