Paul John Eakin's Books

Living Autobiographically

How We Create Identity in Narrative

By: Paul John Eakin

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Living Autobiographically

How We Create Identity in Narrative

By: Paul John Eakin

Autobiography is naturally regarded as an art of retrospect, but making autobiography is equally part of the fabric of our ongoing experience. We tell the stories of our lives piecemeal, and these stories are not merely about our selves but also an integral part of them. In this way we "live autobiographically"; we have narrative identities. In this book, noted life-writing scholar Paul John Eakin explores the intimate, dynamic connection between our selves and our stories, between narrative and identity in everyday life. He draws on a wide range of autobiographical writings from work by Jonathan Franzen, Mary Karr, and André Aciman to the New York Times series "Portraits of Grief" memorializing the victims of 9/11, as well as the latest insights into identity formation from the fields of developmental psychology, cultural anthropology, and neurobiology. In his account, the self-fashioning in which we routinely, even automatically, engage is largely conditioned by social norms and biological necessities. We are taught by others how to say who we are, while at the same time our sense of self is shaped decisively by our lives in and as bodies. For Eakin, autobiography is always an act of self-determination, no matter what the circumstances, and he stresses its adaptive value as an art that helps to anchor our shifting selves in time.

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205

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Cornell University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0801457319

ISBN 13

9780801457319

How Our Lives Become Stories

Making Selves

By: Paul John Eakin

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How Our Lives Become Stories

Making Selves

By: Paul John Eakin

The popularity of such books as Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes, Mary Karr's The Liars' Club, and Kathryn Harrison's controversial The Kiss, has led columnists to call ours "the age of memoir." And while some critics have derided the explosion of memoir as exhibitionistic and self-aggrandizing, literary theorists are now beginning to look seriously at this profusion of autobiographical literature. Informed by literary, scientific, and experiential concerns, How Our Lives Become Stories enhances knowledge of the complex forces that shape identity, and confronts the equally complex problems that arise when we write about who we think we are. Using life writings as examples—including works by Christa Wolf, Art Spiegelman, Oliver Sacks, Henry Louis Gates, Melanie Thernstrom, and Philip Roth—Paul John Eakin draws on the latest research in neurology, cognitive science, memory studies, developmental psychology, and related fields to rethink the very nature of self-representation. After showing how the experience of living in one's body shapes one's identity, he explores relational and narrative modes of being, emphasizing social sources of identity, and demonstrating that the self and the story of the self are constantly evolving in relation to others. Eakin concludes by engaging the ethical issues raised by the conflict between the authorial impulse to life writing and a traditional, privacy-based ethics that such writings often violate.

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223

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Cornell University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1501711830

ISBN 13

9781501711831

Touching the World

Reference in Autobiography

By: Paul John Eakin

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Touching the World

Reference in Autobiography

By: Paul John Eakin

Paul John Eakin's earlier work Fictions in Autobiography is a key text in autobiography studies. In it he proposed that the self that finds expression in autobiography is in fundamental ways a kind of fictive construct, a fiction articulated in a fiction. In this new book Eakin turns his attention to what he sees as the defining assumption of autobiography: that the story of the self does refer to a world of biographical and historical fact. Here he shows that people write autobiography not in some private realm of the autonomous self but rather in strenuous engagement with the pressures that life in culture entails. In so demonstrating, he offers fresh readings of autobiographies by Roland Barthes, Nathalie Sarraute, William Maxwell, Henry James, Ronald Fraser, Richard Rodriguez, Henry Adams, Patricia Hampl, John Updike, James McConkey, and Lillian Hellman. In the introduction Eakin makes a case for reopening the file on reference in autobiography, and in the first chapter he establishes the complexity of the referential aesthetic of the genre, the intricate interplay of fact and fiction in such texts. In subsequent chapters he explores some of the major contexts of reference in autobiography: the biographical, the social and cultural, the historical, and finally, underlying all the rest, the somatic and temporal dimensions of the lived experience of identity. In his discussion of contemporary theories of the self, Eakin draws especially on cultural anthropology and developmental psychology.

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259

Publisher

Princeton University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1400820642

ISBN 13

9781400820641

How Our Lives Become Stories

Making Selves

By: Paul John Eakin

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How Our Lives Become Stories

Making Selves

By: Paul John Eakin

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223

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Cornell University Press

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ISBN 10

1501711830

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9781501711831

Fictions in Autobiography

Studies in the Art of Self-Invention

By: Paul John Eakin

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Fictions in Autobiography

Studies in the Art of Self-Invention

By: Paul John Eakin

Investigating autobiographical writing of Mary McCarthy, Henry James, Jean-Paul Sartre, Saul Friedlander, and Maxine Hong Kingston, this book argues that autobiographical truth is not a fixed but an evolving content in a process of self-creation. Further, Paul John Eakin contends, the self at the center of all autobiography is necessarily fictive. Professor Eakin shows that the autobiographical impulse is simply a special form of reflexive consciousness: from a developmental viewpoint, the autobiographical act is a mode of self-invention always practiced first in living and only eventually, and occasionally, in writing. Originally published in 1985. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

