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All autobiographers are unreliable narrators. Yet what a writer chooses to misrepresent is as telling -- perhaps even more so -- as what really happened. Timothy Adams believes that autobiography is an attempt to reconcile one's life with one's self, and he argues in this book that autobiography should not be taken as historically accurate but as metaphorically authentic. Adams focuses on five modern American writers whose autobiographies are particularly complex because of apparent lies that permeate them. In examining their stories, Adams shows that lying in autobiography, especially literary autobiography, is not simply inevitable. Rather it is often a deliberate, highly strategic decision on the author's part. Throughout his analysis, Adams's standard is not literal accuracy but personal authenticity. He attempts to resolve some of the paradoxes of recent autobiographical theory by looking at the classic question of design and truth in autobiography from the underside -- with a focus on lying rather than truth. Originally published in 1990. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.
On the surface, the use of photography in autobiography appears to have a straightforward purpose: to illustrate and corroborate the text. But in the wake of poststructuralism, the role of photography in autobiography is far from simple or one-dimensional
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.
Meredith Maran lived a daughter's nightmare: she accused her father of sexual abuse, then realized, nearly too late, that he was innocent. During the 1980s and 1990s, tens of thousands of Americans became convinced that they had repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse, and then, decades later, recovered those memories in therapy. Journalist, mother, and daughter Meredith Maran was one of them. Her accusation and estrangement from her father caused her sons to grow up without their only grandfather, divided her family into those who believed her and those who didn't, and led her to isolate herself on "Planet Incest," where "survivors" devoted their lives, and life savings, to recovering memories of events that had never occurred. Maran unveils her family's devastation and ultimate redemption against the backdrop of the sex-abuse scandals, beginning with the infamous McMartin preschool trial, that sent hundreds of innocents to jail—several of whom remain imprisoned today. Exploring the psychological, cultural, and neuroscientific causes of this modern American witch-hunt, My Lie asks: how could so many people come to believe the same lie at the same time? What has neuroscience discovered about the brain's capacity to create false memories and encode false beliefs? What are the "big lies" gaining traction in American culture today—and how can we keep them from taking hold? My Lie is a wrenchingly honest, unexpectedly witty, and profoundly human story that proves the personal is indeed political—and the political can become painfully personal.
The 1990s saw the appearance of many new works that have redefined and embellished the canon of Holocaust literature. While many of these works have quickly become classics, some have raised new questions about the processes of canonicity. This study concentrates particularly on works in German by Jewish Holocaust survivors written and published approximately fifty years after the fateful cataclysm, focusing on such crucial issues as genre and testimony. Despite the long shadow cast by the Holocaust on subsequent generations, the author shows that narratives on the Holocaust have continued to thrive, offering inventive interpretations of questions that have been thought to defy explanation.
This book aims to demonstrate how scholars in recent times have been utilizing egodocuments from various angles and providing an opening for the multivocality of the sources to be fully appreciated. The first part of the book is concerned with the significance of egodocuments, both for the individual him/herself who creates such documents, and also for the other, who receives them. The author approaches the subject on the basis of his own personal experience, and goes on to discuss the importance of such documents for the academic world, emphasizing more general questions and issues within the fields of historiography, philosophy of history, microhistory, and memory studies. The second part of the book is based upon a photographic collection – an archive – that belonged to the author’s grandfather, who over decades accumulated photographs of vagabonds and outsiders. This part seeks to explore what kind of knowledge can be applied when a single source – an archive, document, letter, illustration, etc. – is examined, and whether the knowledge derived may not be quite as good in its own context as in the broader perspective.
While living in Paris at the beginning of the twentieth century, expatriate American writers Edith Wharton (1862-1937) and Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) never crossed paths. Even so, they did rub shoulders in print, in autobiographical essays published by The Atlantic Monthly in 1933. Noel Sloboda shows that the authors pursued many of the same professional goals in these essays and in the book-length life writings that grew out of them, A Backward Glance (1934) and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933). By analyzing the personal and cultural contexts in which these works were produced, as well as subjects common to both of them, Sloboda illuminates a previously unrecognized solidarity between Wharton and Stein. The relationship between the authors is built upon careful analysis of A Backward Glance and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and it is framed by a consideration of the markets into which their life writings were first released. The alignment of Wharton and Stein as life writers will be of interest to those studying autobiography, modern literature, and American women writers.
