Preliminary Programme

The time spent in the compulsory army service is one remembered with conflicting feelings for the majority of the male population in Romania. This research focuses on the oral history narratives of the Roma male and tries to outline the specifics of his experience as compared with those of the Romanian soldiers. In order to obtain relevant data, the field research was planned to cover the experiences of both Roma and Romanian former soldiers, the main part of the interviewing process being concentrated on Roma male subjects and their experience in the military service. The target group of the oral history research is constituted by Roma/Romanian males with ages between 35-70 years who served in the military. Another categorization of the target group can be made if we consider the period in which those served, resulting a bigger group who was under arms during the communist era, and a much smaller one who served after the fall of the communist regime, until the abrogation of the compulsory army service in 2007.
The core of the research is represented by the quantity and accuracy of the memories associated with the time spent in the military service. For the majority of the Roma male population targeted by our research, this was an unique experience, which made them leave their families and community, forcing them to live together with other Romanian or Hungarian males for a long period of time. Thus, the other becomes the commanding officer or non-commissioned officer, platoon comrade, the fellow from the neighbouring bed, the one with whom good and bad are shared during the 12 months of the service. Our research is also touching the topic of gender identity, the main focus of which is on the image construction of the otherness based on ethnic criteria. In order to obtain this kind of "mirror image", we intend to focus both on the image of the Romanian reflected in the narratives of the Roma ethnic, and the image of the Roma male in the narratives of the Romanian former military servicemen. (Show less)

Ruth Slate (1884-1953) was a third-generation member of the British lower-middle-class. In some ways, hers may be considered an ”exceptional typical” life course. Leaving school at 13, she was one of the first generation of ”white blouse” clerical workers, entering the labour force as this occupational category was growing rapidly. After twenty years of repeated and strenuous efforts to extend her education, she was able to attend university, obtain a diploma in social work, and (during the First World War) join the first generation of professional social workers. The anti-feminist backlash of the 1920s, however, saw these new career opportunities cut back.
She was exceptional in that she compiled a substantial archive of personal papers, now in the Women's Library (currently at the London School of Economics). The core of this archive are three boxes containing her diaries (1897-1916), and the correspondence exchanged with her close friend (and fellow clerical worker) Eva Slawson (between 1903 and 1916).
Eva recorded that a friend ”often wondered if our lives would ever be written about in a book, and how interesting they would be.” My paper will explore some of the ways Slate’s writings (with the help of the wider contents of her archive) may be analysed and interpreted. Her life course can be traced, and situated in a series of wider contexts (lower-middle-class suburban London; self-education; Free Methodism, Quakerism and the New Theology movement; female networks; early 20th-century socialism and feminism). Her writings reveal her struggle to articulate and express her desires and aims, the constraints she variously accepted and fought against, her developing understanding of gender, her responses to and participation in the rapid social changes of the Edwardian era and the War. (Show less)

During the past fifteen years, a wealth of archival and printed material produced by unschooled common people – farmers, crofters, cottagers, rural craftsmen, church wardens, farm hands and even beggars – have been unearthed and brought to the attention of research in Finland. This heterogeneous material comprises various forms of life writing: memoirs, diaries, autobiographical poems, among others.
My paper focuses on the role of introspection in life narratives and diaries produced by Finnish common people, born between 1751 and 1880. According to Britt Liljewall, explicit analyses of inner motives are very rare in the Swedish life story material, and Martyn Lyons similarly claims that English and French working-class autobiographies tended to avoid introspection and personal revelations. While it is true that the oldest Finnish life stories and diaries lack introspection, there definitely are many unschooled authors from the lower strata of the society who do not fit into the image of an impersonal writer. One can also ask if the lack of introspection is a feature common in pre-modern life stories only. According to Arianne Baggerman, the rise of production of ego-documents in the nineteenth century has traditionally been correlated with the growing introspection and self-questioning in European culture, though such observation was based on a limited canon of great writers, including Rousseau and Goethe. The studies of Dutch ego-documents written between 1814 and 1914 en masse strongly challenge this traditionally accepted assumption: “contrary to expectations, the number of factual diaries and impersonal memoirs rose more sharply than the number of intimate introspective texts.” Baggerman’s observation concerns texts produced by people from various backgrounds and social classes.
In short: my paper explores the question of the alleged impersonality in life writing from below. (Show less)

