True Relations: Essays on Autobiography and the Postmodern
By (Author) G. Thomas Couser
By (author) Joseph Fichtelberg
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Praeger Publishers Inc
21st January 1998
United States
Tertiary Education
Non Fiction
Literary studies: c 1900 to c 2000
Autobiography: philosophy and social sciences
Psychology: the self, ego, identity, personality
Cultural studies
809.935920
Hardback
184
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 of 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 patterns of significance.
G. THOMAS COUSER is Professor of English at Hofstra University. JOSEPH FICHTELBERG is Associate Professor of English at Hofstra.Both have written extensively on issues surrounding autobiography.