The Intimate Critique

The Intimate Critique

Autobiographical Literary Criticism

  • Author: Freedman, Diane P.; Frey, Olivia; Zauhar, Frances Murphy
  • Publisher: Duke University Press
  • ISBN: 9780822312857
  • eISBN Pdf: 9780822398417
  • Place of publication:  Durham , United States
  • Year of digital publication: 1993
  • Month: January
  • Pages: 320
  • DDC: 810.9
  • Language: English
For a long time now, readers and scholars have strained against the limits of traditional literary criticism, whose precepts—above all, "objectivity"—seem to have so little to do with the highly personal and deeply felt experience of literature. The Intimate Critique marks a movement away from this tradition. With their rich spectrum of personal and passionate voices, these essays challenge and ultimately breach the boundaries between criticism and narrative, experience and expression, literature and life.
Grounded in feminism and connected to the race, class, and gender paradigms in cultural studies, the twenty-six contributors to this volume—including Jane Tompkins, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Shirley Nelson Garner, and Shirley Goek-Lin Lim—respond in new, refreshing ways to literary subjects ranging from Homer to Freud, Middlemarch to The Woman Warrior, Shiva Naipaul to Frederick Douglass. Revealing the beliefs and formative life experiences that inform their essays, these writers characteristically recount the process by which their opinions took shape--a process as conducive to self-discovery as it is to critical insight. The result—which has been referred to as "personal writing," "experimental critical writing," or "intellectual autobiography"—maps a dramatic change in the direction of literary criticism.

Contributors. Julia Balen, Dana Beckelman, Ellen Brown, Sandra M. Brown, Rosanne Kanhai-Brunton, Suzanne Bunkers, Peter Carlton, Brenda Daly, Victoria Ekanger, Diane P. Freedman, Olivia Frey, Shirley Nelson Garner, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Melody Graulich, Gail Griffin, Dolan Hubbard, Kendall, Susan Koppelman, Shirley Geok-Lin Lim, Linda Robertson, Carol Taylor, Jane Tompkins, Cheryl Torsney, Trace Yamamoto, Frances Murphy Zauhar

  • Contents
  • Acknowledgments
  • Introduction - Diane P. Freedman, Olivia Frey, and Frances Murphy Zauhar
  • Part I. Muse-ings on Genre, Autobiography, Narrative: Formative Strategies
    • Border Crossing as Method and Motif in Contemporary American Writing, or, How Freud Helped Me Case the Joint - Diane P. Freedman
    • Me and My Shadow - Jane Tompkins
    • Beyond Literary Darwinism: Women's Voices and Critical Discourse - Olivia Frey
    • "Everyday Use": My Sojourn at Parchman Farm - Cheryl B. Torsney
    • Excerpts from Letters to Friends - Susan Koppelman
    • Social Circles: Being a Report on J. Hillis Miller's Campus Visitation - Linda R. Robertson
    • Touchstones and Bedrocks: Learning the Stories We Need - Victoria Ekanger
  • Part II. Critical Confessions
    • Creative Voices: Women Reading and Women's Writing - Frances Murphy Zauhar
    • Breaking Silence: The Woman Warrior - Shirley Nelson Garner
    • Different Silences - Traise Yamamoto
    • "What's in a Name?": Some Meanings of Blackness - Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
    • Poetry and the Age: "A Girl in a Library" to Randall Jarrell - Sandra M. Brown
    • My Friend, Joyce Carol Oates - Brenda Daly
    • Somebody Must Say These Things: An Essay for My Mother - Melody Graulich
    • The Scarlet Brewer and the Voice of the Colonized - Shirley Geok-lin Lim
    • Dividing Fences - Carol S. Taylor
    • What Do Women Really Mean? Thoughts on Women's Diaries and Lives - Suzanne Bunkers
  • Part III. Autobiographical Literary Criticism
    • Between the Medusa and the Abyss: Reading Jane Eyre, Reading Myself - Ellen Brown
    • Rereading Middlemarch, Rereading Myself - Peter Carlton
    • The Crippling of the Third World: Shiva Naipaul's Heritage - Rosanne Kanhai-Brunton
    • Penelope's Web - Gail Griffin
    • "Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around": Reading the Narrative of Frederick Douglass - Dolan Hubbard
    • Catharine Trotter Cockburn and Me: A Duography - Kendall
    • In Between Abject & Object: The Mourning Sickness of the Expectant Mother, or, Three Movements of the Blues in B Minor - Dana Beckelman
    • La Ronde of Children and Mothers - Julia Balen
  • Selected Bibliography
  • Contributors

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