Julie Rak
Biographic Data
| ID | 3652254 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Julie Rak |
| GIVEN NAMES | Julie |
| FAMILY NAME | Rak |
| SIGNATURE | RAK J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Alberta |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8470-3202 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 26 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 32 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Larger than Life
.
Radical Connections
Kate Beaton's Ducks
Life-Writing Research beyond “The Black Hole” Effect
Because It Is There? Mount Everest, Masculinity, and the Body of George Mallory
When George Mallory was asked in 1923 by an unnamed reporter in Philadelphia why he wanted to climb Mount Everest, he answered simply and perhaps with no little irritation, ‘”because it is there,”’ a phrase that made him famous. Mallory is still revered by climbers as the shining example of early climbing ability and values, and so the mystery of what really happened to him and climbing partner high on the northern route to the summit endures. Wh…
Unfixing the Prefix in Life-Writing Studies
Recently, trans has taken on a number of important theoretical and critical meanings inside and outside the academy. It is a prefix that conveys the send of “across, through, over, to or on the oth
Academic Freedom, Academic Lives
Academic freedom is currently highly public and highly contested terrain. What academic freedom actually means has become an urgent question, as alt-right activists have turned the tenets of academic freedom to their own ends, whether on college and university campuses, or through the actions of right-wing governments as they move to suppress dissent. We want to reclaim the concept of academic freedom for the left and for academic activism, not t…
Marlene Kadar’s Life Writing
In 1992, as part of her landmark collection Essays on Life Writing: From Genre to Critical \nPractice, Marlene Kadar published the essay "Whose Life Is It Anyway? Out of the Bathtub \nand Into the Narrative." When taken with her introduction to the volume, Kadar created what \nshould be a touchstone for everyone working in the field of life writing today. Kadar was the \nfirst critic to frame life writing as a way to name a genre and a critical p…
Radical Connections
Genealogy research is a type of excavation, as practitioners piece together stories of origin of millions of unknown, small lives. As the work of genealogy becomes monetized as big data, it is vital to consider genealogy's radical potential as a kinship practice, and its relationship to ideas about DNA
Derailment
Moments of disorientation are indeed vital. They are bodily experiences that throw the world up, by throwing the body off its line.—Sara Ahmed, FeministKilljoys.comWhat is next in the study of auto
Teaching Life Writing
If you have been teaching life writing in a literary-studies program for as long as I have (eighteen years), you might have had your share of failures, or at least of “teachable moments” when you s
Introduction
The essays in this special issue engage with a range of issues relating to Auto/Biography in Transit, the title of the 2014 International Auto/Biography Association (IABA) conference held in Banff, from which the issue emerged. The essays have been divided into two areas of inquiry: Documents and Displacements. Those in the first section address the status of the document as a technology of the self, or think about how cultural producers document…
Life Writing Versus Automedia
Online environments are rapidly changing our understanding of what it means to construct a life story and what identity itself might come to mean in virtual worlds. This essay poses a direct challenge to the field of life writing by asking us to rethink "life" and "writing" as automedia
Identity Technologies
Burdens of Proof
Susanna Egan . Burdens of Proof: Faith, Doubt, and Identity in Autobiography . Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2011. 210 pages, ISBN 9781554583331 Reviewed by: Julie Rak I became intere
Compelling Confessions
Reviewed by: Compelling Confessions: The Politics of Personal Disclosure Julie Rak (bio) Suzanne Diamond, ed. Compelling Confessions: The Politics of Personal Disclosure. Lanham, MD: Fairleigh Dickinson UP/Rowman and Littlefield, 2011. 230 pp. ISBN 978-1611470420, $65.00. Confessional discourse is an important aspect of auto/biography and life writing studies, but there is much work that remains to be done on the idea of personal disclosure in wr…
Insecure Citizenship
This article links Michael Ignatieff's need to write memoir to his desire to explore what family, public service, and citizenship can mean when they are thought together. Ignatieff does not yet use memoir as most politicians do, to recall what public life was like or to set records straight. He writes as part of a process of self-invention and reinvention. In the process, the concepts of citizenship and national belonging move too, from a positio…
