DOCSLIB.ORG

The Life of Diana Trilling (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 424 Pp

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
The Life of Diana Trilling (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 424 Pp ALH Online Review, Series XX 1 Natalie Robins, The Untold Journey: The Life of Diana Trilling (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 424 pp. Reviewed by Rachel Gordan, University of Florida One wonders if the New York Intellectuals—that cadre of midcentury, anti-Stalinist, thinkers and writers that included Hannah Arendt, Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, Saul Bellow, Mary McCarthy, Clement Greenberg, Sidney Hook, Lionel Trilling, and Diana Trilling—ever truly felt like the cohort they now appear to be. Most famously in the 1998 PBS film Arguing the World, the identity of this group as a mostly Jewish, New York City counterpart to the Bloomsbury group of London intellectuals has been cemented in collective memory. Rising from the hotbed of City College intellectual life, these individuals appear less lonely and more rooted in a moment and a movement when they are placed under the label of New York Intellectuals. But how does focusing on their individual lives change our understanding of this group? Some insight is gained through Natalie Robins’s The Untold Journey: The Life of Diana Trilling. The title refers both to Lionel Trilling’s only published novel, The Middle of the Journey (1947), and to Diana Trilling’s 1994 memoir, The Beginning of the Journey. Robins’s biography makes clear that there can be no complete story of either Trilling without the other, however much we are used to thinking of Lionel, the embodiment of the literary public intellectual, as the star in this couple. While his death made the front page of the New York Times, with the obituary reading, “He made the life of the mind an exciting experience,” he was but half of “Li and Di.” Their struggles were not only over how to be a power couple in an era before power couples. The “three ‘elephants’ in the room” of their marriage—which, according to Diana, were Lionel’s rage, or “furies,” his impotence, and Diana’s contributions to his work—are among the major themes of this biography (101). Financial insecurity was another constant of their marriage, as was Diana’s need to speak and write the truth, even as Lionel sought, for the sake of his career, to craft a more complimentary narrative of their lives. Maybe it is a sign of the effectiveness of Robins’s biography that this reviewer finished her book convinced of Diana’s commitment to honesty and Lionel’s commitment to literature. Writing—Diana’s ability to help Lionel summon the words, and their shared desire to create a legacy through their publications—kept their lives intertwined, even as it provided Diana with a final glorious chapter after her husband’s death. Although the Trilling’s marriage was never a storybook romance, according to Diana, who expressed frequent frustration with the challenge of monogamy, Diana and Lionel were devoted to each other. “[w]e were so terribly married to each other,” Diana Trilling explained (qtd. in Robins 100). Since so few of the young marriages inside the New York © The Author 2019. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected] 2 ALH Online Review, Series XX literary jungle lasted, and adultery and sex were such frequent topics of conversation and writing in their milieu, their story is noteworthy. Robins provides Diana’s view of the difficulty of their union, and the trials of dealing with what their son, James, would later recognize as his late father’s ADHD. “[P]eople will celebrate one member of a household but not two,” Diana believed, thereby explaining how Lionel’s fame and success robbed her of some of her own (qtd. in Robins 241). This feeling of being in Lionel’s shadow made it difficult for Diana to enjoy the many remarkable moments in their shared life: a visit to the White House during the Kennedy administration and being invited to take part in a goodwill visit to Berlin in 1967 with other New York Intellectuals were memories full of complaints for Diana, who always felt the invisible line connecting her to Lionel in any room they entered together. The mantle of being Lionel’s wife weighed Diana down, despite the fact that she had advantages of her own: a close relationship with her father had given Diana a strong sense of her own intelligence; she graduated from Radcliffe, one of only three Jews in her class; and her family was more prosperous than Lionel’s. Diana Rubin of West End Avenue was the catch when the couple met on a Christmas Eve blind date in 1927, and the twenty-two-year-old Lionel could sense it: “She is perhaps the first girl whose being in my arms made me feel triumphant and joyous,” he wrote in his journal (qtd. in Robins 19). Yet Diana’s literary successes owed to her connection to