Modern Confessional Writing: New Critical Essays

ISBN-13: 9780415339698 / Angielski / Twarda / 2005 / 208 str.

Jo Gill

Opis

"Modern Confessional Writing" offers the first comprehensive and scholarly account of this popular and influential genre. The essays in this collection take as their subject confessional literature from the mid-twentieth century to the present day, including the writing of John Berryman, Anne Sexton, Ted Hughes and Helen Fielding.
Drawing on a wide range of examples the contributors to this volume evaluate - and in most cases critique - conventional readings of confessionalism. Orthodox, humanist notions of the literary confession, and its assumed relationship to truth authority and subjectivity are challenged, in their place a range of critical perspectives and practices are adopted, utilizing the insights of contemporary critical theorists. "Modern Confessional Writing "develops and tests new, theoretically-informed perspectives on what confessional writing is, how it functions and what it means to both writer and reader. When read from these new perspectives modern confessional writing is liberated from the misconception it provides a kind of easy authorial release and readerly catharsis, and is instead read as a discursive, self-reflexive, sophisticated and demanding genre.

Spis treści

Introduction.  Dangerous Confessions: The Problem of Reading Sylvia Plath Biographically.  Confessing the Body: Plath, Sexton, Berryman, Lowell, Ginsberg and the Gendered Poetics of the ‘Real’.  ‘To Feel with a Human Stranger’: Adrienne Rich's Post-Holocaust Confession and the Limits of Identification.  ‘Your Story. My Story’: Confessional Writing and the Case of Birthday Letters.  Bridget Jones’s Diary: Confessing Post-Feminism.  ‘The Memoir as Self-Destruction’: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.  Truth, Confession, and the Post-Apartheid Black Consciousness in Njabulo Ndebele’s The Cry of Winnie Mandela.  Personal Performances: The Resistant Confessions of Bobby Baker.  Death Sentences: Confessions of Living with Dying in Narratives of Terminal Illness.  Cultures of Confession/Cultures of Testimony: Turning the Subject Inside Out.  How We Confess Now: Reading the Abu Ghraib Archive.  Index

O autorze

Jo Gill