True Relations, Vol. 85

The essays in this collection explore new directions in autobiography studies. Examining a wide range of texts, from narratives of suicide survivors, cross-dressers, and people with HIV/AIDS to self-representations in the visual arts, the collection demonstrates how writers have used the postmodern experience fragmentation to forge new kinds of identities.

Postmodern selves, the essayists argue, are relational selves, constructed from the acute need to find identity through collaboration with others. Postmodern autobiography emerges as a search, amid shocks to the stable self, for wider patterns of significance. Of interest to researchers and scholars in autobiography, world literature, and psychology.

Examines the state of autobiography in the postmodern world, demonstrating how writers use the experience of fragmentation to forge new kinds of collaborative identities.

Booknews

Derived from a Hofstra conference titled "First-Person Singular: Autobiography Past, Present, and Future." Couser and Fichtelberg (English, Hofstra U.) have compiled ten papers sharing postmodern questioning of authority, boundaries of self, and autobiographical truth. Titles include: Art/I/fact: Rereading culture and subjectivity through sexual abuse survivor narratives; Relational selves, relational lives: the story of the story; and All by myself: Piero Manzoni's autobiographical use of his body, its parts, and its products. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

G. THOMAS COUSER is Professor of English at Hofstra University.

JOSEPH FICHTELBERG is Associate Professor of English at Hofstra. Both have written extensively on issues surrounding autobiography.