The Art of Time in Memoir: Then, Again - Softcover

Birkerts, Sven

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1555974899 ISBN 13: 9781555974893

Publisher: Graywolf Press, 2007

Synopsis

The Art Of series is a new line of books reinvigorating the practice of craft and criticism. Each book will be a brief, witty, and useful exploration of fiction, nonfiction, or poetry by a writer impassioned by a singular craft issue. The Art Of volumes will provide a series of sustained examinations of key but sometimes neglected aspects of creative writing by some of contemporary literature's finest practioners.

In The Art of Time in Memoir, critic and memoirist Sven Birkerts examines the human impulse to write about the self. By examining memoirs such as Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory; Virginia Woolf's unfinished A Sketch of the Past; and Mary Karr's The Liars' Club, Birkerts describes the memoirist's essential art of assembling patterns of meaning, stirring to life our own sense of past and present.

About this title

About the Author

Sven Birkerts is the author of several books, including The Art of Time in Memoir, Reading Life, Readings, and The Gutenberg Elegies. He has taught at Harvard University and currently directs the Bennington Writing Seminars and is the editor of AGNI. He lives in Massachusetts.

Reviews

Respected critic Birkerts has written an insightful appreciation of the memoir form, works that occupy a growing... place in our literary culture. Analyzing five ways different writers have chosen to transform their memories into coherent narrative, Birkerts discerns the underlying principle of the memoir form: balancing two perspectives by revisiting significant events in the past to discover a pattern in one's present life. Nabokov, Virginia Woolf and Annie Dillard are what he calls the Lyrical Seekers, who use sensuous apprehension to explore the nature of being. Frank Conroy's Stop-Time is one of the examples of the coming-of-age memoir, as is Birkerts's own My Sky Blue Trades. Fathers and sons, e.g., Paul Auster, Geoffrey Wolff and Blake Morrison, are distinguished from mothers and daughters, e.g., Jamaica Kincaid and Vivian Gornick. Finally, works by Mary Karr and Lucy Grealy are among those illustrating the category of trauma and memory. The appeal of this slim volume lies in Birkert's graceful prose and lucid analysis. Written for the general reader, it artfully conveys the basics of the craft and will be a particular boon to reading groups. (Jan.)
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Time in memoir? Most analyses of this maligned literary form revolve around the fact-versus-fiction debate, but sophisticated literary critic Birkerts takes a deeper look, arguing convincingly that “the search for patterns and connections is the real point—and glory—of the genre.” Drawing on epiphanies experienced both while reading outstanding literary memoirs and while writing his own, My Sky Blue Trades (2002), Birkerts explains why and how literary memoirs bend time, abandoning the chronological for the circular. Furthermore, Birkerts observes, memory itself is nonlinear and unpredictable: one shocking hour can resonate more powerfully than an entire decade. Writing with ardor, erudition, and conviction, he cites memoirs by such masters as Nabokov, Woolf, and Dillard; celebrates “the constraint of the actual”; explains the difference between sequential events and story; muses over why so many memoirs focus on family struggles and the writer’s coming-of-age; and defines a subgenre, the “traumatic memoir.” Birkerts’ enlightening literary anatomy deepens appreciation for the memoir as it reveals how writers turn the indelible times of their lives into art that is timeless. --Donna Seaman

Edition details

• Publisher: Graywolf Press
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1555974899
• ISBN 13: 9781555974893
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 120