Crisis, formulation and autobiographical intimacy in 1950s America
Item
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Title
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Crisis, formulation and autobiographical intimacy in 1950s America
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:2190355a5334:11490
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identifier
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11965
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Creator
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Aksakalova, Olga,
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Contributor
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Nancy K. Miller
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Date
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2012
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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American literature | American studies | alfred kazin | autobiography | postwar american literature | robert lowell | vladimir nabokov | world war two
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Abstract
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Crisis, Formulation, and Autobiographical Intimacy in 1950s America explores how critical circumstances of historical and personal significance can inspire and direct autobiographical production. I concentrate on Alfred Kazin's A Walker in the City (1951), Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory (1967), and Robert Lowell's Life Studies (1959), three American autobiographies whose first or final versions were produced in the nineteen fifties, decade marked by a surge of autobiographical texts and genres in the United States and the emergence of autobiographical theory in France. Engaging with Robert Jay Lifton's theory of trauma, namely the concept of formulation, I investigate how the relationship between the self and the world is fostered in the wake of a crisis as reflected in autobiographical performance unfolding through drafting, meta-writing, revision, publication, and republication.;As I trace the evolution of the texts, I find each author's persistent attempt to forge a connection to the multiple relational others, including the reader, implicated in the autobiographical act. I argue that the prospect and process of gaining this connection -- at once troubling and rewarding -- tend to stimulate writing and facilitate revision as the writers cross the threshold from the pre-war to the post-war world and grapple with the shifts occurring in their private lives. In the course of writing and re-writing their autobiographies, Kazin, Nabokov, and Lowell develop a special kind of closeness with their relational others that arises from the interrelated acts of identification, projection, and narration. Looking at autobiographical process (revision, textual versioning) rather than merely product (final text), I illustrate how these acts are enhanced, qualified, or reversed as they are repeated. They produce autobiographical intimacy: forged by various forms of interaction(s), it is a virtual space whereby participants of the autobiographical act foster communication, reciprocity, and potentially trust -- productively or otherwise.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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English