Lionel. Indeed, even the idea of having a career in letters was one that took root once they married (Diana had planned to be vocalist), and it is a reminder of the importance of relationships and networks to successful writing careers. For instance, a pivotal scene in the book occurs when, in 1941, in the hallway of their apartment, Diana overhears a phone conversation that changed her life and legacy. She gleaned that Lionel was speaking with the editor of the Nation and that the magazine was looking for a fiction reviewer. When he hung up, Diana, smiling at her husband, wondered aloud whether she might be suitable for the positon. To his credit, Lionel Trilling agreed immediately, and Diana was on her way to establishing what would become a memorable voice in the literary world. Here Diana’s contentiousness was put to good use as she became the kind of critic who, as Paul Fussell has observed of her reviews, was “not satisfied to leave literature sitting there uninterpreted in its fullest psychological, social, and political meaning. Indeed, she believed that ‘literature is no mere decoration of life but an index of the health or sickness of society.’” Diana began with short, unsigned comments on new novels and then moved to signed fiction reviews, and within a year, she had her own column in the Nation, “Fiction in Review.” Would this match between the Nation and one of its most famous reviewers have been made without Lionel? (And how many writers never got the chance because they were © The Author 2019. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected] ALH Online Review, Series XX 3 not sharing a bed and a hallway with another writer, or because their husbands were less receptive to such suggestions?) It seems unlikely, too, that Diana would have developed as productive a relationship with publisher William Jovanovich, had she not been married to a writer whom Jovanovich sought to keep inside his stable. Although Diana was not spared cutting reviews by virtue of being a Trilling—and her association to Lionel may have inspired resentment from some of her detractors—his status paved the way to friendships, such as Diana’s with David Riesman, providing her with emotional and intellectual support even when her marriage did not. Robins’s exploration of Diana’s encounter with feminism is illuminating. Like many intelligent, accomplished women of her generation who had encountered gender bias for so long before the movement, Diana was faced with the need to figure out whether to change her philosophy or mode of living as a result of new currents in thought. That she had been socialized as a young woman and married within a society that had a traditional outlook on male-female relations was a fact that Diana regularly acknowledged as her reason for not making radical adjustments in her life. (“Radcliffe tamped down any early feminist stirrings in most of its students,” Robins reminds readers [30].) That she was, as the editor and publisher Elisabeth Sifton called her, a “freelance soul,” also meant that Diana was resistant to following the crowd on new movements (qtd. in Robins 184). There were also the facts of her family life that made Diana less likely to feel that second wave feminism was speaking to her. In the Trilling home, both spouses were often working at home, and Lionel helped with cleaning and the preparations for dinner guests and hosting, so long as it was behind the scenes, and the outside world did not witness his good housekeeping. Still, Diana was in charge of the household. Although she did not join the frontlines of the women’s movement, Diana could not help being influenced by it. As the women’s movement continued to demand her attention (increasingly, in the 1960s and 70s, feminist voices were part of the writer events and the panel discussions in which she participated), Diana realized that she was a kind of a feminist—what Robins calls a “family feminist,” “a woman who believed that women in concert with men and their families will transform modern life” (184). Diana’s writing gave her an opportunity to explain this viewpoint, as when she published a journal on motherhood in Partisan Review. Her husband’s death in 1975 came as a terrible loss for Diana, even as it allowed her finally to make her own writing the centerpiece of her life and to continue to reap the rewards of friendships she had cultivated in her younger years. Amazingly, Diana made the most of widowhood, publishing more in the subsequent two decades, while her health was in decline, than she had in the previous three.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Mary Mccarthy and Vassar
