G Thomas Couser
Biographic Data
| ID | 123206 |
|---|---|
| NAME | G Thomas Couser |
| GIVEN NAMES | G Thomas |
| FAMILY NAME | Couser |
| SIGNATURE | COUSER G T |
| AFFILIATIONS | Hofstra University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 37 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 39 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 37 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1980 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
The Limits and Limitations of Disability: Retrospect and Prospect
In the article, the author discusses his topic in relation to two experiences that have stimulated his thinking. The first experience was that of co-editing, with Susannah B. Mintz, a two-volume reference work entitled Disability Experiences: Memoirs, Autobiographies, and Other Personal Narratives for Gale Cengage. The second was teaching the Illness/Disability Narrative Course in Columbia’s Narrative Medicine Program in the spring 2021 term. Bot…
Disability, Depression, Diagnosis, and Harm: Reflections on Two Personal Scenarios
Bird-Bent Grass: A Memoir, in Pieces by Kathleen Venema
Reviewed by: Bird-Bent Grass: A Memoir, in Pieces by Kathleen Venema G. Thomas Couser (bio) Bird-Bent Grass: A Memoir, in Pieces Kathleen Venema Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2018, 354 pp. ISBN 978-1771122900, $24.99 paperback. Kathleen Venema's memoir is aptly subtitled "in pieces," as it weaves, quilts, or patches together an account of her relationship with her demented mother out of disparate lifewriting materials. As such, it affords a complex model o…
Is There a Body in This Text? Embodiment in Graphic Somatography
If the great advantage of the graphic memoir of illness and disability is that it features the body in the text, for greatest effectiveness—and affectiveness—the body ought to be recognizable as a particular human's—manifestly a thing of flesh, blood, and bone, a truly corporeal body
The Future of Life Writing: Body Stories
When it comes to prognostication, I agree with Yogi Berra: “It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” I prefer to think of what follows as “informed speculation” about the futur
Body Language: Illness, Disability, and Life Writing
As much as we may like to evade or minimise them, illness and disability inescapably attend human embodiment; we are all vulnerable subjects. So it might seem natural and inevitable that the most u
In Memoriam David Heywood Parker (1943–2015)
Paper Orphans: Writers' Children Write their Lives
Of the many memoirs of parents published in North America since the early 1990s, the great majority concern fathers rather than mothers. This pattern reflects the relational dynamics of the post-war middle-class nuclear family, typified by an absent bread-earning father and an available home-making mother. Memoirs of fathers (patriographies) tend to emerge from relationships that were experienced (by the writers) as deficient in some way or other…
Memoir: An Introduction
"Each year brings a glut 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 …
Filiation in Barack Obama's Dreams from My Father
Although Obama's memoir served, well after its initial publication in 1995, as a campaign autobiography in a historic election, it interests me primarily as an example of an emerging type of American life writing, which I call patriography: life writing about fathers by their sons or daughters. Like its companion subgenre matriography, patriography is inherently relational and inter-subjective life writing. It is also, of course, intergenerationa…
A History of Intelligence and ‘Intellectual Disability’: The Shaping of Psychology in Early Modern Europe – By C. F. Goodey
A Personal Post(human)Script: Further Reading/Reading Further
Posthumanist life writing expresses what humanist life writing has historically sup pressed or denied-the reality that, individually and collectively, humans are deeply dependent on each other (especially at the beginning and end of life); on other species (for sustenance, labor, raw material, and companionship); and of course, to an increasing extent, on technology
The Case History and Deferred Pain
Even when authors of case studies think they have concealed the identity of their patients, there is no guarantee that patients will not recognize themselves should they happen upon the narratives. And this recognition is very likely to cause them discomfort
Introduction: Disability and Life Writing
The current cultural moment in the U. S. and the U. K. is particularly amenable to life writing. Indeed, it has been widely acknowledged by critics, reviewers, and writers that the last few decades in these two countries have witnessed a memoir boom. Granted, as Ben Yagoda has demonstrated in his recent book, Memoir: A History (2009), this is by no means the first memoir boom. But it is probably accurate to say that in the last two decades or so …
What Disability Studies Has to Offer Medical Education
In My Father’s Closet: Reflections of a Critic Turned Life Writer
Relatively late in my career (in my early 60s), I began to write a biographical memoir of my father, William Griffith Couser (1906–1975), based initially and primarily on documents, mostly letters, that I found after his death. In doing so, after nearly 30 years of working as a critic of life writing, I became a life writer myself. The value of this memoir will lie in the letters themselves, partly because they are well written, partly because th…
