Mary Besemeres
Biographic Data
| ID | 1081245 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Mary Besemeres |
| GIVEN NAMES | Mary |
| FAMILY NAME | Besemeres |
| SIGNATURE | BESEMERES M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Australian National University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 15 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 10 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 15 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1998 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Transcultural Perspectives in Journalist Memoirs of Growing Up with Non-Anglo Migrant Parents
This article focuses on memoirs by three Australian journalists, each of whom was born to European parents from a non-native-English-speaking background: Elisabeth Wynhausen’s Manly Girls (1989), Tom Dusevic’s Whole Wild World (2016) and James Jeffrey’s My Family and Other Animus (2018). I also discuss Jeffrey’s Paprika Paradise (2007), an earlier memoir of travelling in his mother’s homeland of Hungary with his northern English father. The artic…
Listening to the Grandmother Tongue
In Transcultural Identities in Contemporary Literature, Irene Gilsenan Nordin et al. make an important and still often unrecognized point: "imaginative literature offers a powerful means of exploring transcultural experience and grappling with the challenges it poses to individuals and societies alike" (x). Arguably, writers who explore transcultural experience through reflective memoir offer particularly valuable takes on the challenges it poses
Remembering David Parker (1943-2015)
Remembering David Parker (1943–2015) Mary Besemeres (bio), John Eakin (bio), and Richard Freadman (bio) remembering david - mary besemeres Click for larger view View full resolution Photo courtesy of Helen Parker. My earliest memory of David Parker is of a lecture he gave in 1990, my first year at the Australian National University, on English poet Edward Thomas’s four-stanza poem “Adlestrop.” The poem is about being made to stop and listen, deep…
Mixed Mother Tongues
Childhood involves entering “a stage which we did not design” and playing “subordinate parts in the dramas of others” (in the words of philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre). What happens when the script of the “drama” a child is born into is spoken in more than one language—when the main players, one’s parents, come from different, even mutually hostile speech communities? While mixed race memoir is an increasingly recognized field, memoirs of mixed mo…
Translingual arts
Poles Apart? Two Polish Australian Women Poets, Krystyna Wanda Jackiewicz and Liliana Rydzyńska
Krystyna Wanda Jackiewicz (1920–1977) and Liliana Rydzyńska (1938–2005) were two Polish-born women poets who emigrated to Australia in the postwar period, Jackiewicz as a ‘Displaced Person’ arriving from India in 1947, Rydzyńska choosing to move here from France in 1969. Their poems could not be more different. Rydzyńska's apparently autobiographical poetry represents Australians as severely emotionally repressed, and her move to Australia as ‘on…
The Ethnographic Work of Cross-Cultural Memoir
(2010). The Ethnographic Work of Cross-Cultural Memoir. a/b: Auto/Biography Studies: Vol. 25, The Work of Life Writing, pp. 219-230
Anglos Abroad
This paper compares recent narratives of immersion in a foreign language and culture by authors from Australia, Britain, and the United States. These writers occupy an ambiguous position at a time when English has acquired the status of a global language. In one sense, they are representatives of the dominant language and culture of contemporary experience. Yet in another, they can be seen as part of a wider resistance to the ascendancy of Englis…
The Family in Exile, Between Languages
(2004). The Family in Exile, Between Languages: Eva Hoffman's Lost in Translation; Lisa Appignanesi's Losing the Dead, Anca Vlasopolos's No Return Address. a/b: Auto/Biography Studies: Vol. 19, Life Writing and the Generations, pp. 239-248
Different Languages, Different Emotions? Perspectives from Autobiographical Literature
Bilingual life writing offers a rare insight into the relationship between languages and emotions. This article explores ways in which some striking contemporary memoirs and novels of bilingual experience approach questions of cultural difference in emotion. The texts considered include memoirs by Eva Hoffman and Tim Parks, autobiographical fiction by Lilian Ng and Nino Ricci, and personal essays by Stanisław Baranczak and Zhengdao Ye. I focus on…
