Poetry and Autobiography

Storytelling: Global Reflections on Narrative

“…The chapter discusses the poetry by Lithuanian émigrés, Danutė Paškevičiūtė and Alė Rūta along the lines of life writing as a diversified form of autobiography to show how their writing reflects on cultural, historical and rhetorical contexts that shaped their identity as exiles (Gill and Waters, 2009). One of the elements of the context that will be highlighted in the analysis is the responsibility assumed by Lithuanian writers in exile to write about the cultural identity of motherland where the traditional national values become endangered because of the foreign occupation.…”

“…It also refers to Peter Hühn and Jens Kiefer's analysis of poetry for narrativity and the treatment of time, in particular to discuss spatialisation and sequencing of time as a discursive ordering of experience, hence, self-definition. For the analysis of the intersection between poetry and autobiography, the discussion refers to feminist studies of autobiography (Gill and Waters, 2009;Gill, 2007), which question the limits of autobiography by seeking to bridge poetry and autobiography in regard to the concepts essential for both genres such as, to quote Jo Gill and Melanie Waters, "language, subjectivity, authenticity, reference and audience" (Gill and Waters, 2009, pp. 1-2).…”