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KNL Rereading Childhood: Autobiography, Criticism, and Memory

When

Jun 04, 2025 from 06:00 to 08:00 (Europe/Berlin / UTC200)

Where

MFR / Online (BBB)

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All literary criticism is to some extent autobiographical: the way we select and analyse texts says as much about us at the works themselves. Authorship can be seen as an act of rereading as much as writing, and tracks our own changing relationships with texts over time. Likewise, many current writers are explicitly choosing to blur the lines between literary criticism and memoir to show how the categories of reader and writer always overlap. In this session Timothy C. Baker will be reading from and discussing their recent hybrid memoir Reading My Mother Back: A Memoir in Childhood Animal Stories, in which they revisit children’s classics to tell a story of grief, trauma, and family secrets. Baker’s memoir tells the story of his mother’s life, and death, through the animal stories they shared, both familiar and less-well-known. The memoir touches on memory, loneliness, disability, and religion, and shows how literature can provide a way to understand our experiences and connect with what we have lost. Reading My Mother Back offers a bold and personal view of why the stories we read, share, and write about matter.

//Timothy C. Baker is Personal Chair in Scottish and Contemporary Literature at the University of Aberdeen, having previously studied Cognitive Science at Vassar College and English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. Their work centres on Scottish literature, queer studies, and environmental humanities. They are the author of five books, most recently Writing Animals: Language, Suffering, and Animality in Twenty-First-Century Fiction (2019), Reading My Mother Back: A Memoir in Childhood Animal Stories (2022), and New Forms of Environmental Writing: Gleaning and Fragmentation (2022). Baker’s writing focuses on both human-animal and environmental relationality, experimental literary forms, and interdisciplinary modes of reading, alongside a longstanding interest in literature and community. They are currently co-editing the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Scottish Literature, and have recently published in Green Letters, C21 Literature, and Gothic Studies. They were a founding member of the British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies, and teach and research widely across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.