Contemporary American Memoir
Contemporary American Memoir
This chapter explores the diversity, richness, and innovation of contemporary memoir. One innovation is the nobody memoir, which puts on record different kinds of experience, including accounts of what it is like to live in, or as, some particular body. And that has often meant writing about odd bodies, those with anomalous somatic conditions of some sort—illnesses or disabilities. The chapter also reckons with the “stunt memoir,” or “shtick lit”—the record of a temporary experiment in behavior or lifestyle. Examples are A. J. Jacobs's The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible and Norah Vincent's Self-Made Man, in which she recounts posing as a man for a year. Finally, there is the postmodernist memoir, such as Lauren Slater's Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir and Dave Eggers's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. There are few such memoirs, probably because one feature of postmodernism—the open acknowledgment of the artifice of the text—is inconsistent with the nature of memoir.
Keywords: American memoirs, American literature, nobody memoir, stunt memoir, postmodernist memoir
Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .
