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

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The purpose of this volume is to provide an update on southern life-writing and present how southerners have variously constructed, deconstructed, reconstructed, and performed the self, tracing the evolution of the genre in classical works and showing its development in recent life narratives. This new southern life-writing is characterized by a wider range of personal narratives, themes, and approaches (including a transnational one), genre experimentation, performance, and the inclusion of other sites of autobiographical self-knowledge. The following essays, therefore, aim to show a variety of voices, forms and discursive constructions of the southern self. The organization of the volume loosely reflects the development of southern life-writing, from its beginning to more recent approaches to autobiographical works that incorporate contemporary critical theories and perspectives. Divided into five parts, the collection focuses first on the subversive quality of most African American autobiographies in their effort to construct a self that resists prejudice and discrimination. Second, it presents attempts at reconciliation of the self with itself and the other race. The third section examines the blurred boundaries between autobiography and fiction with the construction of fictionalized selves that question the validity of both truth-telling and the autobiographical pact. The following section explores the different forms of transgression that southern life narrators use to deconstruct the self (and even the memoir genre) and the masks they wear to tell their life stories. The final section presents real and allegorical pilgrimages of self-discovery, focusing on travel writing and the body as spaces through which southern authors construct and reconstruct the self.