Bequest and Betrayal


Book Description

"In a book that will change the ways we think about autobiography and criticism, Nancy K. Miller produces poignant revelations about what it means to live with a dying parent--as a son or daughter, as well as the difference that gender makes in such a painful situation. In Bequest and Betrayal, she develops an original feminist perspective by counterpointing lyrical introspection about her own grief with critical insights into memoirs by Simone de Beauvoir, Philip Roth, Art Spiegelman, Susan Cheever, Carolyn Steedman, and Annie Ernaux." --Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, co-authors of The Madwoman in the Attic, No Man's Land, and The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women "Miller's use of the memoir form offers a new model of serious criticism, and a way of imagining community through 'bonds of paper' as well as 'bonds of blood.'" --Elaine Showalter, London Review of Books Melding the details of her own experience with the familial biographies of well-known contemporary writers, Miller recreates a common experience--the loss of a father or a mother--and exposes the often tortuous paths of mourning and attachment that we follow in the wake of loss. In the process, she offers pieces of personal history, revealing the mixed emotions provoked by her mother's sudden death from cancer and her father's painful struggle with Parkinson's disease. Memoirs about the loss of parents show how enmeshed in the family plot we have been and the price of our complicity in its stories. The death of parents forces us to rethink our lives, to reread ourselves. We read for what we need to find. Sometimes, we also find what we didn't know we needed.




Bequest & Betrayal


Book Description




But Enough about Me


Book Description

Through the memoirs of contemporaries and pieces of her autobiography, Miller explores the unexpected ways that the stories of other people's lives give meaning to our own. But Enough About Me is a group biography, or even an ethnography, of women, primarily middle-class and urban, now in their fifties and sixties. The book also mounts a defense of the memoir against accusations of terminal narcissism by showing how the forms of life writing--memoirs, diaries, essays--are as much about others as they are about their authors.




What They Saved


Book Description

The discovery of a box of mementos prompts the author to explore past generations of her family, learning about her family's experience during the Holocaust as well as earlier episodes of anti-Semitism.




Getting Personal


Book Description

In the era of identity politics, whose is the I of cultural criticism? And what does the invention of an autobiographical persona have to do with contemporary theory? In Getting Personal, Nancy K. Miller reflects upon the ways in which contingencies of identity and location shape the writing of academic argument and the living of an academic life. Getting Personal explores the new territory of feminist cultural studies and its connections to literary interpretation. The book is organized around a number of academic scenes in which Miller analyses the stakes of feminist critical performance. The focus on occasions, from the conference to the seminar to the professional colloquium, produces an autobiographical perspective on the mini-drama of institutional politics - whether faculty struggles over the canon in elite universities, or student strivings for self-authorization in large urban ones. Writing as a feminist critic, Miller describes the dilemmas of a responsible pedogogic practice: the contradictory demands of authority and complicity for a feminist teacher of literature. Getting Personal examines the rhetorical strategies of a feminism traversed by internal debates over its own self-representations. Working through and among quotations of voices that might otherwise not address each other, Miller assesses a crisis and offers a project for moving on.




The Betrayal of the Humanities


Book Description

How did the academy react to the rise, dominance, and ultimate fall of Germany's Third Reich? Did German professors of the humanities have to tell themselves lies about their regime's activities or its victims to sleep at night? Did they endorse the regime? Or did they look the other way, whether out of deliberate denial or out of fear for their own personal safety? The Betrayal of the Humanities: The University during the Third Reich is a collection of groundbreaking essays that shed light on this previously overlooked piece of history. The Betrayal of the Humanities accepts the regrettable news that academics and intellectuals in Nazi Germany betrayed the humanities, and explores what went wrong, what occurred at the universities, and what happened to the major disciplines of the humanities under National Socialism. The Betrayal of the Humanities details not only how individual scholars, particular departments, and even entire universities collaborated with the Nazi regime but also examines the legacy of this era on higher education in Germany. In particular, it looks at the peculiar position of many German scholars in the post-war world having to defend their own work, or the work of their mentors, while simultaneously not appearing to accept Nazism.




Belonging and Betrayal


Book Description

The old masters' new masters -- Was modernism Jewish? -- In the middle -- To have and have not.




