Autobiographical Occasions and Original Acts

Autobiographical Occasions and Original Acts PDF Author: Albert E. Stone
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 9780812211276
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
Stone rescues autobiography from the thickets of recent critical theory, in which the life portrayed has often seemed less important than the inventive literary techniques. He argues that the techniques are important because knowledge of the life is important to our culture. Restricting himself primarily to 16 writers of the 20th century, Stone juxtaposes two or three figures in given chapters, such as "Becoming a Woman in Male America: Margaret Mead and Anais Nin" and "Two Recreate One: The Act of Collaboration in Recent Black Autobiography -- Ossie Guffy, Nate Shaw, Malcolm X." Other writers considered are W.E.B. DuBois, Henry Adams, Black Elk, Thomas Merton, Louis Sullivan, Richard Wright, Norman Mailer, Frank Conroy, and Lillian Hellman.

Autobiographical Occasions and Original Acts

Autobiographical Occasions and Original Acts PDF Author: Albert E. Stone
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 9780812211276
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
Stone rescues autobiography from the thickets of recent critical theory, in which the life portrayed has often seemed less important than the inventive literary techniques. He argues that the techniques are important because knowledge of the life is important to our culture. Restricting himself primarily to 16 writers of the 20th century, Stone juxtaposes two or three figures in given chapters, such as "Becoming a Woman in Male America: Margaret Mead and Anais Nin" and "Two Recreate One: The Act of Collaboration in Recent Black Autobiography -- Ossie Guffy, Nate Shaw, Malcolm X." Other writers considered are W.E.B. DuBois, Henry Adams, Black Elk, Thomas Merton, Louis Sullivan, Richard Wright, Norman Mailer, Frank Conroy, and Lillian Hellman.

Identities in Motion

Identities in Motion PDF Author: Peter X Feng
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822383985
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
This innovative book shows how Asian American filmmakers and videomakers frame and are framed by history—how they define and are defined by cinematic projections of Asian American identity. Combining close readings of films and videos, sophisticated cultural analyses, and detailed production histories that reveal the complex forces at play in the making and distributing of these movies, Identities in Motion offers an illuminating interpretative framework for assessing the extraordinary range of Asian American films produced in North America. Peter X Feng considers a wide range of works—from genres such as detective films to romantic comedies to ethnographic films, documentaries, avant-garde videos, newsreels, travelogues, and even home movies. Feng begins by examining movies about three crucial moments that defined the American nation and the roles of Asian Americans within it: the arrival of Chinese and Japanese women in the American West and Hawai’i; the incorporation of the Philippines into the U.S. empire; and the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. In subsequent chapters Feng discusses cinematic depictions of ideological conflicts among Asian Americans and of the complex forces that compel migration, extending his nuanced analysis of the intersections of sexuality, ethnicity, and nationalist movements. Identities in Motion illuminates the fluidity of Asian American identities, expressing the diversity and complexity of Asian Americans—including Filipinos, Indonesians, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Laotians, Indians, and Koreans—from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century.

Refiguring the Map of Sorrow

Refiguring the Map of Sorrow PDF Author: Mark Christopher Allister
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813920647
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 213

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Book Description
Allister (English, St. Olaf College) examines works by six authors which fuse autobiography, literary nonfiction, and environmental literature into a distinct form of "grief narrative." Each of these authors "... begins in depression that shadows grief; each comes to put an end to depression, to move through mourning, by turning observations and stories of the external world into a narrative that heals." The six works featured are Sue Hubbell's A Country Year, Terry Tempest Williams' Refuge, Bill Barich's Laughing in the Hills, William Least Heat-Moons' Blue Highways, Peter Matthiessen's The Snow Leopard, and Gretel Ehrlich's The Solace of Open Spaces. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Lives of Their Own

Lives of Their Own PDF Author: Martha Watson
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 9781570032004
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Book Description
Explores how five turn-of-the-century women - Frances Willard, Anna Howard Shaw, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Emma Goldman and Mary Church Terrell - crafted autobiographies that became persuasive models for the women of their generation, and lead to movements for social change.

