Throughout my first year here at UBC, I’ve been invited into thinking about a variety of new and challenging concepts. Particularly in my ASTU course, something that I have learned and that has strongly resonated with me is the concept of framing. Framing, as defined by Jiwani and Young, is the process of “selecting and […]
In a globalizing world, racial and nationalistic identities are more frequently becoming compounded and dynamic. In this blog, I will be discussing a submission from, “The Race Card Project”, an archival site created by Michele Norris, in which invites Americans to add to the conversation about race and their experiences. I will be discussing this […]
Humans of New York (HONY) was initially Brandon Stanton’s photography project but eventually involved into much more. It is now an archival site that portrays mini biographies of people along the street in order to get a glimpse of the individualities of people within a larger group. By bringing the personal to the public, HONY […]
In Marjane’s Satrapi’s memoir, Persepolis, Satrapi stresses the issue of the invisibility of women in Iran during the Islamic Revolution in 1979. She stresses that despite whether women choose to rebel or conform to the Islamic Revolution, women in Iran are only seen by men under the two following categories, both of which erase their […]
Chimamanda Adichie’s TEDtalk, “The Danger of a Single Story” illuminates how telling one interpretation of a group of people over and over again contributes to the misunderstanding and generalization of a group of people. Adichie, an African woman, explains her experience of how the telling of the single story of African people from Western literature […]
Schaffer and Smith, the authors of “Conjuctions,” explain in the section “Other Sites of Narration,” that popular sources such as published life narratives may not the only useful source for addressing human rights issues (19). As they discuss in the previous section, the unpredictability of the reception of published life narratives can lead to both […]
Life narratives are tools that can be used to dig deeper to further understand the complexities of our society. In “Reading Autobiographies”, the authors, Smith and Watson suggest strategies to keep in mind while reading autobiographies in order to understand them more thoroughly (235). One strategy that I will be focusing on is looking at […]
A published life narrative is never bare; texts of autobiographies and memoirs are all wrapped in what Smith and Watson call a “paratextual surround” (99)—the “publication, reception and circulation” in which frames a text (99). The front cover is the first thing a potential reader sees; the way the text of a life narrative is […]
In the publishing of the book Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, many aspects of Anne’s diary were manipulated and altered for marketing purposes in America. The genre of a diary in literature is used to bring authenticity to the work. A diary by definition is “a book in which you write down […]