Getting a Life
Everyday Uses of Autobiography
Published on 1. April 1996
Book
Paperback/Softback
432 pages
978-0-8166-2490-4 (ISBN)
Description
From resumes to personal ads, from talk shows to self-help groups, autobiographical storytelling has become a central theme of American culture. Visual media offer possible lives through soap operas, talk shows, and "lifestyle programming", and newspapers and magazines frame their stories as "personality profiles". This text explores a variety of occasions during which people consume personal narratives. This collection aims to expand our understanding of how we negotiate and commodify identity.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Minnesota
United States
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 149 mm
Thickness: 23 mm
ISBN-13
978-0-8166-2490-4 (9780816624904)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Content
Introduction, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson. Part I Speaking bodies: bad girls and sick boys - inside the body in fiction, film, and performance art, Linda S. Kauffman; "voicing" deaf identity - through the "I's" and ears of an other, H-Dirksen L. Bauman; medical identity - my DNA/myself, Kay K. Cook. Part II Enter-taining lives: morphing identities - Arnold Schwarze-negger - write us, Louise Krasniewicz and Michael Blitz; performing teen motherhood on video - autoethnography as counterdiscourse, Salome Chasnoff; the mediated talking cure - therapeutic framing of autobiography in tv talk shows, Janice Peck; want ads - reading the personals, Traci Carroll. Part III Un/speakable lives: consensual autobiography - narrating "personal sexual history" from Boswell's "london journal" to AIDS pamphlet literature, Philip E. Baruth; survivor discourse - transgression or recuperation?, Linda Martin Alcoff and Laura Gray-Rosendale; taking it to a limit one more time - autobiography and autism, Sidonie Smith. Part IV Family portraits: "what kind of life have I got?" gender in the life story of an "ordinary" woman, Susan Ostrov Weisser; race/identity/culture/kin - constructions of African American identity in transracial adoption, Sandra Patton; ordering the family - genealogy as autobiographical pedigree, Julia Watson. Part V Institutionalised lives: twelve-step teleology - narratives of recovery/recovery as narrative, Robyn R. Warhol and Helena Michie; professional subjects - prepacking the academic CV, Martin A. Danahay; (for)getting a life - testimony, identity, and power, William Chaloupka; epilogue - pieces of my heart, Julia Watson.