The Life Writing of Otherness: Woolf, Baldwin, Kingston, and Winterson

ISBN-13: 9780815336556 / Angielski / Twarda / 2002 / 212 str.

Lauren Rusk;Rusk Lauren

Opis

This work demonstrates a multifaceted approach to autobiographical writing by those the dominant deem other than themselves. Focusing on four major texts of multiculturalism, the author examines how they each represent the self as unique, as collectively othered, and as inclusively human, and how these opposing aspects of selfhood interact. Rusk also analyzes the strategies that the writers speak about to their multiple, divided audiences. For these authors, articulating a life experience and a selfhood more complex than society admits, is an act of repudiation and transgression that bursts the confines of genre. Rusk therefore considers as well the ways each hybrid work draws meaning from its diverse generic roots.

Recenzje

"Rusk chooses these ‘hybrid texts’ because of their challenge to readers ‘to work through puzzles in ways that mirror the writers’ own struggles to wrest sense from the contradictions they’ve faced. Thus the books strive to transform how their readers perceive one another and, ultimately, how they act’ (1). . . ." -- Jeanette McVicker, Biography

Spis treści

Chapter 1 CHAPTER ONE Reading the Life Writing of Otherness; Chapter 2 CHAPTER TWO The Common Life of Uncommon Women; Chapter 3 CHAPTER THREE The Personal Passion of Collective Selfhood; Chapter 4 CHAPTER FOUR The Hard-Won Harmonics of Selfhood; Chapter 5 CHAPTER FIVE The Refusal of Otherness; Notes; Works Cited Index;

O autorze

Lauren Rusk teaches at Stanford University.