Signifying Bodies: Disability in Contemporary Life Writing
"Thomas Couser's Signifying Bodies comes at a crucial moment when debates about physician assisted suicide, genetic engineering, and neo-natal screening are raising the question of what constitutes a 'life worth living' for persons with disabilities. Couser's work engages these debates by exploring the extensive number of personal narratives by or about persons with disabilities. As Couser brilliantly demonstrates through synoptic readings, these…
Witnessing Aids: Writing, Testimony, and the Work of Mourning (review)
Paradigms' Cost: Representing Vulnerable Subjects
The representation in life writing of vulnerable subjects—individuals who, for various reasons (most frequently disability), are not able to represent themselves, at least without assistance—poses difficult ethical questions. Cases should be addressed in terms of their particular characteristics, of course, but a broader approach to the ethical issues inherent in the representation of those with disabilities is to consider the benefits and risks …
Genre Matters: Form, Force, and Filiation
It is obviously no longer the case that genres are considered entirely distinct from one another, that each has its own prescriptive rules and criteria for evaluation of works within it, or that critics believe in a rigid hierarchy of genres. But that is not to say that genre no longer matters, that notions of genre have outlived their usefulness. Current approaches to genre emphasize function over form; that is, they are more interested in `genr…
Disability and (Auto)Ethnography: Riding (and Writing) the Bus with My Sister
Disabled people have largely been ignored by ethnographers, arguably to the detriment of both disabled people and the discipline of anthropology. But although disability communities are ripe for ethnographic investigation, disabled people, long subjected both to marginalization and objectifying examination, may resent and resist such attention. Indeed, disability ethnography faces some of the same ethical challenges as ethnography involving popul…
Vulnerable subjects: Ethics and Life Writing
In an exploration of a range of life-writing scenarios-from the celebrity to the ethnographicand a number of life-writing genres from parental memoir to literary case studies by Oliver Sacks, addresses complex contemporary issues, including investigation of the role of disability in narratives of euthanasia and exploration of the implications of the Human Genome Project for life-writing practices in any age when many regard DNA as a code that scr…
Identity, Identicality, and Life Writing: Telling (The Silent) Twins Apart
Identical twins challenge the Western valorization of the individual, and thus the major life-writing genres, autobiography and biography. The intense bond between Jennifer and June Gibbons, and their elective mutism, made their biography an unlikely project, but their obsessive journal-writing documented their lives in great detail. Marjorie Wallace's The Silent Twins demonstrates--and surmounts--the difficulty of representing identical twins
Genome and Genre: DNA and Life Writing
http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/bio.2001.0006
Memory and Narrative: The Weave of Life-Writing (review)
James Olney. Memory and Narrative: The Weave of Life-Writing. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998. 496 pp. ISBN 0-226-62816-7, $35.00
"The Empire of the "Normal: A Forum On Disability and Self-Representation: Introduction
It is generally agreed that people with disabilities have been misrepresented in most literary and mass media. Among literary genres, autobiography, which William Dean Howells referred to as the "most democratic province of the republic of letters," may be an exception. 1 Autobiography seems to require less in the way of literary expertise and experience than other, more exalted, genres; it seems to require only that one have a life--or at least,…
Disability and (Auto)Ethnography: Riding (and Writing) the Bus with My Sister
Disabled people have largely been ignored by ethnographers, arguably to the detriment of both disabled people and the discipline of anthropology. But although disability communities are ripe for ethnographic investigation, disabled people, long subjected both to marginalization and objectifying examination, may resent and resist such attention. Indeed, disability ethnography faces some of the same ethical challenges as ethnography involving popul…
Autopathography: Women, Illness, and Lifewriting
The word “pathography” first caught my attention not in its clinical context, in which it simply refers to writing about illness, such as case histories, but in a review by Joyce Carol Oates of David Roberts’s recent biography of Jean Stafford. There Oates adapted the clinical term to denote—and to denigrate—what she described as “hagiography’s diminished and often prurient twin, [whose] motifs are dysfunction and disaster, illnesses and pratfall…
Genre Matters: Form, Force, and Filiation
