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Overview
In astute and compelling readings of texts by Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Dorothy Allison, Mikal Gilmore, Jamaica Kincaid, and Jeanette Winterson, Gilmore explores how each of them poses the questions, "How have I lived? How will I live?" in relation to the social and psychic forms within which trauma emerges. Challenging the very boundaries of autobiography as well as trauma, these stories are not told in conventional ways: the writers testify to how self-representation and the representation of trauma grow beyond simple causes and effects, exceed their duration in time, and connect to other forms of historical, familial, and personal pain. In their movement from an overtly testimonial form to one that draws on legal as well as literary knowledge, such texts produce an alternative means of confronting kinship, violence, and self-representation.
About the Author:
Leigh Gilmore is Associate Professor of English at The Ohio State University. She is the author of Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Self-Representation, also from Cornell, and coeditor of Autobiography and Postmodernism.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9781501770777 |
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Publisher: | Cornell University Press |
Publication date: | 07/15/2023 |
Edition description: | with a new preface |
Pages: | 186 |
Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d) |
Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Table of Contents
Introduction: The Limits of Autobiography1. Represent Yourself2. Bastard Testimony: Illegitimacy and Incest in Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina3. There Will Always Be a Father: Transference and the Auto/biographical Demand in Mikal Gilmore's Shot in the Heart4. There Will Always Be a Mother: Jamaica Kincaid's Serial Autobiography5. Without Names: An Anatomy of Absence in Jeanette Winterson's Written on the BodyConclusion: The Knowing Subject and an Alternative Jurisprudence of TraumaWhat People are Saying About This
The Limits of Autobiography is as foundational as a book gets. Gilmore theorizes late-twentieth-century first-person narrative aesthetics as a calculus among trauma, representation, and language. Her thinking is lyrical and astute, and still crackles two decades later. What an indispensable fundament for engaging autobiography, memoir, and autotheory.
Leigh Gilmore's brilliant analysis of limit-case narratives offers a blueprint to advance our understanding of survivors' writings, and courageously validates creativity as a force to tell our truths.
Leigh Gilmore easily negotiates disparate fields of scholarship yet speaks significantly to all of them—from poststructuralist and feminist theory to medical studies of trauma. Her arguments are theoretically sophisticated and engaging, while her thinking about the individual texts is lucid, arresting, and new.
This book remains an extraordinarily important contribution to trauma theory. Leigh Gilmore is a brilliant theorist of narrative experimentation, showing how writing about trauma compels interdisciplinary and cross-genre work. She challenges us to rethink many of the more accepted conventions regarding autobiographical writing, insisting on the partial and complex aspects of trauma narrative as well as the role of experimental forms for survival.