The Bequest


Book Description

Book One of The Guardians Series Finalist, 2016 Daphne Du Maurier Award for Excellence in Mystery/Suspense Cheyenne Elias has inherited a child. A boy she doesn’t know and doesn’t particularly want; a boy whose mother was once Cheyenne’s most hated person in the world. There are a million reasons to walk away: her anger, her past, her certainty that there is nothing benevolent in this act by a woman who almost killed her. But abandoning the boy to a system she barely survived is not an option. Will Blackheart has lost everything. His SEAL team, his country, and—upon occasion—his mind. Worse, he’s lost something that has the capacity to kill thousands. Left for dead in the Afghan desert, Will has risen solely to regain that which was taken...and to punish those who dared take it. His only lead is the son of a dead woman. Her only goal is to save a child. As they come together in a clash of anger, mistrust, and potent, unwanted desire, Will and Cheyenne must put aside their differences and navigate the endgame of a woman for whom nothing was taboo… Don’t miss the first installment of this intense, suspenseful romance series. Keywords related to this romantic suspense series: Romantic suspense series, romance series mystery, romantic thriller, romantic thriller series, romantic suspense anthology, romantic suspense, mystery romance series, mystery romance, FBI romance, FBI romantic suspense thrillers, military romance, first love romance, found family romance, lost love romance, alpha male romance, action adventure romance, romantic suspense box set, romance box set, serial killer romance, law enforcement romance, contemporary romance, contemporary romantic suspense, contemporary romantic thriller, popular romantic suspense, popular romance, new romance, new romantic suspense.




Daniel Mendelsohn’s Memoir-Writing


Book Description

This volume of eight essays written by French scholars analyzes Daniel Mendelsohn's first three volumes of nonfiction (The Elusive Embrace, 1999; The Lost, 2006; and An Odyssey, 2017) and includes an illustrated interview (2019) in which Mendelsohn tackles various aspects of his work as a literary and cultural critic, as a professor of classical literature, as a translator, and as a memoirist. The essay discussing The Elusive Embrace (1999) argues that, in addition to offering a subtle reflection on sexual identity and genres, Mendelsohn’s first volume already broadens his topic and patiently weaves links between ancient and present times, feeding his meditation with his knowledge of Greek culture and myths—a natural movement of back and forth which would become his signature. The Lost (2006), his much-acclaimed investigation on six members of his family who died during the period known as the Holocaust by bullets, is analyzed as a close-up on the disappearance of a whole world, the unspeakability of which Mendelsohn addressed through intertwining several languages, linguistic echoes, and biblical references. Finally, Mendelsohn’s recent An Odyssey (2017) is studied as a brilliant musing on teaching Homer’s masterpiece while building up a memoir on his declining father sitting among his students and allowing Homer’s universal questions and lessons to enlighten a father and son’s last journey.




Extremities


Book Description

How do we come to terms with what can't be forgotten? How do we bear witness to extreme experiences that challenge the limits of language? This remarkable volume explores the emotional, political, and aesthetic dimensions of testimonies to trauma as they translate private anguish into public space. Nancy K. Miller and Jason Tougaw have assembled a collection of essays that trace the legacy of the Holocaust and subsequent events that have shaped twentieth-century history and still haunt contemporary culture. Extremities combines personal and scholarly approaches to a wide range of texts that bear witness to shocking and moving accounts of individual trauma: Toni Morrison's Beloved, Sylvia Plath's "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus," Kathryn Harrison's The Kiss, Tatana Kellner's Holocaust art, Ruth Klüger's powerful memoir Still Alive, and Binjamin Wilkomirski's controversial narrative of concentration camp suffering Fragments. The book grapples with the cultural and social effects of historical crises, including the Montreal Massacre, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and the medical catastrophes of HIV/AIDS and breast cancer. Developing insights from autobiography, psychoanalysis, feminist theory and gender studies, the authors demonstrate that testimonies of troubling and taboo subjects do more than just add to the culture of confession--they transform identities and help reimagine the boundaries of community. Extremities offers an original and timely interpretive guide to the growing field of trauma studies. The volume includes essays by Ross Chambers, Sandra M. Gilbert, Susan Gubar, Marianne Hirsch, Wayne Koestenbaum, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and others.