A user-friendly guide to reading, writing, and theorizing autobiographical texts and practices for students, scholars, and practitioners of life narrative The boom in autobiographical narratives continues apace. It now encompasses a global spectrum of texts and practices in such media as graphic memoir, auto-photography, performance and plastic arts, film and video, and online platforms. Reading Autobiography Now offers both a critical engagement with life narrative in historical perspective and a theoretical framework for interpreting texts and practices in this wide-ranging field. Hailed upon its initial publication as “the Whole Earth Catalog of autobiography studies,” this essential book has been updated, reorganized, and expanded in scope to serve as an accessible and contemporary guide for scholars, students, and practitioners. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson explore definitions of life narrative, probe issues of subjectivity, and outline salient features of autobiographical acts and practices. In this updated edition, they address emergent topics such as autotheory, autofiction, and autoethnography; expand the discussions of identity, relationality, and agency; and introduce new material on autobiographical archives and the profusion of “I”s in contemporary works. Smith and Watson also provide a helpful toolkit of strategies for reading life narrative and an extensive glossary of mini-essays analyzing key theoretical concepts and dozens of autobiographical genres. An indispensable exploration of this expansive, transnational, multimedia field, Reading Autobiography Now meticulously unpacks the heterogeneous modes of life narratives through which people tell their stories, from traditional memoirs and trauma narratives to collaborative life narrative and autobiographical comics.
Memoir Ethics: Good Lives and the Virtues is a philosophical study of moral themes in memoirs, exploring how memoirists present and defend perspectives on good lives. It pays particular attention to the interplay of the virtues, including their interplay with additional (non-moral) types of values in good lives. More generally, it explores the relevance of memoir to moral philosophy, and in turn how moral philosophy enters into elucidating and critiquing memoirs. Memoirs are understood as non-fiction narratives written by oneself and significantly about oneself (including full-life autobiographies). Mike W. Martin explores perspectives on good lives as they are expressed in memoirs written by both philosophers and non-philosophers. Most of the chapters focus on one of the generic aspects of good lives: moral goodness, authenticity, meaningfulness, happiness, health, and self-fulfillment. The book clarifies how memoirists often employ life-based arguments in defending value perspectives, and it includes a discussion of whether philosophers’ memoirs are distinctive, compared to memoirs by non-philosophers and also compared to other forums for doing philosophy. Martin highlights some parallels between features of good lives and features of memoirs; for example, both can be said to be meaningful, authentic, and having virtues such as wisdom and courage. Demonstrating how memoirs are rich resources in exploring the good lives and exploring ways in which philosophical ethics provide tools for interpreting memoirs, Memoir Ethics will be of interest to a broad audience of students, scholars, and general readers, including anyone interested in ethics or the connections between literature and philosophy.
Post-Nationalist American Studies seeks to revise the cultural nationalism and celebratory American exceptionalism that tended to dominate American Studies in the Cold War era. The goal of the book's contributors is a less insular, more trans-national, comparative approach to American Studies, one that questions dominant American myths rather than canonizes them. Articulating new ways to think about American Studies, these essays demonstrate how diverse the field has become. Contributors are concerned with cross-cultural communication, race and gender, global and local identities, and the complex tensions between symbolic and political economies. Their essays explore, among other topics, the construction of "foreign" peoples and cultures; the notion of borders—territorial, racial, economic, and sexual; the "multilingual reality" of the United States; the place of the Mexican-American War in U.S. history; and the significance of Tiger Woods in today's global market of consumption. Together, the essays propose a renewed vision of the United States' role in the world and how American Studies scholarship can address that vision. Each contributor includes a sample syllabus showing how the issues discussed in individual essays can be brought into the classroom.