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Focusing primarily on the period from the eighteenth-century to the present, this interdisciplinary volume takes a fresh look at the institutions and practices of autobiography and self-portraiture in Europe, the United States and other cultures.
Annotation This text evolved out of a December 1995 conference at the International Research Center for Cultural Studies (IFK) in Vienna, attended by scholars from psychology, psychiatry, philosophy, social sciences, literary theory, classics, communication, and film theory, and exploring the importance of narrative as an expression of our experience, as a form of communication, and as a form for understanding the world and ourselves. Nine scholars from Canada, the US, and Europe contribute 12 essays on the relationship between narrative and human identity, how we construct what we call our lives and create ourselves in the process. Coverage includes theoretical perspectives on the problem of narrative and self construction, specific life stories in their cultural contexts, and empirical and theoretical issues of autobiographical memory and narrative identity. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).
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.
This book traces the emergence of the concept of self-identity in modern Western culture, as it was both reflected in and advanced by the development of autobiographical practice in early modern England. It offers a fresh and illuminating appraisal of the nature of autobiographical narrative in general and of the early modern forms of biography, diary and autobiography in particular. The result is a significant and original contribution to the history of individualism. Michael Mascuch argues that the definitive characteristic of individualist self-identity is the personal capacity to produce a unified retrospective autobiographical narrative, and he stresses that this capacity was first demonstrated in England during the last decade of the eighteenth century. He examines the long-term process of innovation in written discourse leading up to this event, from the first use of blank almanacs and common place books by the pious in the late sixteenth century, through the popular criminal biographies of the late seventeenth century, to the printed-for-the-author scandalous memoirs of the mid-eighteenth century. While offering a detailed account of a significant period in the rise of a modern literary genre, Origins of the Individualist Self also addresses topics which are central in the fields of literary and cultural theory and social and cultural history.
Though history and autobiography both claim to tell true stories about the past, historians have traditionally rejected first-person accounts as subjective and therefore unreliable. What then, asks Jeremy D. Popkin in History, Historians, and Autobiography, are we to make of the ever-increasing number of professional historians who are publishing stories of their own lives? And how is this recent development changing the nature of history-writing, the historical profession, and the genre of autobiography? Drawing on the theoretical work of contemporary critics of autobiography and the philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, Popkin reads the autobiographical classics of Edward Gibbon and Henry Adams and the memoirs of contemporary historians such as Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Peter Gay, Jill Ker Conway, and many others, he reveals the contributions historians' life stories make to our understanding of the human experience. Historians' autobiographies, he shows, reveal how scholars arrive at their vocations, the difficulties of writing about modern professional life, and the ways in which personal stories can add to our understanding of historical events such as war, political movements, and the traumas of the Holocaust. An engrossing overview of the way historians view themselves and their profession, this work will be of interest to readers concerned with the ways in which we understand the past, as well as anyone interested in the art of life-writing.
Hunger of Memory is the story of Mexican-American Richard Rodriguez, who begins his schooling in Sacramento, California, knowing just 50 words of English, and concludes his university studies in the stately quiet of the reading room of the British Museum. Here is the poignant journey of a “minority student” who pays the cost of his social assimilation and academic success with a painful alienation — from his past, his parents, his culture — and so describes the high price of “making it” in middle-class America. Provocative in its positions on affirmative action and bilingual education, Hunger of Memory is a powerful political statement, a profound study of the importance of language ... and the moving, intimate portrait of a boy struggling to become a man.
Making culture a more central concept in the texts and contexts of teacher education is the focus of this book. It is a rich account of the author's investigation of teacher book club discussions of ethnic literature, specifically ethnic autobiography--as a genre from which teachers might learn about culture, literacy, and education in their own and others' lives, and as a form of conversation and literature-based work that might be sustainable and foster teachers' comprehension and critical thinking. Dr. Florio-Ruane's role in the book clubs merged participation and inquiry. For this reason, she blends personal narrative with analysis and description of ways she and the book club participants explored culture in the stories they told one another and in their responses to published autobiographies. She posits that autobiography and conversation may be useful for teachers not only in constructing their own learning about culture, but also, by doing so, in participating in the transformation of learning within the teaching profession.
A new interdisciplinary interest has risen to study interconnections between oral tradition and book culture. In addition to the use and dissemination of printed books, newspapers etc., book culture denotes manuscript media and the circulation of written documents of oral tradition in and through the archive, into published collections. Book culture also intertwines the process of framing and defining oral genres with literary interests and ideologies. The present volume is highly relevant to anyone interested in oral cultures and their relationship to the culture of writing and publishing. The questions discussed include the following: How have printing and book publishing set terms for oral tradition scholarship? How have the practices of reading affected the circulation of oral traditions? Which books and publishing projects have played a key role in this and how? How have the written representations of oral traditions, as well as the roles of editors and publishers, introduced authorship to materials customarily regarded as anonymous and collective?
Theorists of autobiography tend to emphasize the centrality of the individual against the community. By contrast, in her reading of Hebrew autobiography, Tamar Hess identifies the textual presence and function of the collective and its interplay with the Israeli self. What characterizes the ten writers she examines is the idea of a national self, an individual whose life story takes on meaning from his or her relation to the collective history and ethos of the nation. Her second and related argument is that this self - individually and collectively - must be understood in the context of waves of immigration to Israel's shores. Hess convincingly shows that autobiography is a transnational genre deeply influenced by the nation's literary as well as cultural history. This book makes an additional contribution to the history of autobiography and contemporary autobiography theory by analyzing the strategies of fragmentation that many of the writers Hess studies have adopted as ways of dealing with the conflicts between the self and the nation, between who they feel they are and what they are expected to be. Hess contrasts the predominantly masculine tradition of Hebrew autobiography with writings by women, and offers a fresh understanding of the Israeli soul and the Hebrew literary canon. A systematic review of contemporary Hebrew autobiography, this study raises fundamental questions essential to the debates about identity at the heart of Israeli culture today. It will interest scholars and students of contemporary Israeli culture, as well as those intrigued by the literary genre of autobiography.
Professor Olney gathers together in this book some of the best and most important writings on autobiography produced in the past two decades. Originally published in 1980. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.