It is obviously no longer the case that genres are considered entirely distinct from one another, that each has its own prescriptive rules and criteria for evaluation of works within it, or that critics believe in a rigid hierarchy of genres. But that is not to say that genre no longer matters, that notions of genre have outlived their usefulness. Current approaches to genre emphasize function over form; that is, they are more interested in `genr…
Is There a Body in This Text? Embodiment in Graphic Somatography
If the great advantage of the graphic memoir of illness and disability is that it features the body in the text, for greatest effectiveness—and affectiveness—the body ought to be recognizable as a particular human's—manifestly a thing of flesh, blood, and bone, a truly corporeal body
Introduction: The Embodied Self
(1991). Introduction: The Embodied Self. a/b: Auto/Biography Studies: Vol. 6, Illness, Disability, and Lifewriting, pp. 1-7
Filiation in Barack Obama's Dreams from My Father
Although Obama's memoir served, well after its initial publication in 1995, as a campaign autobiography in a historic election, it interests me primarily as an example of an emerging type of American life writing, which I call patriography: life writing about fathers by their sons or daughters. Like its companion subgenre matriography, patriography is inherently relational and inter-subjective life writing. It is also, of course, intergenerationa…
Body Language: Illness, Disability, and Life Writing
As much as we may like to evade or minimise them, illness and disability inescapably attend human embodiment; we are all vulnerable subjects. So it might seem natural and inevitable that the most u
Paper Orphans: Writers' Children Write their Lives
Of the many memoirs of parents published in North America since the early 1990s, the great majority concern fathers rather than mothers. This pattern reflects the relational dynamics of the post-war middle-class nuclear family, typified by an absent bread-earning father and an available home-making mother. Memoirs of fathers (patriographies) tend to emerge from relationships that were experienced (by the writers) as deficient in some way or other…
Identity, Identicality, and Life Writing: Telling (The Silent) Twins Apart
Identical twins challenge the Western valorization of the individual, and thus the major life-writing genres, autobiography and biography. The intense bond between Jennifer and June Gibbons, and their elective mutism, made their biography an unlikely project, but their obsessive journal-writing documented their lives in great detail. Marjorie Wallace's The Silent Twins demonstrates--and surmounts--the difficulty of representing identical twins
Autobiography as Anti-Biography: The Case of Twain vs. Paine
(1987). Autobiography as Anti-Biography: The Case of Twain vs. Paine. a/b: Auto/Biography Studies: Vol. 3, No. 3, pp. 13-20
American Autobiography: The Prophetic Mode
American Autobiography: The Prophetic Mode
Current Interests, Work in Progress
Autobiography as Anti-Biography: The Case of Twain vs. Paine
(1987). Autobiography as Anti-Biography: The Case of Twain vs. Paine. a/b: Auto/Biography Studies: Vol. 3, No. 3, pp. 13-20
Black Women Writing Autobiography: A Tradition Within a Tradition
Autopathography: Women, Illness, and Lifewriting
The word “pathography” first caught my attention not in its clinical context, in which it simply refers to writing about illness, such as case histories, but in a review by Joyce Carol Oates of David Roberts’s recent biography of Jean Stafford. There Oates adapted the clinical term to denote—and to denigrate—what she described as “hagiography’s diminished and often prurient twin, [whose] motifs are dysfunction and disaster, illnesses and pratfall…
Introduction: The Embodied Self
(1991). Introduction: The Embodied Self. a/b: Auto/Biography Studies: Vol. 6, Illness, Disability, and Lifewriting, pp. 1-7
Black Elk Speaks Again: Self-Representation in Contemporary Native American Autobiography
(1992). Black Elk Speaks Again: Self-Representation in Contemporary Native American Autobiography. a/b: Auto/Biography Studies: Vol. 7, Native American Identities and Autobiography, pp. 273-291
Authority
Raising Adam: Ethnicity, Disability, and the Ethics of Life Writing in Michael Dorris's The Broken Cord
Michael Dorris's The Broken Cord (1989) combines elements of several life writing genres-for example, Native American autobiography, autoethnography, parental memoir, and disability memoir. Its mixture of genres raises questions about the ethics of parental life writing and the representation of people with disabilities. Ultimately, despite its reformist intentions, the book echoes rather than revises traditional inscriptions of race and disabili…
Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature
Journal Article Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. Rosemarie Garland Thomson. New York: Columbia UP, 1996. x + 200. $45.00 cloth, $14.50 paper. Get access Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. Rosemarie Garland Thomson. New York: Columbia UP, 1996. x + 200 pages. $45.00 cloth, $14.50 paper. G. Thomas Couser G. Thomas Couser Hofstra University Sear…
Memory and Narrative: The Weave of Life-Writing (review)
James Olney. Memory and Narrative: The Weave of Life-Writing. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998. 496 pp. ISBN 0-226-62816-7, $35.00