    Mary McCarthy and Vassar 1 Mary McCarthy and Vass ar An Exhibition Catalogue VASSAR COLLEGE LIBRARIES 2012 2 3 Mary McCarthy and Vass ar An Exhibition Catalogue VASSAR COLLEGE LIBRARIES 2012 2 3 CONTENTS Mary McCarthy and Vassar page 5 The Company We Keep: Mary McCarthy and the Mythic Essence of Vassar page 7 Checklist of the Exhibition page 15 All essays 2012 © the authors 4 5 Mary McCarthy and Vassar By RONALD PATKUS 2012 marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Mary McCarthy, one of 20th century America’s foremost writers and critics. She was born on June 21, 1912 in Seattle, Washington, the first child and only daughter of Roy Winfield and Therese (“Tess”) Preston McCarthy. McCarthy and her three younger brothers (Kevin, Preston, and Sheridan) were orphaned in 1918, when both parents died in the influenza epidemic. For a time the children lived with their great-aunt and her husband, but then McCarthy moved back to Seattle to live with her maternal grandparents, while her brothers were sent to boarding school. This was a privileged environment, and McCarthy at- tended excellent schools. In 1929 she enrolled in the freshmen class at Vassar. No one could have known it at the time, but McCarthy’s arrival on cam- pus was the beginning of a long relationship between her and the college, even though there were ups and downs at certain points. While a student, McCarthy was busy, making friends with classmates, writing for several un- dergraduate publications, and taking part in plays and other activities. Her academic responsibilities did not suffer, and she graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1933.
    [Show full text]
  • Mary Mccarthy
    Mary McCarthy: Manuscripts for in the Manuscript Collection at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center Descriptive Summary Creator: McCarthy, Mary, 1912-1989 Title: Mary McCarthy, Manuscripts for The Group Dates: 1953-1964 Extent: 2 boxes, 1 galley folder (.63 linear feet) Abstract: The Ransom Center’s holdings for Mary McCarthy comprise her draft chapters, final manuscript, and galley proofs for the novel The Group . RLIN Record #: TXRC05-A10006 Language: English . Access: Open for research Administrative Information Acquisition: Purchase, 1968 (R4493) Processed by: Bob Taylor, 2003 Repository: The University of Texas at Austin, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center McCarthy, Mary, 1912-1989 Biographical Sketch Born in Seattle on June 21, 1912, Mary McCarthy was the eldest of four children born to Roy and Therese McCarthy. Orphaned upon their parents’ deaths in the flu epidemic of 1918, Mary and her brothers eventually found refuge with their maternal grandparents in Seattle. Following her graduation from Vassar College in 1933, McCarthy, intending to pursue a literary career, moved to New York City, where she soon attracted attention for her essays and dramatic criticism. In the late 1930s she began to write short stories, several of which served as the nucleus of her first novel, The Company She Keeps, published in 1942. As one of the major figures in contemporary American cultural and political thought, Mary McCarthy wrote widely in fiction( The Oasis, Cast a Cold Eye, The Groves of Academe ), theater criticism( Mary McCarthy’s Theatre Chronicles, 1937-1962 ), memoir( Memories of a Catholic Girlhood and How I Grew ), and broad-ranging commentary( Venice Observed and The Mask of State: Watergate Portraits ).
    [Show full text]
  • History 600: Public Intellectuals in the US Prof. Ratner-Rosenhagen Office
    Hannah Arendt W.E.B. DuBois Noam Chomsky History 600: Public Intellectuals in the U.S. Prof. Ratner-Rosenhagen Lecturer: Ronit Stahl Class Meetings: Office: Mosse Hum. 4112 Office: Mosse Hum. 4112 M 11 a.m.-1 p.m. email: [email protected] email: [email protected] Room: Mosse Hum. 5257 Prof. RR’s Office Hours: R.S.’s Office Hours: T 3- M 9 a.m.-11a.m. 5 p.m. This course is designed for students interested in exploring the life of the mind in the twentieth-century United States. Specifically, we will examine the life of particular minds— intellectuals of different political, moral, and social persuasions and sensibilities, who have played prominent roles in American public life over the course of the last century. Despite the common conception of American culture as profoundly anti-intellectual, we will evaluate how professional thinkers and writers have indeed been forces in American society. Our aim is to investigate the contested meaning, role, and place of the intellectual in a democratic, capitalist culture. We will also examine the cultural conditions, academic and governmental institutions, and the media for the dissemination of ideas, which have both fostered and inhibited intellectual production and exchange. Roughly the first third of the semester will be devoted to reading studies in U.S. and comparative intellectual history, the sociology of knowledge, and critical social theory. In addition, students will explore the varieties of public intellectual life by becoming familiarized with a wide array of prominent American philosophers, political and social theorists, scientists, novelists, artists, and activists.
