But Enough About Me - Why We Read Other People''s Lives

In her latest work of personal criticism, Nancy K. Miller tells the story of how a girl who grew up in the 1950s and got lost in the 1960s became a feminist critic in the 1970s. As in her previous books, Miller interweaves pieces of her autobiography with the memoirs of contemporaries in order to explore the unexpected ways that the stories of other people's lives give meaning to our own. The evolution she chronicles was lived by a generation of literary girls who came of age in the midst of profound social change and, buoyed by the energy of second-wave feminism, became writers, academics, and activists. Miller's recollections form one woman's installment in a collective memoir that is still unfolding, an intimate page of a group portrait in process.

List of contents

1. But Enough About Me, What Do You Think of My Memoir?
2. Decades
3. Circa 1959
4. The Marks of Time
5. "Why Am I Not that Woman?''
Epilogue: My Grandfather's Cigarette Case, or What I Learned in Memphis

About the author

Nancy K. Miller

Summary

Nancy Miller explores the unexpected ways that the stories of other people's lives give meaning to our own. She also mounts a defence of the memoir against accusations of terminal narcissism by showing how the forms of life writing are as much about others as they are about their authors.

Product details

• Authors: Nancy Miller, Nancy K. Miller, Miller Nancy K.
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 21.08.2002
• EAN: 9780231125239
• ISBN: 978-0-231-12523-9
• No. of pages: 160
• Series: Gender & Culture (Paperback); Gender and Culture Series; Gender & Culture (Paperback); Gender and Culture
• Subjects: Fiction > Narrative literature > Essays, feuilletons, literary criticism, interviews; Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies; Social sciences, law, business > Sociology > Sociological theories; Essays, BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Women, LITERARY CRITICISM / Feminist, Literature: history & criticism, Literary studies: general, Literary essays, Literary studies: fiction, novelists and prose writers