This work explores the "authority" of autobiography in several related senses: first, the idea that autobiography is authoritative writing because it is presumably verifiable; second, the idea that one's life is one's exclusive textual domain; third, the idea that, because of the apparent congruence between the implicit ideology of the genre and that of the nation, autobiography has a special prestige in America. Aware of the recent critiques of the notion of autobiography as issuing from, determined by, or referring to a pre-existing self, Couser examines the ways in which the authority of...
This work explores the "authority" of autobiography in several related senses: first, the idea that autobiography is authoritative writing because it ...
This is a provocative look at writing by and about people with illness or disability in particular HIV/AIDS, breast cancer, deafness, and paralysis who challenge the stigmas attached to their conditions by telling their lives in their own ways and on their own terms. Discussing memoirs, diaries, collaborative narratives, photo documentaries, essays, and other forms of life writing, G. Thomas Couser shows that these books are not primarily records of medical conditions; they are a means for individuals to recover their bodies (or those of loved ones) from marginalization and impersonal medical...
This is a provocative look at writing by and about people with illness or disability in particular HIV/AIDS, breast cancer, deafness, and paralysis wh...
This text focuses on the writing by and about people with illness or disability - and in particular HIV/AIDS, breast cancer, deafness and paralysis - challenging the stigmas attached to their conditions by telling their lives in their own ways and on their own terms. Discussing memoirs, diaries, collaborative narratives, photo documentaries, essays and other forms of life writing, G. Thomas Couser shows that these books are not primarily records of medical conditions; they are a means for individuals to recover their bodies (or those of loved ones) from marginalization and impersonal medical...
This text focuses on the writing by and about people with illness or disability - and in particular HIV/AIDS, breast cancer, deafness and paralysis - ...
The essays in this collection explore new directions in autobiography studies. Examining a wide range of texts, from narratives of suicide survivors, cross-dressers, and people with HIV/AIDS to self-representations in the visual arts, the collection demonstrates how writers have used the postmodern experience fragmentation to forge new kinds of identities.
Postmodern selves, the essayists argue, are relational selves, constructed from the acute need to find identity through collaboration with others. Postmodern autobiography emerges as a search, amid shocks to the stable self, for wider...
The essays in this collection explore new directions in autobiography studies. Examining a wide range of texts, from narratives of suicide survivor...
"My primary concern is with the ethics of representing vulnerable subjects persons who are liable to exposure by someone with whom they are involved in an intimate or trust-based relationship, unable to represent themselves in writing, or unable to offer meaningful consent to their representation by someone else. . . . Of primary importance is intimate life writing that done within families or couples, close relationships, or quasi-professional relationships that involve trust rather than conventional biography, which can be written by a stranger. The closer the relationship between writer...
"My primary concern is with the ethics of representing vulnerable subjects persons who are liable to exposure by someone with whom they are involved i...
"Thomas Couser's Signifying Bodies comes at a crucial moment when debates about physician assisted suicide, genetic engineering, and neo-natal screening are raising the question of what constitutes a 'life worth living' for persons with disabilities. Couser's work engages these debates by exploring the extensive number of personal narratives by or about persons with disabilities. As Couser brilliantly demonstrates through synoptic readings, these works challenge the 'preferred rhetorics' by which such narratives are usually written (triumphalist, gothic, nostalgic) while making...
"Thomas Couser's Signifying Bodies comes at a crucial moment when debates about physician assisted suicide, genetic engineering, and neo-nat...
As much as we may like to evade them, illness and disability inescapably attend human embodiment - we are all vulnerable subjects. So it might seem natural and inevitable that the most universal, most democratic, form of literature - autobiography - should address these common features of human experience. Yet for the most part, autobiographical writing expressive of illness and disability remained quite uncommon until the second half of the twentieth century, when it flourished concurrently with successive civil rights movements. Women's liberation, with its signature manifesto Our...
As much as we may like to evade them, illness and disability inescapably attend human embodiment - we are all vulnerable subjects. So it might seem...