Introduction
The Electric Self
If we think of virtual worlds as having additional "language" and customs which their participants adopt, it is possible to think of virtual worlds as spaces where identity can be translated from the physical world to the virtual, resulting in a self which occupies a rhetorical third space, where virtual identities have real effects, and real identities operate virtually. This combination of the real and the virtual, and its position as a space o…
Mountain Masculinity
Fifth Avenue Pilgrims Amid the GoatsThis account, written as a letter from "Tex" to a friend, draws a clear line between real hunters and outdoorsmen who might smoke and be thin as a rail, but who can walk up and down mountains all day, and university graduates from fancy schools with degrees and athletic achievements but no sense of outdoorsmanship.Authenticity, class, education, masculinity, and bodies all matter very much here.Tex strongly ide…
Pop Life
This collection of essays deals with an important form of representation in American culture today: popular auto/biography. Popular auto/biographical discourse appears in a dizzying array of forms in North America, including personal documentaries, graphic books, song lyrics, personal zines, and celebrity memoirs. It is worth considering that, during a time when it is becoming hard for the general public to trust political and spiritual leaders, …
Bio-Power
In a section of Imagined Communities Benedict Anderson presents biography as part of the documentation of identity that is based on a forgetting and then repetition of origins that cannot be remembered. The nation itself is a narrative made of the collection of individual stories. Anderson's image of biography as the site of a forgetting and as the means of national suturing is an excellent way to examine how the genre of biography works as a soc…
The Digital Queer
Blogs have become a popular internet phenomenon. Rather than look at blogs as online diaries, I discuss them as sites for a developing generic practice that is connected to the idea of the internet as potentially non-corporate and democratic. In this context, what might "queer blogging" be, and why do queer bloggers constantly appeal to experience and evidence as the guarantee of reality online
Popular Memoir and the Roots of Citizenship
(2004). Popular Memoir and the Roots of Citizenship: Rousseau, Mountaineering, Autobiography. a/b: Auto/Biography Studies: Vol. 19, Life Writing and the Generations, pp. 10-18
Sergej Tolstoy and the Doukhobors
Identity Technologies
The Digital Queer
Blogs have become a popular internet phenomenon. Rather than look at blogs as online diaries, I discuss them as sites for a developing generic practice that is connected to the idea of the internet as potentially non-corporate and democratic. In this context, what might "queer blogging" be, and why do queer bloggers constantly appeal to experience and evidence as the guarantee of reality online
Insecure Citizenship
This article links Michael Ignatieff's need to write memoir to his desire to explore what family, public service, and citizenship can mean when they are thought together. Ignatieff does not yet use memoir as most politicians do, to recall what public life was like or to set records straight. He writes as part of a process of self-invention and reinvention. In the process, the concepts of citizenship and national belonging move too, from a positio…
Marlene Kadar’s Life Writing
In 1992, as part of her landmark collection Essays on Life Writing: From Genre to Critical \nPractice, Marlene Kadar published the essay "Whose Life Is It Anyway? Out of the Bathtub \nand Into the Narrative." When taken with her introduction to the volume, Kadar created what \nshould be a touchstone for everyone working in the field of life writing today. Kadar was the \nfirst critic to frame life writing as a way to name a genre and a critical p…
Radical Connections
Genealogy research is a type of excavation, as practitioners piece together stories of origin of millions of unknown, small lives. As the work of genealogy becomes monetized as big data, it is vital to consider genealogy's radical potential as a kinship practice, and its relationship to ideas about DNA
Derailment
Moments of disorientation are indeed vital. They are bodily experiences that throw the world up, by throwing the body off its line.—Sara Ahmed, FeministKilljoys.comWhat is next in the study of auto
Pop Life
