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Author: Sean Ross Meehan
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 0826266401
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 266
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Book Description
The emergence of photography in the mid-nineteenth century transformed ideas about how the self and nature could be pictured. Although the autobiographical potential of photography seems self-evident today, Sean Meehan takes us back to the birth of the medium when some of America's preeminent authors began to think about photography's implications for the representation of identity and the nature of autobiographical writing. Both photography and autobiography involve a tension between disclosing and concealing their means of production: a chemical process for one, the writing process for the other. Meehan examines how four major authors-Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, and Walt Whitman-were well aware of this tension and explored it in their work. By examining the implications of early photography in their writings, he shows how each engaged the new visual medium, how photography mediated their conceptions of self-representation, and how their appropriation of photographic thinking created a new kind of autobiography. Examining the metonymic nature of photography, Meehan explores how the new medium influenced conceptions of visual and verbal representation. He intertwines these four writers' reflections on photography-in Emerson's Representative Men, Thoreau's journals, Douglass's narratives of slavery, and Whitman's Specimen Days-with theories of photography as expounded by its inventors and observers, from Louis Daguerre and William Talbot in Europe to Oliver Wendell Holmes and Marcus Root in America. As the first book to focus on the emergence of this new visual medium during the American Renaissance, Mediating American Autobiography shows us what photography means for American literature in general and for the genre most closely linked to it in particular. Because the engagement of these writers with photography has been neglected in previous scholarship, Meehan's work provocatively bridges the study of two media and illuminates an important aspect of American thought and culture at the dawn of the technological era.
Author: Sean Ross Meehan
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 0826266401
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 266
Get Book Here
Book Description
The emergence of photography in the mid-nineteenth century transformed ideas about how the self and nature could be pictured. Although the autobiographical potential of photography seems self-evident today, Sean Meehan takes us back to the birth of the medium when some of America's preeminent authors began to think about photography's implications for the representation of identity and the nature of autobiographical writing. Both photography and autobiography involve a tension between disclosing and concealing their means of production: a chemical process for one, the writing process for the other. Meehan examines how four major authors-Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, and Walt Whitman-were well aware of this tension and explored it in their work. By examining the implications of early photography in their writings, he shows how each engaged the new visual medium, how photography mediated their conceptions of self-representation, and how their appropriation of photographic thinking created a new kind of autobiography. Examining the metonymic nature of photography, Meehan explores how the new medium influenced conceptions of visual and verbal representation. He intertwines these four writers' reflections on photography-in Emerson's Representative Men, Thoreau's journals, Douglass's narratives of slavery, and Whitman's Specimen Days-with theories of photography as expounded by its inventors and observers, from Louis Daguerre and William Talbot in Europe to Oliver Wendell Holmes and Marcus Root in America. As the first book to focus on the emergence of this new visual medium during the American Renaissance, Mediating American Autobiography shows us what photography means for American literature in general and for the genre most closely linked to it in particular. Because the engagement of these writers with photography has been neglected in previous scholarship, Meehan's work provocatively bridges the study of two media and illuminates an important aspect of American thought and culture at the dawn of the technological era.
Author: Rachael McLennan
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748644628
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 160
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Book Description
The first student guide to American autobiographys introduction to the major forms of autobiographical writing in America and important current developments in autobiography studies discusses both 'canonised' texts and those from contemporary writers. Taking a broadly chronological approach, the history of American autobiography is explored including the social and cultural factors that might account for the importance of autobiography in American culture. Then post-1970 autobiographies are examined, taking into account the development in poststructuralism from this time that affected notions of the subject who could write, and conceptions of truth, identity and reference.
Author: Cathy Covell Waegner
Publisher: MSU Press
ISBN: 1628950455
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 497
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Book Description
Mediating Indianness investigates a wide range of media—including print, film, theater, ritual dance, music, recorded interviews, photography, and treaty rhetoric—that have been used in exploitative, informative, educative, sustaining, protesting, or entertaining ways to negotiate Native American identities and images. The contributors to this collection are (Native) American and European scholars whose initial findings were presented or performed in a four-panel format at the 2012 MESEA (Society for Multi-Ethnic Studies: Europe and the Americas) conference in Barcelona. The selection of the term Indianness is deliberate. It points to the intricate construction of ethnicity as filtered through media, despite frequent assertions of “authenticity.” From William “Buffalo Bill” Cody’s claim, extravagantly advertised on both sides of the Atlantic, that he was staging “true-to-life” scenes from Indian life in his Wild West shows to contemporary Native hip-hop artist Quese IMC’s announcement that his songs tell his people’s “own history” and draw on their “true” culture, media of all types has served to promote disparate agendas claiming legitimacy. This volume does not shy away from the issue of evaluation and how it is only tangential to medial artificiality. As evidenced in this collection, “the vibrant, ever-transforming future of Native peoples is located within a complex intersection of cultural influences,” said Susan Power, author of Sacred Wilderness.