    [Show full text]
  • Dr. Lionel Trilling Jefferson Lecturer the Blakelock Problem
    Humanities New York City, a sheaf of rolled-up canvases under his arm, while Blakelock bargained; as often as not, they’d return to the same dealers with the same pic­ tures just before closing, Blakelock desperate and willing to accept almost anything for his work. He was a self-taught artist, born and raised in New York City, who headed west after graduation from what is now the City University of New York, sketch­ ing his way across the plains to the coast, returning by way of Mexico, Panama, and the West Indies. At first he painted pictures in the Hudson River style— romantically colored panoramas identifiable with the locales he had visited. But as the years passed, the children came, and fame, fortune or even a minimal income eluded him, Blakelock started building on canvas a world of his own: dark scenes, heavy with overarching trees Dr. Lionel Trilling brooding over moonlit waters, highly romantic Indian Jefferson Lecturer encampments that never were. Bright colors left his palette, the hues of night dominated. Dr. Lionel Trilling will deliver the first Jefferson Lec­ Blakelock did build up a modest following of col­ ture in the Humanities before a distinguished au­ lectors, but in the 1870’s and 1880’s, $30 to $50 was dience at the National Academy of Sciences Audi­ a decent price for a sizable painting by an unknown, torium, 2101 Constitution Avenue Northwest, Wash­ and his fees never caught up with his expenses. Only ington, D. C. on Wednesday, April 26 at eight once did light break through: in 1883, the Toledo o ’clock.
    [Show full text]
  • Nathan Glazer—Merit Before Meritocracy - the American Interest
    Nathan Glazer—Merit Before Meritocracy - The American Interest https://www.the-american-interest.com/2019/04/03/nathan-glazer-... https://www.the-american-interest.com/2019/04/03/nathan-glazer-merit-before-meritocracy/ WHAT ONCE WAS Nathan Glazer—Merit Before Meritocracy PETER SKERRY The perambulating path of this son of humble Jewish immigrants into America’s intellectual and political elites points to how much we have overcome—and lost—over the past century. The death of Nathan Glazer in January, a month before his 96th birthday, has been rightly noted as the end of an era in American political and intellectual life. Nat Glazer was the last exemplar of what historian Christopher Lasch would refer to as a “social type”: the New York intellectuals, the sons and daughters of impoverished, almost exclusively Jewish immigrants who took advantage of the city’s public education system and then thrived in the cultural and political ferment that from the 1930’s into the 1960’s made New York the leading metropolis of the free world. As Glazer once noted, the Marxist polemics that he and his fellow students at City College engaged in afforded them unique insights into, and unanticipated opportunities to interpret, Soviet communism to the rest of America during the Cold War. Over time, postwar economic growth and political change resulted in the relative decline of New York and the emergence of Washington as the center of power and even glamor in American life. Nevertheless, Glazer and his fellow New York intellectuals, relocated either to major universities around the country or to Washington think tanks, continued to exert remarkable influence over both domestic and foreign affairs.