This collection of essays deals with an important form of representation in American culture today: popular auto/biography. Popular auto/biographical discourse appears in a dizzying array of forms in North America, including personal documentaries, graphic books, song lyrics, personal zines, and celebrity memoirs. It is worth considering that, during a time when it is becoming hard for the general public to trust political and spiritual leaders, …
Unfixing the Prefix in Life-Writing Studies
Recently, trans has taken on a number of important theoretical and critical meanings inside and outside the academy. It is a prefix that conveys the send of “across, through, over, to or on the oth
Teaching Life Writing
If you have been teaching life writing in a literary-studies program for as long as I have (eighteen years), you might have had your share of failures, or at least of “teachable moments” when you s
Life Writing Versus Automedia
Online environments are rapidly changing our understanding of what it means to construct a life story and what identity itself might come to mean in virtual worlds. This essay poses a direct challenge to the field of life writing by asking us to rethink "life" and "writing" as automedia
Introduction
Bio-Power
In a section of Imagined Communities Benedict Anderson presents biography as part of the documentation of identity that is based on a forgetting and then repetition of origins that cannot be remembered. The nation itself is a narrative made of the collection of individual stories. Anderson's image of biography as the site of a forgetting and as the means of national suturing is an excellent way to examine how the genre of biography works as a soc…
Popular Memoir and the Roots of Citizenship
(2004). Popular Memoir and the Roots of Citizenship: Rousseau, Mountaineering, Autobiography. a/b: Auto/Biography Studies: Vol. 19, Life Writing and the Generations, pp. 10-18
Sergej Tolstoy and the Doukhobors
Doukhobor Autobiography as Witness Narrative
For many writers who belong to minority groups, autobiography has come to operate as a field where issues about ethnic identity, group memory, and minority subjectivity can be addressed. Anne E. Goldman's call in Take My Word "for a wider autobiographical field" that can "describe a wider spectrum of the ways and means by which people in the twentieth century speak themselves into existence" (ix) recognizes how this mixing of autobiographical for…
Popular Memoir and the Roots of Citizenship
(2004). Popular Memoir and the Roots of Citizenship: Rousseau, Mountaineering, Autobiography. a/b: Auto/Biography Studies: Vol. 19, Life Writing and the Generations, pp. 10-18
Bio-Power
In a section of Imagined Communities Benedict Anderson presents biography as part of the documentation of identity that is based on a forgetting and then repetition of origins that cannot be remembered. The nation itself is a narrative made of the collection of individual stories. Anderson's image of biography as the site of a forgetting and as the means of national suturing is an excellent way to examine how the genre of biography works as a soc…
The Digital Queer
Blogs have become a popular internet phenomenon. Rather than look at blogs as online diaries, I discuss them as sites for a developing generic practice that is connected to the idea of the internet as potentially non-corporate and democratic. In this context, what might "queer blogging" be, and why do queer bloggers constantly appeal to experience and evidence as the guarantee of reality online
Mountain Masculinity
Fifth Avenue Pilgrims Amid the GoatsThis account, written as a letter from "Tex" to a friend, draws a clear line between real hunters and outdoorsmen who might smoke and be thin as a rail, but who can walk up and down mountains all day, and university graduates from fancy schools with degrees and athletic achievements but no sense of outdoorsmanship.Authenticity, class, education, masculinity, and bodies all matter very much here.Tex strongly ide…
Pop Life
This collection of essays deals with an important form of representation in American culture today: popular auto/biography. Popular auto/biographical discourse appears in a dizzying array of forms in North America, including personal documentaries, graphic books, song lyrics, personal zines, and celebrity memoirs. It is worth considering that, during a time when it is becoming hard for the general public to trust political and spiritual leaders, …
Introduction
The Electric Self
If we think of virtual worlds as having additional "language" and customs which their participants adopt, it is possible to think of virtual worlds as spaces where identity can be translated from the physical world to the virtual, resulting in a self which occupies a rhetorical third space, where virtual identities have real effects, and real identities operate virtually. This combination of the real and the virtual, and its position as a space o…