Author: Rocío G. Davis
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780824870485
Category : Asian Americans
Languages : en
Pages :
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Book Description
This work focuses the Asian American memoir that specifically recounts the story of at least three generations of the same family. This form of autobiography concentrates as much on other members of one's family as on oneself, generally collapses the boundaries conventionally established between biography and autobiography, and in many cases crosses the frontier into history, promoting collective memory.
Author: Gordon O. Taylor
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1349090468
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 179
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Book Description
Author: Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110279819
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 2220
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Book Description
Autobiographical writings have been a major cultural genre from antiquity to the present time. General questions of the literary as, e.g., the relation between literature and reality, truth and fiction, the dependency of author, narrator, and figure, or issues of individual and cultural styles etc., can be studied preeminently in the autobiographical genre. Yet, the tradition of life-writing has, in the course of literary history, developed manifold types and forms. Especially in the globalized age, where the media and other technological / cultural factors contribute to a rapid transformation of lifestyles, autobiographical writing has maintained, even enhanced, its popularity and importance. By conceiving autobiography in a wide sense that includes memoirs, diaries, self-portraits and autofiction as well as media transformations of the genre, this three-volume handbook offers a comprehensive survey of theoretical approaches, systematic aspects, and historical developments in an international and interdisciplinary perspective. While autobiography is usually considered to be a European tradition, special emphasis is placed on the modes of self-representation in non-Western cultures and on inter- and transcultural perspectives of the genre. The individual contributions are closely interconnected by a system of cross-references. The handbook addresses scholars of cultural and literary studies, students as well as non-academic readers.
Author: Paul John Eakin
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 9780299127848
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 302
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Book Description
This is the first comprehensive assessment of the major periods and varieties of American autobiography. The eleven original essays in this volume do not only survey what has been done; they also point toward what can and should be done in future studies of a literary genre that is now receiving major scholarly attention. Book jacket.
Author: Heike Schaefer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108487386
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 327
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Book Description
Demonstrates that the quest for immediacy, or experiences of direct connection and presence, has propelled the development of American literature and media culture.
Author: Bunty Avieson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351606786
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 477
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Book Description
The argument has been made that memoir reflects and augments the narcissistic tendencies of our neo-liberal age. The Literature of Remembering: Tracing the Limits of Memoir challenges and dismantles that assumption. Focusing on the history, theory and practice of memoir writing, editors Bunty Avieson, Fiona Giles and Sue Joseph provide a thorough and cutting-edge examination of memoir through the lenses of ethics, practice and innovation. By investigating memoir across cultural boundaries, in its various guises, and tracing its limits, the editors convincingly demonstrate the plurality of ways in which memoir is helping us make sense of who we are, who we were and the influences that shape us along the way.
Author: James Ruppert
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 9780806127491
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 206
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Book Description
Mediation is the term James Ruppert uses to describe his important new theory of reading Native American fiction. Focusing on novels of six major contemporary American writers - N. Scott Momaday, James Welch, Leslie Silko, Gerald Vizenor, D'Arcy McNickle, and Louise Erdrich - Ruppert analyzes the ways in which these writers draw upon their bicultural heritage, guiding Native and non-Native readers alike to a different and expanded understanding of each other's worlds. While Native American writers may criticize white society, revealing its past and present injustices, their emphasis, Ruppert argues, is on healing, survival, and continuance. Their fiction aims to produce cross-cultural understanding rather than divisiveness. To that end they articulate the perspectives and values of competing world views. In particular they create characters who manifest what Ruppert calls "multiple identities" - determined by both Native and non-Native perceptions of the self. These writers use a variety of narrative techniques deriving from different cultural traditions. They might incorporate Native oral storytelling techniques, adapting them to written form, or they might reconstruct Native mythologies, investing them with new meaning and relevance by applying them to contemporary situations. As novel-writers, they also include features more characteristic of western European writing - such as the omniscient narrator or the detective-story plot.
