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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... narratives (and, later, autobiographies by minorities) were written in eloquent protest against just that invisibility, supporting the cardinal tenet of Whitman's idealistic democratic creed, that distinction was possible for anybody.15 ...
... narratives (and, later, autobiographies by minorities) were written in eloquent protest against just that invisibility, supporting the cardinal tenet of Whitman's idealistic democratic creed, that distinction was possible for anybody.15 ...
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... Narrative. Although the elements of style can be isolated and classified—diction (colloquial, formal, euphuistic, detached), syntax (long or short, periodic or declarative), rhythm (muscular or dreamy, syncopated or neutral), form ...
... Narrative. Although the elements of style can be isolated and classified—diction (colloquial, formal, euphuistic, detached), syntax (long or short, periodic or declarative), rhythm (muscular or dreamy, syncopated or neutral), form ...
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... narrative with witty literalness along a series of grids, each containing nine images, which change as we turn the page: tools, pipes, tapes, artist's supplies, books; rugs, pillows, throws; the contents of bathroom, kitchen, and studio ...
... narrative with witty literalness along a series of grids, each containing nine images, which change as we turn the page: tools, pipes, tapes, artist's supplies, books; rugs, pillows, throws; the contents of bathroom, kitchen, and studio ...
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... who happens to be its chronicler. She adds no moral reflections. Indeed, viewing subjectivity as a gilded trap, she declares provocatively: “Gertrude Stein never had subconscious reactions.”26 By playing with narrative.
... who happens to be its chronicler. She adds no moral reflections. Indeed, viewing subjectivity as a gilded trap, she declares provocatively: “Gertrude Stein never had subconscious reactions.”26 By playing with narrative.
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... narrative time in a casual manner, like an aleatoric composer or a speaker losing her place, shuttling back and forth between present and past, she avoids a merely linear movement and concentrates on an external reality as wide as the ...
... narrative time in a casual manner, like an aleatoric composer or a speaker losing her place, shuttling back and forth between present and past, she avoids a merely linear movement and concentrates on an external reality as wide as the ...
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