Autobiographical Tightropes

Autobiographical Tightropes PDF Author: Leah D. Hewitt
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803272583
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
"In order to write" said Simone de Beauvoir, "the first essential condition is that reality can no longer be taken for granted." She and four other French women writers of the second half of the twentieth century—Nathalie Sarraute, Marguerite Duras, Monique Wittig, and Maryse Condé—illustrate that producing autobiography is like performing a tightrope act on the slippery line between fact and fiction. Autobiographical Tightropes emphasizes the tension in the works of these major writers as they move in and out of "experience" and "literature," violating the neat boundaries between genres and confusing the distinctions between remembering and creating. Focusing on selected works, Leah D. Hewitt for the first time anywhere explores the connections among the authors. In doing so she shows how contemporary women's autobiography in France links with feminist issues, literary tradition and trends, and postmodern theories of writing. In light of these theories Hewitt offers a new reading of de Beauvoir's memoirs and reveals how her attempt to represent the past faithfully is undone by irony, by literary and "feminine" detours. Other analysts of Nathalie Sarraute's writing have dwelt mainly on formal considerations of the New Novel, but Hewitt exposes a repressed, forbidden feminine aspect in her literary innovations. Unlike Sarraute, Duras cannot be connected with just one literary movement, political stance, style, or kind of feminism because her writing, largely autobiographical, is marked by chameleon like transformations. The chapters on Wittig and Condé show how, within the bounds of feminism, lesbians and women of color challenge the individualistic premises of autobiography. Hewitt demonstrates that, despite vast differences among these five writers, all of them reveal in their autobiographical works the self's need of a fictive other.

Autobiographical Tightropes

Autobiographical Tightropes PDF Author: Leah D. Hewitt
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803272583
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
"In order to write" said Simone de Beauvoir, "the first essential condition is that reality can no longer be taken for granted." She and four other French women writers of the second half of the twentieth century—Nathalie Sarraute, Marguerite Duras, Monique Wittig, and Maryse Condé—illustrate that producing autobiography is like performing a tightrope act on the slippery line between fact and fiction. Autobiographical Tightropes emphasizes the tension in the works of these major writers as they move in and out of "experience" and "literature," violating the neat boundaries between genres and confusing the distinctions between remembering and creating. Focusing on selected works, Leah D. Hewitt for the first time anywhere explores the connections among the authors. In doing so she shows how contemporary women's autobiography in France links with feminist issues, literary tradition and trends, and postmodern theories of writing. In light of these theories Hewitt offers a new reading of de Beauvoir's memoirs and reveals how her attempt to represent the past faithfully is undone by irony, by literary and "feminine" detours. Other analysts of Nathalie Sarraute's writing have dwelt mainly on formal considerations of the New Novel, but Hewitt exposes a repressed, forbidden feminine aspect in her literary innovations. Unlike Sarraute, Duras cannot be connected with just one literary movement, political stance, style, or kind of feminism because her writing, largely autobiographical, is marked by chameleon like transformations. The chapters on Wittig and Condé show how, within the bounds of feminism, lesbians and women of color challenge the individualistic premises of autobiography. Hewitt demonstrates that, despite vast differences among these five writers, all of them reveal in their autobiographical works the self's need of a fictive other.

Hope on a Tightrope

Hope on a Tightrope PDF Author: Cornel West
Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com
ISBN: 145873918X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
The New York Times best-selling author of Race Matters and Democracy Matters offers open-hearted wisdom for our times in this courageous collection of quotations, speech excerpts, letters, philosophy, and photographs that reflect the profound humanity that fuels the passionate public intellectual. In a world that seesaws between unconditional lo...

The Tightrope Walker

The Tightrope Walker PDF Author: Anne Wilkinson
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 9781442614925
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Anne Wilkinson (1910-61) was one of the most celebrated Canadian writers of her time. Her success as a poet came against all odds: nothing in her background, from geography to genealogy, would have suggested a literary career. She lived her life and practiced her art in Toronto at a time when the nerve centre of Canadian poetry was unquestionably Montreal. She was born into the highest levels of Toronto society, a daughter of the very distinguished Osler family. And yet she wrote poetry, and was published to great acclaim, through decades of marriage, child-rearing, divorce, and illness. From December 1947 to July 1956, the years during which she wrote her most successful poetry, Wilkinson kept journals; in due course she also wrote an autobiography, part of which appeared in a literary magazine shortly after she died. Joan Coldwell brings together the complete text of the autobiography with the poet’s journals, some samples of her poetry, and a moving exchange of letters between Wilkinson and her mother. The journals vividly reveal the inner workings of the writer’s mind and her struggles to create in a difficult environment. With an immediacy and power that only journals can achieve, these writings explore the nature of the creative process in a context of daily realities that are often harsh and sometimes heart-breaking. The autobiography tells the story in a different way, rearranged to fit the forms of a 'legitimate' genre. Together with Coldwell’s introduction, these writings present a unique and moving self-portrait of a poet who died too young, at the peak of her career. This volume celebrates Wilkinson’s life and work, and the spirit that informed them.