The Known Citizen

The Known Citizen PDF Author: Sarah E. Igo
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674244796
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 593

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Book Description
A Washington Post Book of the Year Winner of the Merle Curti Award Winner of the Jacques Barzun Prize Winner of the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award “A masterful study of privacy.” —Sue Halpern, New York Review of Books “Masterful (and timely)...[A] marathon trek from Victorian propriety to social media exhibitionism...Utterly original.” —Washington Post Every day, we make decisions about what to share and when, how much to expose and to whom. Securing the boundary between one’s private affairs and public identity has become an urgent task of modern life. How did privacy come to loom so large in public consciousness? Sarah Igo tracks the quest for privacy from the invention of the telegraph onward, revealing enduring debates over how Americans would—and should—be known. The Known Citizen is a penetrating historical investigation with powerful lessons for our own times, when corporations, government agencies, and data miners are tracking our every move. “A mighty effort to tell the story of modern America as a story of anxieties about privacy...Shows us that although we may feel that the threat to privacy today is unprecedented, every generation has felt that way since the introduction of the postcard.” —Louis Menand, New Yorker “Engaging and wide-ranging...Igo’s analysis of state surveillance from the New Deal through Watergate is remarkably thorough and insightful.” —The Nation

Sending My Heart Back Across the Years

Sending My Heart Back Across the Years PDF Author: Hertha Dawn Wong
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195069129
Category : Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Using contemporary autobiography theory, and literary and anthropological approaches, Wong traces the development of Native American autobiography from pre-literate oral, artistic, and dramatic personal narratives through late nineteenth and early twentieth-century life histories to contemporary autobiographies.

Closer to the Truth Than Any Fact

Closer to the Truth Than Any Fact PDF Author: Jennifer Jensen Wallach
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820335029
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
Although historians frequently use memoirs as source material, too often they confine such usage to the anecdotal, and there is little methodological literature regarding the genre’s possibilities and limitations. This study articulates an approach to using memoirs as instruments of historical understanding. Jennifer Jensen Wallach applies these principles to a body of memoirs about life in the American South during Jim Crow segregation, including works by Zora Neale Hurston, Willie Morris, Lillian Smith, Henry Louis Gates Jr., William Alexander Percy, and Richard Wright. Wallach argues that the field of autobiography studies, which is currently dominated by literary critics, needs a new theoretical framework that allows historians, too, to benefit from the interpretation of life writing. Her most provocative claim is that, due to the aesthetic power of literary language, skilled creative writers are uniquely positioned to capture the complexities of another time and another place. Through techniques such as metaphor and irony, memoirists collectively give their readers an empathetic understanding of life during the era of segregation. Although these reminiscences bear certain similarities, it becomes clear that the South as it was remembered by each is hardly the same place.

Intimate Memories

Intimate Memories PDF Author: Mabel Dodge Luhan
Publisher: UNM Press
ISBN: 0826332498
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 444

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Book Description
Mabel Dodge Luhan’s Intimate Memories offers the brilliantly edited memoirs of one woman’s rebellion against “the whole ghastly social structure” under which the United States had been buried since the Victorian era. Luhan fled the Gilded Age prison of the upper classes to lead a life of notoriety among Europe and America’s leading artists, writers, and social visionaries—among them D. H. Lawrence, Gertrude Stein, and John Reed. Intimate Memories details Luhan’s assemblage of a series of utopian domains aimed at curing the malaise of the modern age and shows Luhan not just as a visionary hostess but as a talented and important writer.

My Generation

My Generation PDF Author: John Downton Hazlett
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 9780299157845
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
John Hazlett's engaging study of writers from the 1960s demonstrates the ways in which the idea of the generation has affected autobiographical writing in this century. Autobiographers from the sixties claim to speak on behalf of all members of their generation. However, each writer presents a unique political and personal agenda.

Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior

Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior PDF Author: Say-ling Cynthia Wong
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199726795
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
With the continued expansion of the literary canon, multicultural works of modern literary fiction and autobiography have assumed an increasing importance for students and scholars of American literature. This exciting new series assembles key documents and criticism concerning these works that have so recently become central components of the American literature curriculum. Each casebook will reprint documents relating to the work's historical context and reception, present the best in critical essays, and when possible, feature an interview of the author. The series will provide, for the first time, an accessible forum in which readers can come to a fuller understanding of these contemporary masterpieces and the unique aspects of American ethnic, racial, or cultural experience that they so ably portray. This case book presents a thought-provoking overview of critical debates surrounding The Woman Warrior, perhaps the best known Asian American literary work. The essays deal with such issues as the reception by various interpretive communities, canon formation, cultural authenticity, fictionality in autobiography, and feminist and poststructuralist subjectivity. The eight essays are supplemented an interview with the author and a bibliography.