Читать книгу Constructing the Self. Essays on Southern Life-Writing онлайн

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Recently, and drawing on the work of Judith Butler, particularly Bodies That Matter (1993), an emphasis on the body as site for the construction of the self has produced a number of interesting works. Disability and disease have been recurrent topics in many memoirs written by both men and women. Some of the most important studies are Thomas Couser’s Recovering Bodies: Illness, Disability, and Life Writing (1997) and Signifying Bodies: Disability in Contemporary Life Writing (2009), as well as earlier references to the body in Sidonie Smith’s Subjectivity, Identity, and the Body (1993), along with Paul John Eakin’s How Our Lives Become Stories (1999) and Living Autobiographically: How We Create Identity in Narrative (2008). Leigh Gilmore also discussed trauma and the raped body in The Limits of Autobiography (2001), with an interesting analysis of Dorothy Allison’s autobiographical novel Bastard Out of Carolina. This new direction in life-writing found its continuation in the volume New Essays on Life Writing and the Body (2009) edited by Christopher Stuart and Stephanie Todd, who present a collection of essays containing multiple perspectives on the topic (racialized bodies, disabled bodies, aged bodies, disfigured bodies, ill bodies, etc.). The volume also includes an illuminating Foreword by Timothy Dow Adams, who claims that “[n]ot only are our embodied selves a kind of on-going textual narrative of the course of our lives, but they are also directly connected to graphe, our ability to produce life writing” (x).