Insecure Citizenship
This article links Michael Ignatieff's need to write memoir to his desire to explore what family, public service, and citizenship can mean when they are thought together. Ignatieff does not yet use memoir as most politicians do, to recall what public life was like or to set records straight. He writes as part of a process of self-invention and reinvention. In the process, the concepts of citizenship and national belonging move too, from a positio…
Compelling Confessions
Reviewed by: Compelling Confessions: The Politics of Personal Disclosure Julie Rak (bio) Suzanne Diamond, ed. Compelling Confessions: The Politics of Personal Disclosure. Lanham, MD: Fairleigh Dickinson UP/Rowman and Littlefield, 2011. 230 pp. ISBN 978-1611470420, $65.00. Confessional discourse is an important aspect of auto/biography and life writing studies, but there is much work that remains to be done on the idea of personal disclosure in wr…
Burdens of Proof
Susanna Egan . Burdens of Proof: Faith, Doubt, and Identity in Autobiography . Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2011. 210 pages, ISBN 9781554583331 Reviewed by: Julie Rak I became intere
Identity Technologies
Introduction
The essays in this special issue engage with a range of issues relating to Auto/Biography in Transit, the title of the 2014 International Auto/Biography Association (IABA) conference held in Banff, from which the issue emerged. The essays have been divided into two areas of inquiry: Documents and Displacements. Those in the first section address the status of the document as a technology of the self, or think about how cultural producers document…
Life Writing Versus Automedia
Online environments are rapidly changing our understanding of what it means to construct a life story and what identity itself might come to mean in virtual worlds. This essay poses a direct challenge to the field of life writing by asking us to rethink "life" and "writing" as automedia
Teaching Life Writing
If you have been teaching life writing in a literary-studies program for as long as I have (eighteen years), you might have had your share of failures, or at least of “teachable moments” when you s
Radical Connections
Genealogy research is a type of excavation, as practitioners piece together stories of origin of millions of unknown, small lives. As the work of genealogy becomes monetized as big data, it is vital to consider genealogy's radical potential as a kinship practice, and its relationship to ideas about DNA
Derailment
Moments of disorientation are indeed vital. They are bodily experiences that throw the world up, by throwing the body off its line.—Sara Ahmed, FeministKilljoys.comWhat is next in the study of auto
Marlene Kadar’s Life Writing
In 1992, as part of her landmark collection Essays on Life Writing: From Genre to Critical \nPractice, Marlene Kadar published the essay "Whose Life Is It Anyway? Out of the Bathtub \nand Into the Narrative." When taken with her introduction to the volume, Kadar created what \nshould be a touchstone for everyone working in the field of life writing today. Kadar was the \nfirst critic to frame life writing as a way to name a genre and a critical p…
Unfixing the Prefix in Life-Writing Studies
Recently, trans has taken on a number of important theoretical and critical meanings inside and outside the academy. It is a prefix that conveys the send of “across, through, over, to or on the oth
Academic Freedom, Academic Lives
Academic freedom is currently highly public and highly contested terrain. What academic freedom actually means has become an urgent question, as alt-right activists have turned the tenets of academic freedom to their own ends, whether on college and university campuses, or through the actions of right-wing governments as they move to suppress dissent. We want to reclaim the concept of academic freedom for the left and for academic activism, not t…
Because It Is There? Mount Everest, Masculinity, and the Body of George Mallory
When George Mallory was asked in 1923 by an unnamed reporter in Philadelphia why he wanted to climb Mount Everest, he answered simply and perhaps with no little irritation, ‘”because it is there,”’ a phrase that made him famous. Mallory is still revered by climbers as the shining example of early climbing ability and values, and so the mystery of what really happened to him and climbing partner high on the northern route to the summit endures. Wh…
Life-Writing Research beyond “The Black Hole” Effect
Kate Beaton's Ducks
Larger than Life
.
Sociology (14 works) · History (13 works) · Art (12 works) · Literature (9 works) · Political science (9 works) · Law (8 works) · History (7 works) · Media studies (7 works) · Philosophy (7 works) · Autobiographical and Biographical Writing (6 works)