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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... word processor for one more revision. My debt to her for her collaboration cannot be adequately conveyed in words. Preface MY EARLY INTEREST in autobiography began innocently with Walt.
... word processor for one more revision. My debt to her for her collaboration cannot be adequately conveyed in words. Preface MY EARLY INTEREST in autobiography began innocently with Walt.
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... words, who move through time and live in a physical world that confines and presses hard on them, whether in the Mississippi Delta or in a leafy New Jersey suburb. In the vignettes of Twenty Years at Hull-House, her autobiography, Jane ...
... words, who move through time and live in a physical world that confines and presses hard on them, whether in the Mississippi Delta or in a leafy New Jersey suburb. In the vignettes of Twenty Years at Hull-House, her autobiography, Jane ...
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... words like the debonair grace of Fred Astaire as he dances on ceilings or partners a hatrack. Style mediates between fact and the interpretation of fact. When the particulars about a parent, a failed relationship, a career setback, or a ...
... words like the debonair grace of Fred Astaire as he dances on ceilings or partners a hatrack. Style mediates between fact and the interpretation of fact. When the particulars about a parent, a failed relationship, a career setback, or a ...
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... gift for imaginative writing” or for making “a language change its sound or words their meaning, which is the faculty of poets.” “I can describe things and persons, narrate facts,”11 he avers modestly, and indeed he does not milk.
... gift for imaginative writing” or for making “a language change its sound or words their meaning, which is the faculty of poets.” “I can describe things and persons, narrate facts,”11 he avers modestly, and indeed he does not milk.
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... words, Dahlberg puts in his bid for literary immortality, singing out his epic theme—sensuality, sex, flesh—and embedding his words, the jewels of a bankrupt character, he would say, in a mythic setting. Those homely Middle American ...
... words, Dahlberg puts in his bid for literary immortality, singing out his epic theme—sensuality, sex, flesh—and embedding his words, the jewels of a bankrupt character, he would say, in a mythic setting. Those homely Middle American ...
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