Threads of life
Threads of life: autobiography and the will Richard Freadman
Publisher: Chicago ; University of Chicago Press, c2001.
ISBN: 0226261433
DDC: 920
LCC: CT25
Edition: (paper : alk. paper)
Summary:
"Many autobiographers share profound questions about human life with
their readers - questions like: To what extent was my life imposed on
me? To what extent did I bring it about through particular choices
and actions, through the activity of my own will?
Indeed, the issue of the will is central to autobiographical writing,
and some of the greatest autobiographies give extended consideration
to the will - its nature; its powers; its limitations; the forms of
freedom, constraint, and expression it finds in various cultures; its
role in particular human lives.".
"In this new study, unprecedented in subject and scope, Richard
Freadman offers the first sustained account of how changing
theological, philosophical, and psychological accounts of the human
will have been reflected in the writing of autobiography, and of how
autobiography in its turn has helped shape various understandings of
the will.
Early chapters trace narrative representations of the will from
antiquity (the Greeks and Augustine) to postmodernism (Derrida and
Barthes), with particular emphasis on late modernity's culture of the
will. Later chapters then present detailed and powerfully original
readings of autobiographical texts by Louis Althusser, Roland
Barthes, B. F. Skinner, Ernest Hemingway, Simone de Beauvoir, Arthur
Koestler, Stephen Spender, and Diana Trilling.".
"Freadman's interdisciplinary approach to autobiography and the will
includes a theoretical defense of the view that autobiographers are,
in varying degrees, agents in their own texts. Threads of Life argues
that late modernity has inherited deeply conflicted attitudes to the
will. Freadman suggests that these attitudes, now deeply embedded in
contemporary cultural discourse, need reexamining. In this, he
contends, 'reflective autobiography' has an important part to
play."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes:
Includes bibliographical references (p. 331-374) and index.
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