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A compact, pithy guide to the most popular form of life-writing, Memoir: An Introduction provides a primer to the ubiquitous literary form and its many subgenres.
Each year brings a batch of new memoirs, ranging from works by former teachers and celebrity has-beens to disillusioned soldiers and bestselling novelists. In addition to becoming bestsellers in their own right, memoirs have become a popular object of inquiry in the academy and a mainstay in most MFA workshops. Courses in what is now called "life writing" study memoir alongside personal essays, diaries, and autobiographies. Memoir: An Introduction proffers a succinct and comprehensive survey of the genre (and its many subgenres) while taking readers through the various techniques, themes, and debates that have come to characterize the ubiquitous literary form. Its fictional origins are trace...
"My primary concern is with the ethics of representing vulnerable subjects—persons who are liable to exposure by someone with whom they are involved in an intimate or trust-based relationship, unable to represent themselves in writing, or unable to offer meaningful consent to their representation by someone else.... Of primary importance is intimate life writing—that done within families or couples, close relationships, or quasi-professional relationships that involve trust—rather than conventional biography, which can be written by a stranger. The closer the relationship between writer and subject, the greater the vulnerability or dependency of the subject, the higher the ethical stak...
Sheds new light on the memoir boom by asking: Is the genre basically about disability?
This is a provocative look at writing by and about people with illness or disability—in particular HIV/AIDS, breast cancer, deafness, and paralysis—who challenge the stigmas attached to their conditions by telling their lives in their own ways and on their own terms. Discussing memoirs, diaries, collaborative narratives, photo documentaries, essays, and other forms of life writing, G. Thomas Couser shows that these books are not primarily records of medical conditions; they are a means for individuals to recover their bodies (or those of loved ones) from marginalization and impersonal medical discourse. Responding to the recent growth of illness and disability narratives in the United St...
Life writing, in its various forms, does work that other forms of expression do not; it bears on the world in a way distinct from imaginative genres like fiction, drama, and poetry; it acts in and on history in significant ways. Memoirs of illness and disability often seek to depathologize the conditions that they recount. Memoirs of parents by their children extend or alter relations forged initially face to face in the home. At a time when memoir and other forms of life writing are being produced and consumed in unprecedented numbers, this book reminds readers that memoir is not mainly a "literary" genre or mere entertainment. Similarly, letters are not merely epiphenomena of our "real lives." Correspondence does not just serve to communicate; it enacts and sustains human relationships. Memoir matters, and there’s life in letters. All life writing arises of our daily lives and has distinctive impacts on them and the culture in which we live.
Many books have been written about the father-son relationship. Most of the readers are well-meaning fathers looking for helpful advice on how to build a relationship with their sons and impact them in a real, meaningful way from older wise men, who have done it. These “successful” fathers usually provide a step-by-step plan describing what they did to connect with their son. This book is different. This book is written from a son's perspective. At the beginning of each chapter, you’ll encounter a letter written from a son to his father asking important questions, expressing doubts, and sharing experiences during growing up from adolescence to becoming a young man. Young men have a lot...
As much as we may like to evade them, illness and disability inescapably attend human embodiment – we are all vulnerable subjects. So it might seem natural and inevitable that the most universal, most democratic, form of literature – autobiography – should address these common features of human experience. Yet for the most part, autobiographical writing expressive of illness and disability remained quite uncommon until the second half of the twentieth century, when it flourished concurrently with successive civil rights movements. Women’s liberation, with its signature manifesto Our Bodies Ourselves, supported the breast cancer narrative; the gay rights movement encouraged AIDS narra...
Working across time periods and critical contexts, this volume provides the most comprehensive overview of literary representations of disability.
projects, and an extensive bibliography. --Book Jacket.