The meaning of the particle lah in Singapore English
In this paper we try to crack one of the hardest and most intriguing chestnuts in the field of cross-cultural pragmatics and to identify the meaning of the celebrated Singaporean particle lah — the hallmark of Singapore English. In pursuing this goal, we investigate the use of lah and seek to identify its meaning by trying to find a paraphrase in ordinary language which would be substitutable for lah in any context. In doing so, we try to enter t…
JAS review of books
Penelope Hetherington, Settlers, Servants and Slaves: Aboriginal and European Children in Nineteenth‐Century Western Australia, University of Western Australia Press, 2002, pp 256, pb $34.95, ISBN 1876268735. B W Higman, Domestic Service in Australia, Melbourne University Press, 2002, pp 304, hb $49.95, ISBN 0522850111. Robert Jordan, The Convict Theatres of Early Australia 1788–1840, Currency Press, 2002, pp 366, hb $49.95, ISBN 0958121303. Mimi…
Immigrant irony and embarrassment
(2001). Immigrant irony and embarrassment: Andrew Riemer's the habsburg cafe. Journal of Australian Studies: Vol. 25, Fresh Cuts: New Talents 2001, pp. 109-117
Self-translation in Vladimir Nabokov's Pnin
Language and Self in Cross-Cultural Autobiography
scale of the problem of emigrating into a new linguistic environment is suggested with particular subtlety and force by the title of the Polish-Canadian1 author Eva Hoffman's autobiography: in Translation: A Life in a New Language (1989). second half of the title answers the question implicitly posed by the first: it is the immigrant's whole life before emigration that is imagined as in translation, by analogy with the meaning of a literary text.…
Language and Self in Cross-Cultural Autobiography
scale of the problem of emigrating into a new linguistic environment is suggested with particular subtlety and force by the title of the Polish-Canadian1 author Eva Hoffman's autobiography: in Translation: A Life in a New Language (1989). second half of the title answers the question implicitly posed by the first: it is the immigrant's whole life before emigration that is imagined as in translation, by analogy with the meaning of a literary text.…
Self-translation in Vladimir Nabokov's Pnin
Different Languages, Different Emotions? Perspectives from Autobiographical Literature
Bilingual life writing offers a rare insight into the relationship between languages and emotions. This article explores ways in which some striking contemporary memoirs and novels of bilingual experience approach questions of cultural difference in emotion. The texts considered include memoirs by Eva Hoffman and Tim Parks, autobiographical fiction by Lilian Ng and Nino Ricci, and personal essays by Stanisław Baranczak and Zhengdao Ye. I focus on…
The Ethnographic Work of Cross-Cultural Memoir
(2010). The Ethnographic Work of Cross-Cultural Memoir. a/b: Auto/Biography Studies: Vol. 25, The Work of Life Writing, pp. 219-230
Language and Self in Cross-Cultural Autobiography
scale of the problem of emigrating into a new linguistic environment is suggested with particular subtlety and force by the title of the Polish-Canadian1 author Eva Hoffman's autobiography: in Translation: A Life in a New Language (1989). second half of the title answers the question implicitly posed by the first: it is the immigrant's whole life before emigration that is imagined as in translation, by analogy with the meaning of a literary text.…
Self-translation in Vladimir Nabokov's Pnin
Immigrant irony and embarrassment
(2001). Immigrant irony and embarrassment: Andrew Riemer's the habsburg cafe. Journal of Australian Studies: Vol. 25, Fresh Cuts: New Talents 2001, pp. 109-117
The meaning of the particle lah in Singapore English
In this paper we try to crack one of the hardest and most intriguing chestnuts in the field of cross-cultural pragmatics and to identify the meaning of the celebrated Singaporean particle lah — the hallmark of Singapore English. In pursuing this goal, we investigate the use of lah and seek to identify its meaning by trying to find a paraphrase in ordinary language which would be substitutable for lah in any context. In doing so, we try to enter t…
JAS review of books
