This book examines philosophers autobiographies as a genre of philosophical writing. Author J. Lenore Wright focuses her attention on five philosophical autobiographies: Augustine s Confessions, Descartes Meditations, Rousseau s The Confessions, Nietzsche s Ecce Homo, and Hazel Barnes s The Story I Tell Myself. In the context of first-person narration, she shows how the philosophers in question turn their attention inward and unleash their analytical rigor on themselves.
Memoir: An IntroductionEach year brings a batch of new memoirs, ranging from works by former teachers and celebrity has-beens to disillusioned soldiers and bestselling novelists. In addition to becoming bestsellers in their own right, memoirs have become a popular object of inquiry in the academy and a mainstay in most MFA workshops. Courses in what is now called "life writing" study memoir alongside personal essays, diaries, and autobiographies. Memoir: An Introduction proffers a succinct and comprehensive survey of the genre (and its many subgenres) while taking readers through the various techniques, themes, and debates that have come to characterize the ubiquitous literary form.
This volume explores Graham Greene's literary career. Among other things, it explores his motives for writing; the literary and cinematic influences that shaped his work; his writing routine and the importance of his childhood experience. Greene was elusive, enigmatic and this book teases out the fiction from his autobiographies, the autobiography from his fictions, sharing Paul Theroux's view that you may not know Greene from his face or speech "but from his writing, you know everything".