    [Show full text]
  • Congress Is Weak Because Its Members Want It to Be
    CommentaryJULY/AUGUST 2018 DOUBLE ISSUE Congress Is Weak Because Its Members Want It to Be BY YUVAL LEVIN Game of Peacock Thrones BY SOHRAB AHMARI Should Jews Flee Europe? BY MELANIE PHILLIPS Commentary How Israel Became a JULY/AUGUST 2018 : VOLUME 146 NUMBER 1 146 : VOLUME 2018 JULY/AUGUST TV Powerhouse BY HANNAH BROWN Philip Roth’s My Time Among Joyless the Exuberance Anti-Israelites BY RUTH R. WISSE CANADA $7.00 : US $5.95 BY ARDIE GELDMAN We join in celebrating Israel’s 70 years. And Magen David Adom is proud to have saved lives for every one of them. Magen David Adom, Israel’s largest and premier emergency medical response agency, has been saving lives since before 1948. Supporters like you provide MDA’s 27,000 paramedics, EMTs, and civilian Life Guardians — more than 90% of them volunteers — with the training, equipment, and rescue vehicles they need. In honor of Israel’s 70th anniversary, MDA has launched a 70 for 70 Campaign that will put 70 new ambulances on the streets of Israel this year. There is no better way to celebrate this great occasion and ensure the vitality of the state continues for many more years. Please give today. 352 Seventh Avenue, Suite 400 New York, NY 10001 Toll-Free 866.632.2763 • [email protected] www.afmda.org Celebrate Israel’s 70th anniversary by helping put 70 new ambulances on its streets. FOR SEVENTY Celebrate Israel’s 70th anniversary by putting 70 new ambulances on its streets. please join us for the ninth annual COMMENTARY ROAST this year’s victim: JOE LIEBERMAN monday, october 8, 2018, new york city CO-CHAIR TABLES: $25,000.
    [Show full text]
  • Lionel Trilling's Existential State
    Lionel Trilling’s Existential State Michael Szalay Death is like justice is supposed to be. Ralph Ellison, Three Days Before the Shooting IN 1952, LIONEL TRILLING ANNOUNCED THAT “intellect has associated itself with power, per- haps as never before in history, and is now conceded to be in itself a kind of power.” He was de- scribing what would be his own associations: his personal papers are littered with missives from the stars of postwar politics. Senator James L. Buckley admires his contribution to American let- ters. Jacob J. Javits does the same. Daniel Patrick Moynihan praises him as “the nation’s leading literary critic.” First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy writes from the White House, thanking him for the collection of D. H. Lawrence stories and hoping to see him again soon. Three years later, President Lyndon Johnson sends a telegram asking Trilling to represent him at the funeral of T. S. Eliot. Politicians liked having Trilling around. He confirmed their noble sense of mission as often as they praised him.1 Trilling’s accommodating relation to power alienated many of his peers, like Irving Howe and C. Wright Mills, and later provoked condemnations from historians like Christopher Lasch and MICHAEL SZALAY teaches American literature and culture at UC, Irvine, and is the author of New Deal Modernism and The Hip Figure, forthcoming from Stanford University Press. He is co-editor of Stanford’s “Post*45” Book Series. 1 Trilling thought that the political establishment embraced intellectuals because it was “uneasy with itself” and eager “to apologize for its existence by a show of taste and sensitivity.” Trilling, “The Situation of the American Intellectual at the Present Time,” in The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent, ed.
