The Claims of Experience: Autobiography and American Democracy

ISBN-13: 9780190060695 / Angielski / Twarda / 2019 / 276 str.

Nolan Bennett

Recenzje

Autobiography creates community. This is the bold, paradoxical claim that Nolan Bennett explores in this magnificent history of life writing in U.S. political thought. Bennett sheds new light on classic autobiographers, Benjamin Franklin and Frederick Douglass, while disclosing the intellectual riches of the relatively neglected Henry Adams, Emma Goldman, and Whittaker Chambers. This careful, thorough book will have a long shelf life as an alternative history of American political thought.

O autorze

Nolan Bennett is an Assistant Professor of Democracy and Justice Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay. He is a scholar of American political thought, and his research considers why and to what effect historical actors and movements ground their claims for democratic justice in personal experience. He recovers genres like autobiography, slave narrative, and prison writing as appeals to popular authority and representation not found in state or electoral politics. Nolan is particularly interested in issues of prison reform and punishment in the United States, inspired by the long history of prison writing, and with a committed interest to teaching in carceral spaces.