Tightrope Walking

Tightrope Walking PDF Author: Zhozefina Leonidovna Pasternak
Publisher: Slavica Publishers
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description


Walking the Tightrope Without a Grace Net

Walking the Tightrope Without a Grace Net PDF Author: Brenda M. Myers
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 1450237630
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 114

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Book Description
The Christian life was meant to be danced but not on your tip toes. A tightrope walk was my spiritual life. One missed step meant you were falling into hell if you didn't repent immediately. I was taught that true Christians never sinned, or if they did, they would have to "get saved" all over again. An unreasonable standard of "holiness" and a constant striving of perfection flowed from this belief. Lists of dos and don'ts were in abundance in an effort to practice the "idol of holiness." Are you walking that tightrope? By understanding God's true character through His saving grace on the cross, you can break free from the bondage of legalism and unholy fear, anxiety, and frustration, into a life of gratefulness for God's love, mercy, and grace. You can begin the balancing act of leaving legalism behind and finding true liberty in Christ.

Consuming Autobiographies

Consuming Autobiographies PDF Author: Claire Boyle
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351195298
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
"Since 1975, French literary writing has been marked by an autobiographical turn which has seen authors increasingly often tap into the vein of what the French term ecriture de soi. This coincides, paradoxically, with the 'death of autobiography', as these authors self-consciously distance themselves and their writings from conventional autobiography, founding a 'nouvelle autobiographie' where the very possibility of autobiographical expression is questioned. In the first book-length study in English to address this phenomenon, Claire Boyle sheds a new light on this hostility toward autobiography through a series of ground-breaking studies of estrangement in autobiographical works by major post-war authors Nathalie Sarraute, Georges Perec, Jean Genet and Helene Cixous. She identifies autobiography as a site of conflict between writer and reader, as authors struggle to assert the unknowableness of their identity in the face of a readership resolutely desiring privileged knowledge. Autobiography emerges as a deeply troubling genre for authors, with the reader as an antagonistic consumer of the autobiographical self."

On the High Wire

On the High Wire PDF Author: Philippe Petit
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 0811228657
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 97

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Book Description
“On the High Wire is fascinating to read. You will learn about the man, his work, his passion, his tenacity and lucidity” (Marcel Marceau) In this poetic handbook, written when he was just twenty-three, the world-famous high-wire artist Philippe Petit offers a window into the world of his craft. Petit masterfully explains how preparation and self-control contributed to such feats as walking between the towers of Notre Dame and the World Trade Center. Addressing such topics as the rigging of the wire, the walker’s first steps, his salute and exercises, and the work of other renowned high-wire artists, Petit offers us a book about the ecstasy of conquering our fears and reaching for the stars.

Just Balancing

Just Balancing PDF Author: Samantha Jeffery
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781922803771
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
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The Tightrope Walker

The Tightrope Walker PDF Author: Hermine Demoriane
Publisher: Harvill Secker
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 180

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Book Description
Hermine Demoriane is a singer, playwright, actress and performance artist. In this account of her life as a funambulist and her career in the 1970s, she also evokes the spirit of earlier tightrope walkers who pioneered the art - the legendary Blondin, Madame Saqui and others.

Against Autobiography

Against Autobiography PDF Author: Lia Nicole Brozgal
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496208986
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
The work of Tunisian Jewish intellectual Albert Memmi, like that of many francophone Maghrebian writers, is often read as thinly veiled autobiography. Questioning the prevailing body of criticism, which continues this interpretation of most fiction produced by francophone North African writers, Lia Nicole Brozgal shows how such interpretations of Memmi’s texts obscure their not inconsiderable theoretical possibilities. Calling attention to the ambiguous status of autobiographical discursive and textual elements in Memmi’s work, Brozgal shifts the focus from the author to theoretical questions. Against Autobiography places Memmi’s writing and thought in dialogue with several major critical shifts in the late twentieth-century literary and cultural landscape. These shifts include the crisis of the authorial subject; the interrogation of the form of the novel; the resistance to the hegemony of vision; and the critique of colonialism. Showing how Memmi’s novels and essays produce theories that resonate both within and beyond their original contexts, Brozgal argues for allowing works of francophone Maghrebi literature to be read as complex literary objects, that is, not simply as ethnographic curios but as generating elements of literary theory on their own terms.