Troubling Confessions


Book Description

Literature has often understood the problematic nature of confession better than the law, as Brooks demonstrates in perceptive readings of legal cases set against works by Roussean, Dostoevsky, Joyce, and Camus, among others."--BOOK JACKET.




Troubling Confessions


Book Description

In Troubling Confessions, Peter Brooks juxtaposes law and literature to explore the kinds of truth we associate with confessions, and why we both rely on them and regard them with suspicion. For centuries the law has considered confession to be "the queen of proofs," but it has also seen a need to regulate confessions and the circumstances under which they are made, as evidenced in the continuing debate over the Miranda decision. Western culture has made confessional speech a prime measure of authenticity, seeing it as an expression of selfhood that bears witness to personal truth. Yet the urge to confess may be motivated by inextricable layers of shame, guilt, self-loathing, and the desire to propitiate figures of authority. Literature has often understood the problematic nature of confession better than the law, as Brooks demonstrates in perceptive readings of legal cases set against works by Roussean, Dostoevsky, Joyce, and Camus, among others




Innocent Until Interrogated


Book Description

Recounts the events surrounding the murders of nine Buddhist temple members near Phoenix, Arizona, and the arrest of four men known as "The Tucson Four" who were coerced into confessing and held despite there being no physical evidence to connect them tothe crime, and discusses how the suspects were treated by the media, even after the real killers were discovered.




Involuntary Confessions of the Flesh in Early Modern France


Book Description

Involuntary Confessions of the Flesh in Early Modern France is an interdisciplinary study of moments in which the early modern body loses control of its surface. Rather than read these moments as forerunners to the Freudian slip, it suggests that these moments are vital players in shaping various early modern discourses. This book pairs literary texts with religious, legal, and courtly documents in order to highlight the urgency and messiness of the relationships between body, self, and text.




The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault


Book Description

This book is a genealogical study of confession. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault as well as the history of Western confessional writings from Ancient Greece to contemporary pop culture, this book challenges the transhistorical and commonsense views of confession as an innate impulse resulting in the psychological liberation of the confessing subject. On the contrary, confessional desire is argued to be contingent and constraining, and alternatives to confessional subjectivity are explored.




Confessions


Book Description

Drawing comparisons with Shadow of the Wind, The Name of the Rose and The Reader, and an instant bestseller in more than 20 languages, Confessions is an astonishing story of one man s life, interwoven with a narrative that stretches across centuries to create an addictive and unforgettable literary symphony. I confess. At 60 and with a diagnosis of early Alzheimer s, Adri� Ard�vol re-examines his life before his memory is systematically deleted. He recalls a loveless childhood where the family antique business and his father s study become the centre of his world; where a treasured Storioni violin retains the shadows of a crime committed many years earlier. His mother, a cold, distant and pragmatic woman leaves him to his solitary games, full of unwanted questions. An accident ends the life of his enigmatic father, filling Adri� s world with guilt, secrets and deeply troubling mysteries that take him years to uncover and driving him deep into the past where atrocities are methodically exposed and examined. Gliding effortlessly between centuries, and at the same time providing a powerful narrative that is at once shocking, compelling, mysterious, tragic, humorous and gloriously readable, Confessions reaches a crescendo that is not only unexpected but provides one of the most startling denouements in contemporary literature. Confessions is a consummate masterpiece in any language, with an ending that will not just leave you thinking, but quite possibly change the way you think forever.




Confessional Crises and Cultural Politics in Twentieth-Century America


Book Description

Confessional Crises and Cultural Politics in Twentieth-Century America revolutionizes how we think about confession and its ubiquitous place in American culture. It argues that the sheer act of labeling a text a confession has become one of the most powerful, and most overlooked, forms of intervening in American cultural politics. In the twentieth century alone, the genre of confession has profoundly shaped (and been shaped by) six of America’s most intractable cultural issues: sexuality, class, race, violence, religion, and democracy.




Confessions


Book Description

This book explores what is at stake in the confessional culture. Thomas Docherty examines confessional writings from Augustine to Derrida, arguing that through all this work runs a philosophical substratum - the conditions under which it is possible to assert a confessional mode - that needs exploration and explication.




Repentance in Christian Theology


Book Description

This volume is a major resource for the interpretation, theology, and practice of communal and individual penitence. It gives teachers, preachers, and serious students of theology an exhaustive source of information and inspiration for renewing the initial call of Jesus to "Repent and believe in the Gospel" (Mark 1:15).




Male Confessions


Book Description

Male Confessions examines how men open their intimate lives and thoughts to the public through confessional writing. This book examines writings—by St. Augustine, a Jewish ghetto policeman, an imprisoned Nazi perpetrator, and a gay American theologian—that reflect sincere attempts at introspective and retrospective self-investigation, often triggered by some wounding or rupture and followed by a transformative experience. Krondorfer takes seriously the vulnerability exposed in male self-disclosure while offering a critique of the religious and gendered rhetoric employed in such discourse. The religious imagination, he argues, allows men to talk about their intimate, flawed, and sinful selves without having to condemn themselves or to fear self-erasure. Herein lies the greatest promise of these confessions: by baring their souls to judgment, these writers may also transcend their self-imprisonment.