The stories of lived experience offer powerful representations of a nation’s complex and often fractured identity. Personal narratives have taken many forms in American literature. From the letters and journals of the famous and the lesser known to the memoirs of former slaves to hit true crime podcasts to lyric essays to the curated archives we keep on social media, life writing has been a tool of both the influential and the disenfranchised to spark cultural and political evolution, to help define the larger identity of the nation, and to claim a sense of belonging within it. Taken together, individual stories of real American lives weave a tapestry of history, humanity, and art while raising questions about the veracity of memory and the slippery nature of truth. This volume surveys the forms of life writing that have contributed to the richness of American literature and shaped American discourse. It examines life writing as a rhetorical tool for social change and explores how technological advancement has allowed ordinary Americans to chronicle and share their lives with others.
Author(s): Amy Monticello, Jason Tucker
Series: Routledge Introductions to American Literature
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2023
Language: English
Pages: 242
City: New York
Cover
Half Title
Series Information
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Introduction
Defining American Life Writing
Terminology
Works Cited
1 Personal Essays
The Oldest Essay Binary: Baconian and Montaignian
The Evolution of the American Essay
Synthesizing Bacon and Montaigne
Essay as Democracy
Persona in Essays
Essays Are Defiantly Omnivorous
Works Cited
2 Memoir and Autobiography
Benjamin Franklin’s “Self-Made” Man
American Slave Narratives
Autobiography as an Act of Democracy
Transcendentalism and Selfhood in Autobiography
The Co-Creation of “I” and “We”
Early Twentieth-Century Black American Autobiography
Presidential Memoirs and Autobiographies
Self-Creation in Contemporary Autobiography
Subgenres of Contemporary Memoir
Grief Memoirs
Motherhood Memoirs
Addiction Memoirs
Family Memoirs
Divorce Memoirs
Conclusion
Works Cited
3 Literary Journalism
Honest Subjectivity
Nomenclature and Distinguishing Characteristics
Facts and Fictions
There Is a Dishonest Subjectivity
“New” Journalism
Self and Otherness
Questions of Fact; Questions of Interpretation
True Crime
Empathy and Advocacy
Works Cited
4 Lyric Essays
Segmented Essays
Braided Essays
Hermit Crab Essays
Other Lyric Essay Forms
Book-Length Lyric Essay and Memoir
Conclusion
Works Cited
5 Diaries, Epistles, and Speeches
Diaries
Public Vs. Private Diaries
Diaries as Historical Narrative
Diarist as an Embodiment of Time and Culture
Diary as Literary Construction
Diary to Supplement Celebrity
The Diary’s Daily “Ongoingness”
Epistles
Repurposed Correspondence
The Political Public Force of Private Letters
Open Letters
The Personal-Political in Literary Open Letters
Speeches
Embodied and Disembodied Symbols
Speeches of Social Reform
Indigenous American Oratory
Oral Histories and Crowdsourcing
TED Talks
Conclusion
Works Cited
6 Aural Narratives: Podcasts and Story Slams
This American Life and the Beginning of American Podcasts
The Role of the Host
S-Town and the Ethics of Telling Others’ Stories
Representation in Public Radio
Further Listening
Live Storytelling
Conclusion
Works Cited
7 Life Writing Online
Webgenres and Blogging
Blogging Communities and Controversies
The Social Network
A Brief History of Social Network Sites
The Rhetoric of SNS Interfaces
Conclusion
Works Cited
Index
