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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... soul of Fabricating Lives is my wife and loving friend, Susan Yankowitz, who has entered so completely into the composition of the book. She has patiently read and edited draft after sweaty draft, removing obscurities and purple patches ...
... soul of Fabricating Lives is my wife and loving friend, Susan Yankowitz, who has entered so completely into the composition of the book. She has patiently read and edited draft after sweaty draft, removing obscurities and purple patches ...
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... soul, I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass. Creeds and schools in abeyance, Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten, I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard ...
... soul, I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass. Creeds and schools in abeyance, Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten, I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard ...
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... soul, thus not only disobeying but teasing the Puritan censor and going unpunished for his brazen transgressions. Though he started with “I” and punned slyly and bossily on the verb “assume,” he ended with “you,” establishing a sociable ...
... soul, thus not only disobeying but teasing the Puritan censor and going unpunished for his brazen transgressions. Though he started with “I” and punned slyly and bossily on the verb “assume,” he ended with “you,” establishing a sociable ...
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... soul was anointed with God's grace, did not touch all. This fact led to an anxious scrutiny of signs that indicated the person was one of the chosen—and neglect of the Puritan's daily life as merchant, judge, husband, father, and friend ...
... soul was anointed with God's grace, did not touch all. This fact led to an anxious scrutiny of signs that indicated the person was one of the chosen—and neglect of the Puritan's daily life as merchant, judge, husband, father, and friend ...
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... soul-life of the multitudes,”22 but what kind of “soul-life” could flourish in a sunless rear tenement, where space for an expansive identity shrank to the size of a grave plot? Distinction seemed an unlikely goal to powerless workers ...
... soul-life of the multitudes,”22 but what kind of “soul-life” could flourish in a sunless rear tenement, where space for an expansive identity shrank to the size of a grave plot? Distinction seemed an unlikely goal to powerless workers ...
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