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The Ethics of Life Writing
Paul John Eakin (Edited by)
9780801488337
Paperback / softback, published 15 April 2004
282 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.7 cm, 0.454 kg
What is the nature of the author's obligation to her subject and to her audience? The Ethics of Life Writing, skillfully edited by Paul John Eakin, addresses this fundamental question. The book is the result of eleven prominent 'life writers' writing, presenting, arguing, and re-writing their ideas on the ethics of writing from real life.... Each essay in this collection motivated me to find a pen and underline the wisdom. Every writer who has ever asked, Do I feel right about this' will benefit from the reading of this book.
A pervasive culture of confession, combined with the revolution in Internet-based communication, has crowded bookstores with autobiographies and biographies and generated an unprecedented amount of personal exposure. As columnists and reviewers tell us that we live in an age of memoir, life histories are commanding attention in many academic and professional disciplines, including anthropology, history, journalism, medicine, and psychology, as well as literary studies. Our lives are increasingly on display in public, but the ethical issues involved in presenting such revelations remain largely unexamined. How can life writing do good, and how can it cause harm? The eleven essays in The Ethics of Life Writing explore such questions. They focus chiefly on autobiography and biography, but their findings apply to all "life writing"—the entire class of literature in which people tell life stories. Their forms include case studies, diaries, ethnographies, interviews, and profiles. The essays are enhanced by an introduction that provides an overview of the volume, including a section on life writing vis-à-vis privacy and the law, and an afterword that looks at the essays in relation to one another.
Introduction: Mapping the Ethics of Life Writing
by Paul John EakinPart I. Telling the Truth in Autobiography, Biography, and History1. Arguing with Life Stories: The Case of Rigoberta Menchú
by Paul Lauritzen2. Misremembering Ted Hughes
by Diane MiddlebrookPart II. Life Writing as Moral Inquiry3. Life Writing as Narrative of the Good: Father and Son and the Ethics of Authenticity
by David Parker4. Judging and Not Judging Parents
by John D. BarbourPart III. Representing Others: Trust and Betrayal5. Friendship, Fiction, and Memoir: Trust and Betrayal in Writing from One's Own Life
by Claudia Mills6. Decent and Indecent: Writing My Father's Life
by Richard Freadman7. The Ethics of Betrayal: Diary of a Memoirist
by Nancy K. MillerPart IV. Acts of Resistance: Telling Counterstories8. Mapping Lives: "Truth," Life Writing, and DNA
by Alice Wexler9. Moral Non-fiction: Life Writing and Children's Disability
by Arthur W. Frank10. When Life Writing Becomes Death Writing: Disability and the Ethics of Parental Euthanography
by G. Thomas Couser11. Tales of Consent and Descent: Life Writing as a Fight against an Imposed Self-Image
by Marianne GullestadAfterword
by Craig HowesContributors
Index