Surviving Literary Suicide - Softcover

Berman, Jeffrey

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1558492119 ISBN 13: 9781558492110

Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999

Synopsis

An exploration of the relationship between literature and life, this study examines the effect on readers of "suicidal literature"―novels and poems that depict, and sometimes glorify, the act of suicide. Beginning with a discussion of the growing incidence of suicide in American culture, Jeffrey Berman investigates the portrayal of suicide in the works of four authors who later took their own lives―Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton― and two who did not―Kate Chopin and William Styron. In each case Berman discusses the writer's shifting attitude toward suicide, the tendency of critics to romanticize fictional suicide, and the impact of writing about suicide on the artist's own life. At the same time, Berman draws on his experiences as a teacher of these writings, analyzing student reactions to "literary suicide" as recorded in class diaries―responses ranging from grief and confusion to anger and guilt. By looking at the connection between real and imagined suicide, Berman seeks to shed fresh light on a subject long enshrouded in silence, fear, and mystery.

About this title

About the Author:

Jeffrey Berman is professor of English at the University of Albany. He is author of The Talking Cure: Literary Representations of Psychoanalysis and Narcissism and the Novel.

From Library Journal:

Berman's boyhood dream of being a successful oncologist was thwarted by mediocre grades in college science courses, but he has been more fortunate in his search for an understanding of another pathology: suicide. In graduate classes that combined Freudian and reader-response examinations of works by Woolf, Hemingway, Plath, Sexton, and others that depicted or even seemed to celebrate suicide, Berman's students tested Plato's model of "infection"Ai.e., poetry gives people bad ideasAvs. Aristotle's of "immunity"Ai.e., plays are valuable for purging people of bad emotions. Ultimately, the class favored the latter viewpoint, concluding that studying suicide rids one of self-destructive thoughts. The author of Diaries to an English Professor (Univ. of Massachusetts, 1994) and other books that break down the artificial barrier between criticism and pedagogy, Berman (English, Univ. of Albany) here offers a circuitous approach, one that is both emotionally charged and intellectually rigorous, to the undeniable connections between how we read and who we are. At a time when professors often treat literature as alien terrain, Berman and his students use new methods to confirm an old truth: the more one knows about books, the better equipped one is for life, and vice versa.ADavid Kirby, Florida State Univ., Tallahassee
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 1558492119
• ISBN 13: 9781558492110
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304