Do peasants write egodocuments? To be sure, we find diaries and autobiographies written by peasants in 19th-century Europe. But an autobiography is not necessarily an egodocument, if it reveals little about the ego and is very short on introspection. Peasant writings were chiefly characterised by their terse and laconic style, and their pragmatic concerns with the state of the harvest and the price of essential goods. They did not usually focus on the self.
My paper will raise these questions, but will present a remarkable exception to the rule of peasant writings: the case of the autodidact Luigi Daldosso. Born in the Habsburg Trentino in 1877, Daldosso was taken prisoner by the Italians in the First World War. During his confinement he kept a notebook which he then reworked into a more mature text, his Diario of his wartime experience. His writings maintained an imaginary dialogue with himself and an absent lover, developing a profound cynicism about the war. As he re-composed his original notebook, he demonstrated stylistic pretensions, succumbing to what Marie-Claude Penloup called, in another context, ‘the literary temptation’.
To adapt a paradox often attributed to Carlo Ginzburg, we might call Daldosso an ‘ordinary exception’: he was an ordinary writer of humble social origins who practised literary and compositional skills rarely found amongst peasant authors.

Do peasants write egodocuments? To be sure, we find diaries and autobiographies written by peasants in 19th-century Europe. But an autobiography is not necessarily an egodocument, if it reveals little about the ego and is very short on introspection. Peasant writings were chiefly characterised by their terse and laconic style, and their pragmatic concerns with the state of the harvest and the price of essential goods. They did not usually focus on the self.
My paper will raise these questions, but will present a remarkable exception to the rule of peasant writings: the case of the autodidact Luigi Daldosso. Born in the Habsburg Trentino in 1877, Daldosso was taken prisoner by the Italians in the First World War. During his confinement he kept a notebook which he then reworked into a more mature text, his Diario of his wartime experience. His writings maintained an imaginary dialogue with himself and an absent lover, developing a profound cynicism about the war. As he re-composed his original notebook, he demonstrated stylistic pretensions, succumbing to what Marie-Claude Penloup called, in another context, ‘the literary temptation’.
To adapt a paradox often attributed to Carlo Ginzburg, we might call Daldosso an ‘ordinary exception’: he was an ordinary writer of humble social origins who practised literary and compositional skills rarely found amongst peasant authors. (Show less)

Ingrians or Ingrian Finns used to live by the Gulf of Finland, bordering Estonia in the west and the Karelian Isthmus and Lake Ladoga in the north. Ingrian Finns descend from Lutheran Finns who moved to the area in the 17th century, during the era of the Swedish Empire. In 1919, the Ingrian Finnish population, mostly Finnish-speaking and Lutheran by faith, living in Ingria and Petrograd (later Leningrad), was almost 150,000. The Soviet repression began in the late 1920s and led to mass deportations of the Ingrian population to the prison camps. Today the area of historical Ingria belongs to Russia.
My paper explores letters written by Ingrian Finns in Soviet prison camps during the 1930s. The material includes 51 letters, written by ordinary people, both men and women. Archived at the Finnish Literature Society, the history of this collection is yet unknown, but it seems that the letters were sent from prison camps to those Ingrian Finns who were later evacuated to Finland during the Second World War, when their villages were occupied by Germany.
My paper focuses on the function of religious discourse in the letters. I argue that religious discourse with its references to Biblical narratives refers in a more or less indirect ways to the personal experiences of the writers in the harsh camp reality. It enabled the writers to depict their desolate lives in a way that offered some consolation for the recipients. When writing about their trust in God and finding counterparts of their experiences in the Bible, they tried to create a source of comfort to their loved ones back home. (Show less)