An autobiographically inflected work of lifewriting scholarship, this groundbreaking study examines how five autobiographical (or, in Tim O Brien s case, autobiographically adjacent) literary texts The Things They Carried by Tim O Brien; Kaddish by Allen Ginsberg; The White Album by Joan Didion; and Prisoner on the Hell Planet by Art Spiegelman, and Psychiatric Tales by Darryl Cunningham use distinct techniques of their respective genres metafiction, poetry, essay, graphic narrative to communicate the affective experience of psychic pain. This book situates the autobiographical subject/text as a stand-in (a surrogate self) for readers unable to give voice to their trauma.
Building on foundational lifewriting scholarship particularly the work of Philippe Lejeune, Mary Mason, John Paul Eakin, and Nancy K. Miller this book enlarges the scope of the relational self posited by Mason and subsequent feminist lifewriting scholars and extends the concept of relationality from the autobiographical subject and chosen other within an autobiographical text to the autobiographical text and the reader, specifically, here, in autobiographies of trauma.
As a former foster child and ward of the state with no surviving family or institutional records, the author has turned to the texts examined here specifically those of O Brien, Didion, Ginsberg, and Spiegelman in the (re)construction of his lost, fragmented, and traumatic history, helping to objectify and articulate embodied memories that otherwise have had no locus. At key moments in the book, the author discusses his autobiography and affective connections to these four works, merging theory and practice. The book is distinctive in using this extended theoretical approach and the strategic use of autobiographical writing and personal history to map how O Brien, Ginsberg, Didion, Spiegelman, and Cunningham communicate the experience of psychic pain.
Chapter 1: An Introduction The Wounded and Collective Body: Artist as Oracle.- Chapter 2. Relational Aesthetics: The Writer and Reader Connection.- Chapter 3. Making the Stomach Believe : Sensational Truth and Tim O Brien s The Things They Carried.- Chapter 4. from whose pained head I first took Vision : My Sensational Allen Ginsberg, 1948-1959.- Chapter 5. Distancing Effects: Somatic Reaction formation and Social Anomie in Joan Didion s The White Album .- Chapter 6. Labile Lines: The Comics of Mental Illness in Art Spiegelman s Prisoner on The Hell Planet and Darryl Cunningham s Psychiatric Tales.
David Bahr is a tenured Associate Professor of English at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, The City University of New York (CUNY), USA.
