Search results for ""author paul john""

Investigating autobiographical writing of Mary McCarthy, Henry James, Jean-Paul Sartre, Saul Friedlander, and Maxine Hong Kingston, this book argues that autobiographical truth is not a fixed but an evolving content in a process of self-creation. Further, Paul John Eakin contends, the self at the center of all autobiography is necessarily fictive. Professor Eakin shows that the autobiographical impulse is simply a special form of reflexive consciousness: from a developmental viewpoint, the autobiographical act is a mode of self-invention always practiced first in living and only eventually, and occasionally, in writing. Originally published in 1985. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Read more less

Autobiography is naturally regarded as an art of retrospect, but making autobiography is equally part of the fabric of our ongoing experience. We tell the stories of our lives piecemeal, and these stories are not merely about our selves but also an integral part of them. In this way we "live autobiographically"; we have narrative identities. In this book, noted life-writing scholar Paul John Eakin explores the intimate, dynamic connection between our selves and our stories, between narrative and identity in everyday life. He draws on a wide range of autobiographical writings from work by Jonathan Franzen, Mary Karr, and André Aciman to the New York Times series "Portraits of Grief" memorializing the victims of 9/11, as well as the latest insights into identity formation from the fields of developmental psychology, cultural anthropology, and neurobiology. In his account, the self-fashioning in which we routinely, even automatically, engage is largely conditioned by social norms and biological necessities. We are taught by others how to say who we are, while at the same time our sense of self is shaped decisively by our lives in and as bodies. For Eakin, autobiography is always an act of self-determination, no matter what the circumstances, and he stresses its adaptive value as an art that helps to anchor our shifting selves in time.

Read more less

Within forty years of the end of the Second World War, Japan was transformed from a nation in defeat to one of the most successful economic forces in the world. In this book, Paul Bailey draws on the most recent research to analyse the significance of the American Occupation (1945-52) as well as the later political, social and economic factors that contributed to postwar recovery.

Read more less

The popularity of such books as Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes, Mary Karr's The Liars' Club, and Kathryn Harrison's controversial The Kiss, has led columnists to call ours "the age of memoir." And while some critics have derided the explosion of memoir as exhibitionistic and self-aggrandizing, literary theorists are now beginning to look seriously at this profusion of autobiographical literature. Informed by literary, scientific, and experiential concerns, How Our Lives Become Stories enhances knowledge of the complex forces that shape identity, and confronts the equally complex problems that arise when we write about who we think we are. Using life writings as examples—including works by Christa Wolf, Art Spiegelman, Oliver Sacks, Henry Louis Gates, Melanie Thernstrom, and Philip Roth—Paul John Eakin draws on the latest research in neurology, cognitive science, memory studies, developmental psychology, and related fields to rethink the very nature of self-representation. After showing how the experience of living in one's body shapes one's identity, he explores relational and narrative modes of being, emphasizing social sources of identity, and demonstrating that the self and the story of the self are constantly evolving in relation to others. Eakin concludes by engaging the ethical issues raised by the conflict between the authorial impulse to life writing and a traditional, privacy-based ethics that such writings often violate.

Read more less

This overview of twentieth-century history in China tells the story of a fascinating country undergoing political revolutions and social and cultural upheaval.

Read more less

Before it was written, this book was spoken. For ten winter days in 1977, the orator Paul John—widely respected as a dean of Yup’ik elders, and recognized for his tireless advocacy of Yup’ik language and traditions—held an audience of Yup’ik students rapt at Nelson Island High School, in southwest Alaska. Hour after hour he spoke to the young people, sharing life experiences and Yup’ik narratives, never repeating a tale. Now, more than a quarter-century after Paul John’s extraordinary performance, Sophie Shield’s translations and Ann Fienup-Riordan’s editing have brought his words back to life, and to a new audience. This book records one elder’s attempt to create a moral universe for future generations through stories about the special knowledge of the Yup’ik people. Tales both authentically Yup’ik and marked by Paul John’s own unique innovations are presented in a bilingual edition, with Yup’ik and English text presented in facing pages. As Paul John says, “In this whole world, whoever we are, if people speak using their own language, they will be presenting their identity and it will be their strength.”

Read more less

Margaret M. Mitchell argues that all Pauline interpretation depends to a large degree upon the ways in which readers formulate their own mental (and sometimes graphic) images of the author, Paul. John Chrysostom, the most prolific interpreter of the Pauline epistles in the early church (c. 349-407 C.E.), richly exemplifies this phenomenon in his writings and speeches, where he composes word portraits of his beloved Paul, so as to bring his own readers face to face with the saintly figure he commends for their imitation.The author brings together the copious portraits of Paul - of his body, his soul, and his life circumstances - found throughout Chrysostom's immense corpus of writings, and for the first time analyzes them as complex rhetorical compositions built upon well-known conventions and techniques of Greco-Roman rhetoric (epithet, encomium, and ekphrasis). Chrysostom's literary portraiture, by idealizing Paul as 'the archetypal image' of Christian virtue, served as a rhetorical vehicle for social construction and replication of the Pauline model in the now-Christian society of late antiquity. Pauline interpretation as Chrysostom practiced it confounds both the traditional map of patristic exegesis as defined by the dichotomy between Antiochene literalism and Alexandrine allegory, and contemporary hermeneutical claims about 'the death of the author' in the interpretive enterprise. While Chrysostom's Pauline portraiture may reach exalted heights of artistry, it is not unique, as comparisons with Chrysostom's Latin contemporary Augustine and recent Pauline scholarship reveal. Two appendices offer a fresh translation of Chrysostom's seven homilies de laudibus sancti Pauli, and a catalogue and color plates of artistic representations of Chrysostom and Paul that graphically represent the author/exegete dynamic this study explores.

Read more less