The art of time in memoir
Subtitle: then, again
By: Sven Birkerts.
Series: The art of series
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: 2008
Place of publication: Saint Paul, Minn
Language: eng
Number of pages: 194
ISBN-13: 9781555974893
Subjects: Autobiography; Biography as a literary form; Time in literature
Description: "In The Art of Time in Memoir, critic, editor, and memoirist Sven Birkerts examines the human impulse to write about the self. "Memoir is, for better and often for worse, the genre of our times," Birkerts writes. But what makes one memoir memorable and another self-serving? What determines the difference between graceful disclosure and sensational self-exposure? Birkerts argues that the memoirist's strategies for presenting the subjective experience of time reveal the power and resonance of the writer's life. 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, how the work stirs to life our own sense of past and present."--Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 193-194).