"The Empire of the "Normal: A Forum On Disability and Self-Representation: Introduction
It is generally agreed that people with disabilities have been misrepresented in most literary and mass media. Among literary genres, autobiography, which William Dean Howells referred to as the "most democratic province of the republic of letters," may be an exception. 1 Autobiography seems to require less in the way of literary expertise and experience than other, more exalted, genres; it seems to require only that one have a life--or at least,…
Genome and Genre: DNA and Life Writing
http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/bio.2001.0006
Identity, Identicality, and Life Writing: Telling (The Silent) Twins Apart
Identical twins challenge the Western valorization of the individual, and thus the major life-writing genres, autobiography and biography. The intense bond between Jennifer and June Gibbons, and their elective mutism, made their biography an unlikely project, but their obsessive journal-writing documented their lives in great detail. Marjorie Wallace's The Silent Twins demonstrates--and surmounts--the difficulty of representing identical twins
Vulnerable subjects: Ethics and Life Writing
In an exploration of a range of life-writing scenarios-from the celebrity to the ethnographicand a number of life-writing genres from parental memoir to literary case studies by Oliver Sacks, addresses complex contemporary issues, including investigation of the role of disability in narratives of euthanasia and exploration of the implications of the Human Genome Project for life-writing practices in any age when many regard DNA as a code that scr…
Witnessing Aids: Writing, Testimony, and the Work of Mourning (review)
Paradigms' Cost: Representing Vulnerable Subjects
The representation in life writing of vulnerable subjects—individuals who, for various reasons (most frequently disability), are not able to represent themselves, at least without assistance—poses difficult ethical questions. Cases should be addressed in terms of their particular characteristics, of course, but a broader approach to the ethical issues inherent in the representation of those with disabilities is to consider the benefits and risks …
Genre Matters: Form, Force, and Filiation
It is obviously no longer the case that genres are considered entirely distinct from one another, that each has its own prescriptive rules and criteria for evaluation of works within it, or that critics believe in a rigid hierarchy of genres. But that is not to say that genre no longer matters, that notions of genre have outlived their usefulness. Current approaches to genre emphasize function over form; that is, they are more interested in `genr…
Disability and (Auto)Ethnography: Riding (and Writing) the Bus with My Sister
Disabled people have largely been ignored by ethnographers, arguably to the detriment of both disabled people and the discipline of anthropology. But although disability communities are ripe for ethnographic investigation, disabled people, long subjected both to marginalization and objectifying examination, may resent and resist such attention. Indeed, disability ethnography faces some of the same ethical challenges as ethnography involving popul…
Signifying Bodies: Disability in Contemporary Life Writing
"Thomas Couser's Signifying Bodies comes at a crucial moment when debates about physician assisted suicide, genetic engineering, and neo-natal screening are raising the question of what constitutes a 'life worth living' for persons with disabilities. Couser's work engages these debates by exploring the extensive number of personal narratives by or about persons with disabilities. As Couser brilliantly demonstrates through synoptic readings, these…
The Case History and Deferred Pain
Even when authors of case studies think they have concealed the identity of their patients, there is no guarantee that patients will not recognize themselves should they happen upon the narratives. And this recognition is very likely to cause them discomfort
Introduction: Disability and Life Writing
The current cultural moment in the U. S. and the U. K. is particularly amenable to life writing. Indeed, it has been widely acknowledged by critics, reviewers, and writers that the last few decades in these two countries have witnessed a memoir boom. Granted, as Ben Yagoda has demonstrated in his recent book, Memoir: A History (2009), this is by no means the first memoir boom. But it is probably accurate to say that in the last two decades or so …
What Disability Studies Has to Offer Medical Education
In My Father’s Closet: Reflections of a Critic Turned Life Writer
Relatively late in my career (in my early 60s), I began to write a biographical memoir of my father, William Griffith Couser (1906–1975), based initially and primarily on documents, mostly letters, that I found after his death. In doing so, after nearly 30 years of working as a critic of life writing, I became a life writer myself. The value of this memoir will lie in the letters themselves, partly because they are well written, partly because th…
Art (27 works) · History (26 works) · Literature (22 works) · Sociology (18 works) · Psychology (15 works) · History (14 works) · Biography (13 works) · Life writing (13 works) · Memoir (11 works) · Narrative (11 works)