Panel: New Terrains of Truth
Copanelists: Margaretta Jolly and Katherine Lindsay
My paper draws on my experience as writer, academic, and director of the Centre for Life Narratives at Kingston University (CLN). Taking examples from CLN’s successful reading and research seminars, I will argue that the act of bringing together academics and practioners to debate notions of truth-telling, ethical dilemma, representations of the self, and the like is not only challenging and frustrating—it is an act of translation in which something is gained as well as lost.
Virginia Woolf (and many writers before and since) saw both an intellectual and a linguistic difference between the self as articulated through the academy and the autobiographical self as told through the life story. In her most autobiographical novel, To The Lighthouse, for example, the father figure, Mr Ramsay, invites his student Charles Tansley to stay with his family on St Ives. Soon after arriving, Tansley confides the tale of his difficult childhood to Mrs. Ramsay. Later, as student and teacher talk, Mrs Ramsay overhears them, and, Woolf tells us, she “did not catch the meaning, only the words, here and there . . . dissertation . . . fellowship . . . readership . . . lectureship. . . . She could not follow the ugly academic jargon . . . but said to herself that she saw now why [Tansley] came out, instantly, with all that about his father and mother and brothers and sisters, and she would see to it that they didn’t laugh at him anymore” (22). Woolf envisioned this difference in discourse to be gendered and political, inscribed by historically static boundaries. In our own century, the divide may be differently drawn, but as “Biography,” “Autobiography,” and “Life Writing” become more widely accepted as areas of academic research, the linguistic distance between practitioner and researcher remains. By considering CLN’s example in light of Woolf’s academic/autobiographic split, I will ask—when writer and theorist share a classroom or an office, or indeed a funded research project—how can they talk to each other productively?
Meg Jensen is Director of the Centre for Life Narratives (CLN) at Kingston University, and a Senior Lecturer in English and Creative Writing. She received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College, her MA from New York University, and PhD from the University of London. She teaches a wide range of courses in the BA and MA programs in Creative Writing and Nineteenth and Twentieth Century English and American Literature, and is supervising three Creative Writing PhD students who are working on life stories. She publishes both creative writing and literary criticism, and in all of her writing and research, her focus is upon writers and writing: what writers read, to whom writers talk, what writers think, and how writers write. She developed the undergraduate field of Creative Writing at Kingston University in 2003, and the Master’s Programme in Creative Writing in 2004, and ran both for several years before establishing CLS. She has recently completed her second novel.