Penelope Hetherington, Settlers, Servants and Slaves: Aboriginal and European Children in Nineteenth‐Century Western Australia, University of Western Australia Press, 2002, pp 256, pb $34.95, ISBN 1876268735. B W Higman, Domestic Service in Australia, Melbourne University Press, 2002, pp 304, hb $49.95, ISBN 0522850111. Robert Jordan, The Convict Theatres of Early Australia 1788–1840, Currency Press, 2002, pp 366, hb $49.95, ISBN 0958121303. Mimi…
The Family in Exile, Between Languages
(2004). The Family in Exile, Between Languages: Eva Hoffman's Lost in Translation; Lisa Appignanesi's Losing the Dead, Anca Vlasopolos's No Return Address. a/b: Auto/Biography Studies: Vol. 19, Life Writing and the Generations, pp. 239-248
Different Languages, Different Emotions? Perspectives from Autobiographical Literature
Bilingual life writing offers a rare insight into the relationship between languages and emotions. This article explores ways in which some striking contemporary memoirs and novels of bilingual experience approach questions of cultural difference in emotion. The texts considered include memoirs by Eva Hoffman and Tim Parks, autobiographical fiction by Lilian Ng and Nino Ricci, and personal essays by Stanisław Baranczak and Zhengdao Ye. I focus on…
Anglos Abroad
This paper compares recent narratives of immersion in a foreign language and culture by authors from Australia, Britain, and the United States. These writers occupy an ambiguous position at a time when English has acquired the status of a global language. In one sense, they are representatives of the dominant language and culture of contemporary experience. Yet in another, they can be seen as part of a wider resistance to the ascendancy of Englis…
The Ethnographic Work of Cross-Cultural Memoir
(2010). The Ethnographic Work of Cross-Cultural Memoir. a/b: Auto/Biography Studies: Vol. 25, The Work of Life Writing, pp. 219-230
Translingual arts
Poles Apart? Two Polish Australian Women Poets, Krystyna Wanda Jackiewicz and Liliana Rydzyńska
Krystyna Wanda Jackiewicz (1920–1977) and Liliana Rydzyńska (1938–2005) were two Polish-born women poets who emigrated to Australia in the postwar period, Jackiewicz as a ‘Displaced Person’ arriving from India in 1947, Rydzyńska choosing to move here from France in 1969. Their poems could not be more different. Rydzyńska's apparently autobiographical poetry represents Australians as severely emotionally repressed, and her move to Australia as ‘on…
Mixed Mother Tongues
Childhood involves entering “a stage which we did not design” and playing “subordinate parts in the dramas of others” (in the words of philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre). What happens when the script of the “drama” a child is born into is spoken in more than one language—when the main players, one’s parents, come from different, even mutually hostile speech communities? While mixed race memoir is an increasingly recognized field, memoirs of mixed mo…
Remembering David Parker (1943-2015)
Remembering David Parker (1943–2015) Mary Besemeres (bio), John Eakin (bio), and Richard Freadman (bio) remembering david - mary besemeres Click for larger view View full resolution Photo courtesy of Helen Parker. My earliest memory of David Parker is of a lecture he gave in 1990, my first year at the Australian National University, on English poet Edward Thomas’s four-stanza poem “Adlestrop.” The poem is about being made to stop and listen, deep…
Listening to the Grandmother Tongue
In Transcultural Identities in Contemporary Literature, Irene Gilsenan Nordin et al. make an important and still often unrecognized point: "imaginative literature offers a powerful means of exploring transcultural experience and grappling with the challenges it poses to individuals and societies alike" (x). Arguably, writers who explore transcultural experience through reflective memoir offer particularly valuable takes on the challenges it poses
Transcultural Perspectives in Journalist Memoirs of Growing Up with Non-Anglo Migrant Parents
This article focuses on memoirs by three Australian journalists, each of whom was born to European parents from a non-native-English-speaking background: Elisabeth Wynhausen’s Manly Girls (1989), Tom Dusevic’s Whole Wild World (2016) and James Jeffrey’s My Family and Other Animus (2018). I also discuss Jeffrey’s Paprika Paradise (2007), an earlier memoir of travelling in his mother’s homeland of Hungary with his northern English father. The artic…
Art (10 works) · Philosophy (10 works) · Psychology (10 works) · Sociology (10 works) · Linguistics (9 works) · Literature (8 works) · History (7 works) · Art history (6 works) · Memoir (6 works) · Philosophy (6 works)