Risking Who One Is: Encounters with Contemporary Art and Literature - Hardcover

Suleiman, Susan Rubin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674773012 ISBN 13: 9780674773011

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 1994

Synopsis

To write about your contemporaries, whose work is enmeshed in the stuff of your life, maybe even in the weave of your self, is risky business. Your interest may be too personal, your involvement too close - but this, as Susan Suleiman demonstrates here, is precisely what makes such a critical encounter worthwhile. Risking Who One Is shows how the process of self-recognition, even self-construction, in the reading of contemporary work can lead to larger considerations about culture and society - to the dimensions of historical awareness and collective action. The book gives us a new way of looking at issues that are as personal as they are prevalent in the writing, the criticism, and the life of our times.
Through subtle and incisive readings of Simone de Beauvoir, Mary Gordon, Julia Kristeva, Richard Rorty, Helene Cixous, Leonora Carrington, Max Ernst, Angela Carter, Elie Wiesel, and others, we observe Suleiman in a fascinating dialogue with those who share her place and time and whose interests and preoccupations meet her own. Suleiman confronts with them the conflicts between writing and motherhood. Together, they inquire into "being postmodern" and explore the connections between creativity and love. They consider the place of beauty in contemporary art, examine the relations between aesthetics and politics, and reflect on haunting memories of World War II. Through Suleiman's encounter with them, these writers and artists enter an exchange with each other, and with us as readers, that opens new perspectives on the representation of women's lives, history and memory, autobiography, and the intersection of gender and postmodernism. Itself a form of mediated autobiography, this work takes us through the shaping of a critical approach to some of our closest and deepest concerns in reading, in writing, and in knowing ourselves.

About this title

About the Author

Susan Rubin Suleiman is the Dillon Professor of the Civilization of France and Professor of Comparative Literature, Harvard University.

From Kirkus Reviews

In the shadow of ``ethnic cleansing'' and rigid nationalism, a noted academic literary critic examines exemplary creations of the ``plural self'' and urges an extension of the private ironies of ``postmodern subjectivity'' into the public sphere. Suleiman (Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant- Garde, not reviewed) studies authors and artists who live ``between'' safely fixed categories: between national identities (memoirs of Holocaust survivors and war refugees, including the Hungarian-born author herself); between motherhood and creativity (Mary Gordon, Rosellen Brown, Toni Morrison); between languages (Christine Brooke-Rose, H‚lŠne Cixous); between love of male peers and irritation at their debasing idealizations (Leonora Carrington). Among autobiographies she favors ``the kind that tries to recover, through writing, an irrecoverable absence,'' a mother tongue for the uprooted and decentered. Although Suleiman is an acute reader of playful novelists like Angela Carter, most of her subjects have been gravely ``hurt into poetry.'' Interested in the beautiful and the beautifully ugly, Suleiman is drawn to literature and visual art that offers ``disruptive, painful self-exposure and self-exploration.'' She is a prober of wounds, including her own, when a Chicana reader faults her for class-bound views on author- mothers (the letter and its cogent rejoinder are reprinted here), or when she confronts the much-admired Simone de Beauvoir's dubious war conduct. Suleiman argues, finally, in contrast to thinkers like Richard Rorty, for an essential continuity between public and private spheres. Pinning future salvation to the inculcation of ``divided loyalties,'' she asserts that such divisions would create tolerance by instilling an awareness of how many conflicting interests each of us is made of. The admittedly utopian-sounding proposal she leaves us with is this: ``Since public rhetorics of certainty... don't seem to have worked all that well... why not try a public rhetoric of doubt?'' Detailed, generous analyses of complex artists, buttressed by lucid cultural speculation. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0674773012
• ISBN 13: 9780674773011
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1