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300

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Princeton University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1400854792

ISBN 13

9781400854790

Writing Life Writing

Narrative, History, Autobiography

By: Paul Eakin

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Writing Life Writing

Narrative, History, Autobiography

By: Paul Eakin

Why do we endlessly tell the stories of our lives? And why do others pay attention when we do? The essays collected here address these questions, focusing on three different but interrelated dimensions of life writing. The first section, "Narrative," argues that narrative is not only a literary form but also a social and cultural practice, and finally a mode of cognition and an expression of our most basic physiology. The next section, "Life Writing: Historical Forms," makes the case for the historical value of the subjectivity recorded in ego-documents. The essays in the final section, "Autobiography Now," identify primary motives for engaging in self-narration in an age characterized by digital media and quantum cosmology.

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Page Count

170

Publisher

Routledge

Published Date

ISBN 10

1000088103

ISBN 13

9781000088106

Living Autobiographically

How We Create Identity in Narrative

By: Paul John Eakin

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Living Autobiographically

How We Create Identity in Narrative

By: Paul John Eakin

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205

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Cornell University Press

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ISBN 10

0801457319

ISBN 13

9780801457319

Touching the World

Reference in Autobiography

By: Paul John Eakin

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Touching the World

Reference in Autobiography

By: Paul John Eakin

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259

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Princeton University Press

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ISBN 10

1400820642

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9781400820641

Narrative and Genre

Contexts and Types of Communication

By: Paul Thompson

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Narrative and Genre

Contexts and Types of Communication

By: Paul Thompson

Any life story, whether a written autobiography or an oral testimony, is shaped not only by the reworkings of experience through memory and re-evaluation, but also by art. Any communication has to use shared conventions not only of language itself, but also the more complex expectations of ""genre,"" the forms expected within a given context and type of communication. This collection of essays by international academics draws on a wide range of disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities to examine how far the expectations and forms of genre shape different kinds of autobiography and influence what messages they can convey. After investigating the problem of genre definition, and tracing the evolution of genre as a concept, contributors explore such issues as: How far can we argue that what people narrate in their autobiographical stories is selected and shaped by the repertoire of genre available to them? To what extent is oral autobiography shaped by its social and cultural context? What is the relationship between autobiographical sources and the ethnographer? Narrative and Genre presents exciting new debates in an emerging field and will encourage international and interdisciplinary discussion. Its authors and contributors are scholars from the fields of anthropology, cultural studies, literary analysis, psychology, psychoanalysis, social history, and sociology.

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216

Publisher

Routledge

Published Date

ISBN 10

1351503898

ISBN 13

9781351503891

Fictions in Autobiography

Studies in the Art of Self-Invention

By: Paul John Eakin

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Fictions in Autobiography

Studies in the Art of Self-Invention

By: Paul John Eakin

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300

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Princeton University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1400854792

ISBN 13

9781400854790

The Future Without a Past

The Humanities in a Technological Society

By: John Paul Russo

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The Future Without a Past

The Humanities in a Technological Society

By: John Paul Russo

Argues that technological imperatives like rationalization, universalism, monism, and autonomy have transformed the humanities and altered the relation between humans and nature. Examines technology and its impact on education, historical memory, and technological and literary values in criticism and theory, concluding with an analysis of the fiction of Don DeLillo"--Provided by publisher.

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325

Publisher

University of Missouri Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0826264735

ISBN 13

9780826264732

Play and the Politics of Reading

The Social Uses of Modernist Form

By: Paul B. Armstrong

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Play and the Politics of Reading

The Social Uses of Modernist Form

By: Paul B. Armstrong

Classrooms and curricula should be structured to foster the playful interaction that can teach students how to negotiate social and political differences in an emancipatory, noncoercive manner.... Teaching reading as a playful exercise of reciprocity with otherness can help prepare students for a democracy understood as a community of communities."—from the "Pedagogical Postscript" Reading is socially useful, in Paul B. Armstrong's view, and can model democratic interaction by a community unconstrained by the need to build consensus but aware of the dangers of violence, irrationality, and anarchy. Reading requires mutual recognition but need not culminate in agreement, Armstrong says; instead, the social potential of reading arises from the active exchange of attitudes, ideas, and values between author and reader and among readers. Play and the Politics of Reading, which has important implications for education, draws on Wolfgang Iser's notion of free play to offer a valuable response to social problems. Armstrong finds that Joseph Conrad, E. M. Forster, Henry James, and James Joyce provide apt examples of the politics of reading, for reasons both literary and political. In making the transition from realism to modernism, these authors experimented with narrative strategies that seek simultaneously to represent the world and to question the means of representation itself. The formal ambiguities and complexities of such texts as Howards End and Ulysses are ways of staging for the reader the difficulties and opportunities of a world of differences. Innovative formal structures challenge readers to reconsider their assumptions and beliefs about social issues.

