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Originally published in 1960. Is there an art of autobiography? What are its origins and how has it come to acquire the form we know today? For what does the autobiographer seek, and why should it be so popular? This study suggests some of the answers to these questions. It takes the view that autobiography is one of the dominant and characteristic forms of literary self-expression and deserves examination for its own sake. This book outlines a definition of the form and traces its historical origins and development, analyses its ‘truth’ and talks about what sort of self-knowledge it investigates.
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Annotation Writing from positions of cultural exclusion, women have faced constraints not only upon the "content" of fiction but upon the act of narration itself. Narrative voice thus becomes a matter not simply of technique but of social authority: how to speak publicly, to whom, and in whose name. Susan Sniader Lanser here explores patterns of narration in a wide range of novels by women of England, France, and the United States from the 1740s to the present. Drawing upon narratological and feminist theory, Lanser sheds new light on the history of "voice" as a narrative strategy and as a means of attaining social power.
This powerful argument reassess radical Islam and the set of ideas and assumptions at its core. Olivier Roy offers a challenging and highly original view that no-one trying to understand Islamic fundamentalism can afford to overlook.
A heart-wrenching story of how one young boy's life was forever changed during the Rwandan genocide Agabande, Rwanda, April 1994. Life is simple but good. Pascal and his brother go to school with their friends, their parents work hard, their little sister is growing up, and on Sunday almost everyone they know goes to church to thank God for his goodness. But lately, there have been whispers and suspicious glances around town, and messages of hate on the radio, and people are leaving. . . Then, in one awful night, Pascal’s ordinary life in the land of one thousand hills is turned upside down. One Thousand Hills an important story of the awful consequences of unfettered prejudice in the modern world, written by a survivor.
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 decisio...
When Roy Pascal died in 1980 he had all but completed a book on narrative viewpoint in Kafka's shorter fiction: the stories and sketches, as well as the numerous fables and parables. It was for Pascal a genuine voyage of discovery from which he believed he was bringing back significant observations that would contribute to a richer and more accurate assessment of Kafka's art. Prepared for publication by professors Martin Swales and Siegbert Prawer, the book was originally published in 1982 in the confident expectation that it had achieved the author's aim. Although it contains detailed analyses of individual works, the book is more than simply one further addition to the bewildering corpus of secondary literature on Kafka. For it is a study which manages to cut through many previous critical controversies by paying scrupulous attention to matters of literary and stylistic technique.
Presents a collection of critical essays about Kafka's The metamorphosis.
Interim Judaism Jewish Thought in a Century of Crisis Michael L. Morgan Probes the impact of the 20th century on Jewish belief and practice. Confronting the challenges of the 20th century, from modernity and the Great War to the Holocaust and postmodern culture, Jewish thinkers have wrestled with such fundamental issues as redemption and revelation, eternity and history, messianism and politics. From the turn of the century through the 1920s, European Jewish intellectuals confronted alienation and the challenges of modernity by seeking secure grounds for a meaningful life. After the Holocaust and the fall of Nazism, the rich results of their thinking -- on topics such as transcendence, redem...
In this important volume, Graziella Parati examines the ways in which Italian women writers articulate their identities through autobiography - a public act that is also the creation of a private life. Considering autobiographical writings by five women writers from the seventeenth century to the present, Parati draws important connections between self-writing and the debate over women's roles, both traditional and transgressive. Parati considers the first prose autobiography written by an Italian woman - Camilla Faa Gonzaga's 1622 memoir - as her beginning point, citing it as a central "pre-text". Parati then examines the autobiographies of Enif Robert, Fausta Cialente, Rita Levi Montalcini, and Luisa Passerini. Through her discussion of these women's writings, she demonstrates the complex negotiations over identity contained within them, negotiations that challenge dichotomies between male and female, maternal and paternal, and private and public. Public History, Private Stories is a compelling exploration of the disparate identities created by these women through the act of writing autobiography.