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Getting a Life Everyday Uses of Autobiography Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, editors |
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Looks at the confession and creation of life stories in American popular culture. From résumés to personal ads, from talk shows to self-help groups, autobiographical storytelling has become a central theme of American culture. Visual media offer a dazzling display of possible lives through soap operas, talk shows, music videos, and "lifestyle programming"; newspapers and magazines frame their stories as "personality profiles." We construct public identities through the cars we drive, the beverages we drink, the clothes we wear. Exploring a variety of everyday occasions during which people assemble, circulate, and consume personal narratives, this collection expands our understanding of how we negotiate and commodify identity. Many kinds of personal storytelling are explored, among them self-description in personal ads, the "new" talk shows, transracial adoption and African American identity, twelve-step programs, survivor discourse in narratives of sexual assault, signing in deaf communities, genealogical pedigrees, and autistic life stories. Getting a Life is an innovative examination of how autobiographical stories have become central in circulating multiple, overlapping, provisional identities-and how those identities are negotiated or resisted in everyday life. "A provocative collection of essays in the field of American cultural studies, Getting a Life brings together with humor and rigor an alternately serious and entertaining array of contributions on 'autobiographical acts in everyday occasions' ranging from talk shows to DNA, pornography to morphing, transracial adoption to personal ads, and deafness to breast cancer. The book is an engrossing mirror that will generate shocks of recognition among academics, artists, housewives, survivors, teen mothers, genealogists, and adoptees, were they all to read it." —Signs "This is a terrific book. Smith and Watson have once again presented us with an intriguing and valuable addition to the ongoing critical discussions of autobiography as form. Their volume is informative, lucid, and accessible, not to mention playful and idiosyncratic in ways that seem appropriate to the postmodern world in which they and we live." —Biography "From the outset of this startling collection of essays, we're in for a whirl. Commonplace categories of autobiography criticism take on an entirely new coloring when the 'texts' in question are no longer literary, nor in some cases written documents. Getting a Life proclaims that you do not have to be a writer to have an autobiography; the narratives are everywhere." —a/b Contributors: Linda Martin Alcoff, Philip E. Baruth, H-Dirksen L. Bauman, Michael Blitz, Traci Carroll, William Chaloupka, Salome Chasnoff, Kay K. Cook, Martin A. Danahay, Laura Gray-Rosendale, Linda S. Kauffman, Louise Krasniewicz, Helena Michie, Sandra Patton, Janice Peck, Robyn R. Warhol, Susan Ostrov Weisser. Sidonie Smith is professor of English, comparative literature, and women's studies at Binghamton University. She is the author of Moving Lifes: Twentieth-Century Women's Travel Writing and is a co-editor of Writing New Identities: Gender, Nation, and Immigration in Contemporary Europe. Julia Watson is professor of liberal studies and director of women's studies at the University of Montana. Together they wrote Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. 424 pages | 5 7/8 x 9 | 1996
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$27.50 Paper