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224

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Cornell University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1501720651

ISBN 13

9781501720659

The Global Remapping of American Literature

By: Paul Giles

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The Global Remapping of American Literature

By: Paul Giles

This book charts how the cartographies of American literature as an institutional category have varied radically across different times and places. Arguing that American literature was consolidated as a distinctively nationalist entity only in the wake of the U.S. Civil War, Paul Giles identifies this formation as extending until the beginning of the Reagan presidency in 1981. He contrasts this with the more amorphous boundaries of American culture in the eighteenth century, and with ways in which conditions of globalization at the turn of the twenty-first century have reconfigured the parameters of the subject. In light of these fluctuating conceptions of space, Giles suggests new ways of understanding the shifting territory of American literary history. ranging from Cotton Mather to David Foster Wallace, and from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to Zora Neale Hurston. Giles considers why European medievalism and Native American prehistory were crucial to classic nineteenth-century authors such as Emerson, Hawthorne, and Melville. He discusses how twentieth-century technological innovations, such as air travel, affected representations of the national domain in the texts of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein. And he analyzes how regional projections of the South and the Pacific Northwest helped to shape the work of writers such as William Gilmore Simms, José Martí, Elizabeth Bishop, and William Gibson. Bringing together literary analysis, political history, and cultural geography, The Global Remapping of American Literature reorients the subject for the transnational era.

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340

Publisher

Princeton University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0691180784

ISBN 13

9780691180786

The Making of the Modern Police, 1780–1914, Part I Vol 3

By: Paul Lawrence,Francis Dodsworth,Robert M Morris

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The Making of the Modern Police, 1780–1914, Part I Vol 3

By: Paul Lawrence,Francis Dodsworth,Robert M Morris

Over six volumes this edited collection of pamphlets, government publications, printed ephemera and manuscript sources looks at the development of the first modern police force. It will be of interest to social and political historians, criminologists and those interested in the development of the detective novel in nineteenth-century literature. This is Part I, Volume 3.

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1232

Publisher

Routledge

Published Date

ISBN 10

1000561976

ISBN 13

9781000561975

American Catholic Arts and Fictions

Culture, Ideology, Aesthetics

By: Paul Giles

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American Catholic Arts and Fictions

Culture, Ideology, Aesthetics

By: Paul Giles

Examines how secular transformations of religious ideas have helped to shape the style and substance of works by American writers, filmmakers and artists from Catholic backgrounds.

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Page Count

570

Publisher

Cambridge University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0521417775

ISBN 13

9780521417778

What Is Pastoral?

By: Paul Alpers

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What Is Pastoral?

By: Paul Alpers

One of the enduring traditions of Western literary history, pastoral is often mischaracterized as a catchall for literature about rural themes and nature in general. In What Is Pastoral?, distinguished literary historian Paul Alpers argues that pastoral is based upon a fundamental fiction—that the lives of shepherds or other socially humble figures represent the lives of human beings in general. Ranging from Virgil's Eclogues to Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs, from Shakespeare and Cervantes to Hardy and Frost, this work brings the story of the pastoral tradition, previously limited to classical and Renaissance literature, into the twentieth century. Pastoral reemerges in this account not as a vehicle of nostalgia for some Golden Age, nor of escape to idyllic landscapes, but as a mode bearing witness to the possibilities and problems of human community and shared experience in the real world. A rich and engrossing book, What Is Pastoral? will soon take its place as the definitive study of pastoral literature. "Alpers succeeds brilliantly. . . . [He] offers . . . a wealth of new insight into the origins, development, and flowering of the pastoral."—Ann-Maria Contarino, Renaissance Quarterly

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Page Count

444

Publisher

University of Chicago Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0226015238

ISBN 13

9780226015231

Involuntary Associations

Postcolonial Studies and World Englishes

By: David Huddart

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Involuntary Associations

Postcolonial Studies and World Englishes

By: David Huddart

Involuntary associations : "Postcolonial Studies" and "World Englishes"--Grammars of living break their Tense : world Englishes and cultural translation -- English in the conversation of mankind : world Englishes and global citizenship -- Declarations of linguistic independence: the postcolonial dictionary -- Writing after the end of empire : Composition, community, and creativity -- Slow reading : the opacity of world literatures -- Conclusion : English remains, englishes remain

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Page Count

175

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1781380252

ISBN 13

9781781380253

Principles of Microeconomics

By: Roy J. Ruffin,Paul R. Gregory

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Principles of Microeconomics

By: Roy J. Ruffin,Paul R. Gregory

Through its Defining Moments theme, the Ruffin/Gregory text provides a historical basis for students to understand the economic theories and policies of today. Defining Moments outline the ideas behind the most important events of economics the Industrial Revolution, the Rise and Fall of Socialism, the Great Depression, Globalization, and the Information Revolution. In addition to thoroughly updated microeconomics coverage, the new edition features a wealth of up-to-date boxed examples and all-new pedagogical features, including Learning Objectives, Chapter Puzzles, and Web Questions.

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Page Count

492

Publisher

Addison Wesley Longman

Published Date

ISBN 10

0321077318

ISBN 13

9780321077318

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