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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... say this picture appalled us, and made us “rather bear those ills we had, Than fly to others, that we knew not of. ”5 As a piece of extended storytelling, this passage cannot be surpassed. But it also depicts the cruelty of a specific ...
... say this picture appalled us, and made us “rather bear those ills we had, Than fly to others, that we knew not of. ”5 As a piece of extended storytelling, this passage cannot be surpassed. But it also depicts the cruelty of a specific ...
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... says, “is a profound social and psychological truth”10—a proposition that can be examined by juxtaposing a few paragraphs of the autobiographies of Virgil Thomson and Edward Dahlberg. Both men begin their books with an evocation of ...
... says, “is a profound social and psychological truth”10—a proposition that can be examined by juxtaposing a few paragraphs of the autobiographies of Virgil Thomson and Edward Dahlberg. Both men begin their books with an evocation of ...
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... say, in a mythic setting. Those homely Middle American streets he played on as a child compete with the place names of antiquity; Kansas City and Smyrna exist on the same latitude, sister towns. The reader is at first disconcerted by ...
... say, in a mythic setting. Those homely Middle American streets he played on as a child compete with the place names of antiquity; Kansas City and Smyrna exist on the same latitude, sister towns. The reader is at first disconcerted by ...
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... say, and indeed for engaging clarity as an expositor of musical practices and ideas he has few peers. In Virgil Thomson, he seldom ventures into introspection. When he does, he grows quizzical, gingerly, as though flexing a rusty skill ...
... say, and indeed for engaging clarity as an expositor of musical practices and ideas he has few peers. In Virgil Thomson, he seldom ventures into introspection. When he does, he grows quizzical, gingerly, as though flexing a rusty skill ...
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... say. The reader is tantalized, confused, by this breach not of manners but of consistency, of surefootedness. In the last chapter of Virgil Thomson, the composer unexpectedly drops his temperate “I” and adopts the third person again ...
... say. The reader is tantalized, confused, by this breach not of manners but of consistency, of surefootedness. In the last chapter of Virgil Thomson, the composer unexpectedly drops his temperate “I” and adopts the third person again ...
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