    [Show full text]
  • Neoconservatism Hoover Press : Berkowitz/Conservative Hberkc Ch5 Mp 104 Rev1 Page 104 Hoover Press : Berkowitz/Conservative Hberkc Ch5 Mp 105 Rev1 Page 105
    Hoover Press : Berkowitz/Conservative hberkc ch5 Mp_103 rev1 page 103 part iii Neoconservatism Hoover Press : Berkowitz/Conservative hberkc ch5 Mp_104 rev1 page 104 Hoover Press : Berkowitz/Conservative hberkc ch5 Mp_105 rev1 page 105 chapter five The Neoconservative Journey Jacob Heilbrunn The Neoconservative Conspiracy The longer the United States struggles to impose order in postwar Iraq, the harsher indictments of the George W. Bush administration’s foreign policy are becoming. “Acquiring additional burdens by engag- ing in new wars of liberation is the last thing the United States needs,” declared one Bush critic in Foreign Affairs. “The principal problem is the mistaken belief that democracy is a talisman for all the world’s ills, and that the United States has a responsibility to promote dem- ocratic government wherever in the world it is lacking.”1 Does this sound like a Democratic pundit bashing Bush for par- tisan gain? Quite the contrary. The swipe came from Dimitri Simes, president of the Nixon Center and copublisher of National Interest. Simes is not alone in calling on the administration to reclaim the party’s pre-Reagan heritage—to abandon the moralistic, Wilsonian, neoconservative dream of exporting democracy and return to a more limited and realistic foreign policy that avoids the pitfalls of Iraq. 1. Dimitri K. Simes, “America’s Imperial Dilemma,” Foreign Affairs (Novem- ber/December 2003): 97, 100. Hoover Press : Berkowitz/Conservative hberkc ch5 Mp_106 rev1 page 106 106 jacob heilbrunn In fact, critics on the Left and Right are remarkably united in their assessment of the administration. Both believe a neoconservative cabal has hijacked the administration’s foreign policy and has now overplayed its hand.
    [Show full text]
  • Epi-Revel@Nice
    Nabokov and the Campus Novel Lodge David Pour citer cet article Lodge David, « Nabokov and the Campus Novel », Cycnos, vol. 24.1 (Vladimir Nabokov, Annotating vs Interpreting Nabokov), 2006, mis en ligne en mars 2008. http://epi-revel.univ-cotedazur.fr/publication/item/597 Lien vers la notice http://epi-revel.univ-cotedazur.fr/publication/item/597 Lien du document http://epi-revel.univ-cotedazur.fr/cycnos/597.pdf Cycnos, études anglophones revue électronique éditée sur épi-Revel à Nice ISSN 1765-3118 ISSN papier 0992-1893 AVERTISSEMENT Les publications déposées sur la plate-forme épi-revel sont protégées par les dispositions générales du Code de la propriété intellectuelle. Conditions d'utilisation : respect du droit d'auteur et de la propriété intellectuelle. L'accès aux références bibliographiques, au texte intégral, aux outils de recherche, au feuilletage de l'ensemble des revues est libre, cependant article, recension et autre contribution sont couvertes par le droit d'auteur et sont la propriété de leurs auteurs. Les utilisateurs doivent toujours associer à toute unité documentaire les éléments bibliographiques permettant de l'identifier correctement, notamment toujours faire mention du nom de l'auteur, du titre de l'article, de la revue et du site épi-revel. Ces mentions apparaissent sur la page de garde des documents sauvegardés ou imprimés par les utilisateurs. L'université Côte d’Azur est l'éditeur du portail épi-revel et à ce titre détient la propriété intellectuelle et les droits d'exploitation du site. L'exploitation du site à des fins commerciales ou publicitaires est interdite ainsi que toute diffusion massive du contenu ou modification des données sans l'accord des auteurs et de l'équipe d’épi-revel.
    [Show full text]
  • Norman Podhoretz: a Biography"
    Books Book Review: "Norman Podhoretz: A Biography" By Thomas L. Jeffers (Cambridge University Press). By Saul Rosenberg '93GSAS | Fall 2010 Norman Podhoretz, a maker of friends, ex-friends, and enemies. (David Howells / Corbis) John Gross, the English literary critic, was once in a magazine office in New York when the secretary called across the room to him: “John, there’s a Mr. Podhoretz on the phone for you.” As Gross recalled, “I felt every pair of eyes drilling into me, as though she’d said, ‘There’s a Mr. Himmler on the phone for you.’” This anecdote, retold by Thomas Jeffers in his Norman Podhoretz: A Biography, nicely sums up what many people feel about “Mr. Podhoretz.” He is hated by liberals for his turn to the right at the end of the sixties, and particularly loathed for his energetic support of Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and the Iraq War. So it is good someone should remind us, as Jeffers admiringly does, that Podhoretz is a first- class intellectual of enormous culture and considerable humanity. Podhoretz ’50CC was a first-generation American prodigy, an acute reader initially of literature and then politics, whose aggressive intellect took him from beat-up Brownsville through a glittering student career at Columbia College and Cambridge University to the editorship of Commentary at age 30. He edited the monthly from 1960 to 1995 into a publication The Economist once mused might be “the best magazine in the world.” In the last 25 years of his tenure, Podhoretz helped found and lead the neoconservative revolution that insisted, against some popular and much elite opinion, that America was, for all its faults, a clear force for good in the world.
