Fabricating Lives: Explorations in American AutobiographyKnopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2013 M04 3 - 400 páginas How does the autobiographer want us to perceive him? How do we penetrate the memoirist’s strategies and subterfuges—sometimes conscious, usually—brilliant—and discover the real person screened behind them? In this fresh and provocative approach to the reading of autobiography, Herbert Leibowitz explores the self-portraits of eight Americans whose lives span almost two centuries and encompass a stunning range of personality and circumstances: Benjamin Franklin, Louis Sullivan, Jane Addams, Emma Goldman, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, Richard Wright, and Edward Dahlberg. In pursuit of clues to both the human essence and the literary artifice of each, he examines their styles (Franklin’s plain talk and “possum’s wit,” Sullivan’s “gilded abstractions,” Stein’s “gossipy ventriloquism,” Williams’s “grumpy clowning” and foxy innocence), their metaphors, and their choices of incident, looking beyond their visions of themselves to their true identities. In American autobiography particularly Leibowitz finds an extraordinary medley of voices—from the balanced objectivity of Addams and the heated oratory of Goldman, as each encounters the promises and failures of the democratic ideal, to the uneasy self-consciousness of Wright, reflecting the tensions of growing up in a world he did not trust, and the baroque contrivances of Dahlberg, who painted himself in mythic proportions on the American canvas. As he guides us through the labyrinths and mazes of these self-histories, Leibowitz relates the material to a wide cross section of the American experience and helps to interpret our history. His engrossing and highly original book is both a contribution to biographical criticism and a vivid recapturing of some remarkable American lives. |
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... memory, personal ideologies splintered. Retrieving the past frequently proved unreliable, as though an unstable conjuror had his finger on memory's switch.6 Blank or faded pages got sewn into the book of every life. A detailed ...
... memory, personal ideologies splintered. Retrieving the past frequently proved unreliable, as though an unstable conjuror had his finger on memory's switch.6 Blank or faded pages got sewn into the book of every life. A detailed ...
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... memory's stream,”2 as Virgil Thomson puts it, and at other times a comedy of delusions that also bears witness to a historical epoch's contradictions. We are interested in the man or woman who, Henry Adams observes, can steal the bells ...
... memory's stream,”2 as Virgil Thomson puts it, and at other times a comedy of delusions that also bears witness to a historical epoch's contradictions. We are interested in the man or woman who, Henry Adams observes, can steal the bells ...
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... memory more painstakingly for the causes of an infirm and sinful will than Saint Augustine in his Confessions; the inside is, for Augustine, the site of divinity and guilt, friendship and carnal desire, a sacred space overcast by the ...
... memory more painstakingly for the causes of an infirm and sinful will than Saint Augustine in his Confessions; the inside is, for Augustine, the site of divinity and guilt, friendship and carnal desire, a sacred space overcast by the ...
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... memory lapse or a photographic contact sheet that was dipped into the wrong chemical solution and did not print. Accident artfully disarranges rigid order. Then the viewer's eyes, momentarily blocked, resume their scanning of the grids ...
... memory lapse or a photographic contact sheet that was dipped into the wrong chemical solution and did not print. Accident artfully disarranges rigid order. Then the viewer's eyes, momentarily blocked, resume their scanning of the grids ...
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... memory the more its stored secretions flow,”32 Henry James muses in A Small Boy and Others. Where many autobiographers experience dearth or diffidence, James has easy access to his unconscious; the sponge never runs dry. In fact, he ...
... memory the more its stored secretions flow,”32 Henry James muses in A Small Boy and Others. Where many autobiographers experience dearth or diffidence, James has easy access to his unconscious; the sponge never runs dry. In fact, he ...
Contenido
The Autobiography of Benjamin | |
Louis Sullivans | |
Jane Addamss Twenty Years at Hull | |
Emma Goldmans Living My Life | |
Gertrude Steins | |
The Autobiography of William | |
Richard Wrights Black | |
Edward Dahlbergs Because I | |
Notes | |
Otras ediciones - Ver todas
Fabricating Lives: Explorations in American Autobiography Herbert A. Leibowitz Vista previa limitada - 1991 |
Términos y frases comunes
Addams’s Alexander Berkman American Hunger anarchists architecture artistic authority Autobiography of Alice beauty Benjamin Franklin Black Boy boy’s Chicago child childhood conflict consciousness culture death democracy democratic Douglass dream Edward Dahlberg Emma Goldman emotional essay experience eyes faith father fear feelings felt flesh flowers Frank Lloyd Wright friends Gertrude Stein God’s heart Hull-House human Ibid ideal ideas identity imagination immigrant influence James James’s Jane Addams John letter Library of America literary Living Lizzie Louis Sullivan man’s memory mind moral mother narrative nature never one’s paragraph Paris passion phrase poem poet political Pound prose Puritan reader reflection revolutionary Richard Richard Wright says seems sense sentences sexual social society son’s soul spirit style thing Thomson thought Toklas University Press Virgil Thomson voice Vollard William Carlos Williams Williams’s woman women words Wright writing York young