The Entangled Self: Genre Bondage in the Age of the Memoir
@article{Miller2007TheES, title={The Entangled Self: Genre Bondage in the Age of the Memoir}, author={Nancy K. Miller}, journal={PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America}, year={2007}, volume={122}, pages={537 - 548} }
So, I'm just like everybody else. I go to the bookstore. I pick out a book I love. If it says memoir, I know that—that maybe the names and dates and times have been compressed, because that' what a memoir is. —Oprah Winfrey on Larry King Live, 11 January 2006 I wanted the stories in the book to ebb and flow, to have dramatic arcs, to have the tension that all great stories require. I altered events all the way through the book. —James Frey, New York Times, 2 February 2006 Sometimes the facts…
83 Citations
Memoir, Truthiness, and the Power of Oprah
- History
- 2012
After his memoir A Million Little Pieces became a best-selling selection for Oprah's Book Club in 2005, James Frey's meteoric rise as a major writer of the American memoir boom was cut short when it…
Truth and fiction: Or, orature and witnessing in Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone
- Art
- 2017
Abstract The publication in 2007 of Ishmael Beah’s memoir A Long Way Gone, which sold more than 62,000 copies within a few months, etched Sierra Leone in the global consciousness. The book’s…
BREAKING THE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL PACT: TRUTH AND LIFE-WRITING IN ALISON BECHDEL’S FUN HOME.
- Art
- 2020
Much of the focus on truth in critical responses to the novel has surrounded the use of archival evidence and the access to truth provided by the graphic medium. This article will explore these…
Telling What Is True: Truthiness and Fictional Truths in Hybrid (Non)Fiction
- Art
- 2015
In this essay, I propose that there is a logic behind the concept of truthiness that has permeated our categorizations of fiction and nonfiction, one that can shed light on the reception of truth…
Feminism Underground: The Comics Rhetoric of Lee Marrs and Roberta Gregory
- Art
- 2015
How these comics visualize and interrogate feminist forms while theorizing new possibilities for women engaging their politics through their bodies is considered, part of a lively domain of independent comics produced by women in the 1970s in coordination with the larger countercul- tural underground comics movement.
Confession and Forgiveness: A Pastoral Reading of A Father’s Son by Lionel Dahmer
- History
- 2011
This paper offers a pastoral reading of the memoir written by Lionel Dahmer, the father of the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. I suggest that the literary genre of the memoir provided Lionel with a…
Life Writing Lite: Judy Garland and Reparative Rhetorics of Celebrity Life Writing.
- Art
- 2010
The terms celebrity and controversy are becoming synonymous. For one thing, contemporary celebrities are often in trouble, and their alleged misdeeds stimulate streams of input and commentary from…
Is Relationality a Genre
- Art
- 2016
Anne Ruggemeier’s Die relationale Autobiographie (Relational Autobiography) lays out an ambitious and nuanced argument encompassing a wide range of theoretical claims about autobiography and…
The autobiographical pact and the selection of self in memoir
- Art
- 2016
This thesis examines the influence of spiritual conversion narratives on
autobiography and the novel. It traces a lineage from Augustine, to Bunyan,
Rousseau, early novels of the eighteenth…
Closing the Gap in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home
- Art
- 2008
Alison Bechdel's 2006 memoir, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, makes a strong and explicit claim for the power of graphic narrative as witness. Employing the straightforward visual style developed over…
References
SHOWING 1-10 OF 53 REFERENCES
A Million Little Pieces
- Psychology
- 2006
Having heard about James Frey’s “memoirs” from a number of my patients, and having been forewarned that he writes as an antagonist of Twelve-Step programs, I was somewhat reluctant to invest time and…
An Interview with Alison Bechdel
- Art
- 2006
Alison Bechdel's Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic takes place in the tiny, rural town of Beech Creek, Pennsylvania, and meditates on her closeted father's suicide in 1980 (a few months after Bechdel…
Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood
- Art
- 2000
Relating Narratives is a major new work by the philosopher and feminist thinker Adriana Cavarero. First published in Italian to widespread acclaim, Relating Narratives is a fascinating and…
The Confessions of a Bad Reader: Embodied Selves, Narrative Strategies, and Subversion in Israeli Women's Autobiography
- Art
- 2007
Since the 1992 quincentennial of the Iberian events of 1492, a large number of autobiographies by Jews who are not Ashkenazim have been published in a variety of languages. In this article, I seek to…
The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women's Autobiographical Writings
- Art
- 1988
This collection of twelve essays discusses the principles and practices of women's autobiographical writing in the United States, England, and France from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries.…
Representing others: gender and the subjects of autobiography
- Art
- 1994
Women authors use distinctive patterns of self-representation in their autobiographical works. In 1980, Mary Mason claimed that female self-disclosure comes in the form of an alternate identity that…
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
- Art
- 2006
One of the most eagerly anticipated graphic memoirs of recent years, Fun Home is a darkly funny family tale, pitch-perfectly illustrated with Alison Bechdel's sweetly gothic drawings. Like Marjane…
The Afterlife
- ArtLeonardo
- 2003
In 2001, the artists’ group Radiant Atmospheres designed and built our second art installation for Burning Man. Following the theme “Seven Ages,” we expanded on it by considering that wakeful state…
Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical
- History
- 1980
Professor Olney gathers together in this book some of the best and most important writings on autobiography produced in the past two decades.Originally published in 1980.The Princeton Legacy Library…
The Auto/biographical: The theory and practice of feminist auto/biography
- Art
- 1992
Introduction: On feminism, culture politics and post/modern selves enter the author, the auto/biographical I. Part 1 On auto/bimography: fictions and lives the presumptive feminist reinscribing "bio"…