    [Show full text]
  • Wojahn Blackbird Commentary
    “On Hearing That My Poems Were Being Studied in a Distant Place”: Thoughts on Distance, Difficulty, and Secret Addressees By David Wojahn Published in Blackbird: An Online Journal of Literature and the Arts Spring 2016, Vol. 15 No. 1 So-called “public intellectuals” tend not to have exceptionally long afterlives. We have heard their names—the likes of H.L. Mencken, Margaret Mead, Mary McCarthy, Lionel Trilling, and Edmund Wilson—but all have become footnotes in our cultural history. Also on the verge of cultural oblivion is the most telegenic and popular public intellectual of the late twentieth century, astronomer and astrophysicist Carl Sagan. His many books were bestsellers; he was a regular guest on Johnny Carson; Cosmos, the PBS series which he developed, coproduced, and moderated, was an immense success when first broadcast in 1980. And, last but not least, his highly idiosyncratic speaking voice—haunting but oddly nasal and prone to doing downright weird things with vowels—was as unmistakable as it was widely lampooned. As with Bob Dylan, once you heard that voice you would never get it out of your head. But Sagan’s voice has outlasted his reputation. Since his death in 1996, a foundation has been named after him, and many of his books remain in print, but Sagan seems, even to those who know him, a relic of the 1970s and early ’80s—he’s down in the cultural junk drawer with the Walkman, the shoulder pads, the big hair, Cyndi Lauper, and the presidency of Ronald Reagan. Yet one of Sagan’s projects has a certain loopy relevance to the topic I will discuss tonight.
    [Show full text]
  • Seriality I Co Temporary America Memoir
    SERIALITY I COTEMPORARY AMERICA MEMOIR: 1957-2007 A Dissertation by NICOLE EVE MCDANIEL-CARDER Submitted to the Office of Graduate Studies of Texas A&M University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY August 2009 Major Subject: English SERIALITY I COTEMPORARY AMERICA MEMOIR: 1957-2007 A Dissertation by NICOLE EVE MCDANIEL-CARDER Submitted to the Office of Graduate Studies of Texas A&M University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Approved by: Chair of Committee, Susan M. Stabile Committee Members, Pamela Matthews Linda Radzik Sally Robinson Head of Department, M. Jimmie Killingsworth August 2009 Major Subject: English iii ABSTRACT Seriality in Contemporary American Memoir: 1957-2007. (August 2009) Nicole Eve McDaniel-Carder, B.A., Sweet Briar College; M.A., Texas A&M University Chair of Advisory Committee: Dr. Susan M. Stabile In this dissertation, I examine the practice of what I term serial memoir in the second-half of the twentieth century in American literature, arguing that serial memoir represents an emerging and significant trend in life writing as it illustrates a transition in how a particular generation of writers understands lived experience and its textual representation. During the second-half of the twentieth century, and in tandem with the rapid technological advancements of postmodern and postindustrial culture, I look at the serial authorship and publication of multiple self-reflexive texts and propose that serial memoir presents a challenge to the historically privileged techniques of linear storytelling, narrative closure, and the possibility for autonomous subjectivity in American life writing.
    [Show full text]