Timothy Dow Adams
Biographic Data
| ID | 971381 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Timothy Dow Adams |
| GIVEN NAMES | Timothy Dow |
| FAMILY NAME | Adams |
| SIGNATURE | ADAMS T D |
| AFFILIATIONS | West Virginia University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 12 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 2 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 12 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1982 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Confessions of an Autobiography Scholar; or, You Can't Handle the Truthiness
This piece is an autobiographical summary of my relationship to truth and genre over a long career as a scholar of life writing. In what is meant to be humorous, I lament the entanglements of my scholarly and personal life and my ever shifting views on teaching and writing in contrast to living a life in autobiography
Twentieth-Century Autobiography
Borderline Personality
A consideration of the relationship between actual documents reproduced within Girl, Interrupted, Susanna Kaysen's 1993 autobiography, and the genre of that text is especially complicated, not just because of the general instability of literary genres, and the nature of documentary in autobiography, but also because of the mental instability of the autobiographer during the year and half Kaysen spent in the psychiatric ward of McLean Hospital in …
Hicks, Tribes, and Dirty Realists
Eschewing allegiance to particular literary movements, Robert Rebein offers a shrewd topographical map of contemporary American fiction. Rebein argues that much literary fiction of the 1980s and 90s represents a triumphant, if tortured, return to questions about place and the individual that inspired the works of Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, Faulkner, and other giants of American literature. Concentrating on the realist bent and regional orientati…
"Heightened by Life" vs. "Paralyzed by Fact"
As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure. --Susan Sontag, On Photography In this essay I would like to discuss interrelations between photography and autobiography in Norma Elia Cantú's Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera (Figure 1), published in 1995, hoping that some of my discussion of the relationship between word and …
Gertrude Stein and Richard Wright
Deafness and Deftness in Coda Autobiography
This essay discusses two autobiographies by CODAs (Children of Deaf Adults) in which issues of language, naming, translation, and identity call into question some of autobiography's most basic questions. Parallels with native American autobiography, captivity narratives, and métissage help situate these narratives within a larger generic framework
Introduction
(1995). Introduction: Term Limits. a/b: Auto/Biography Studies: Vol. 10, Terms of Identity: Essays on the Theoretical Terminology of Lifewriting, pp. 1-4
Telling Lies in Modern American Autobiography
Current Interests, Work in Progress
My Gay Àntonia
Although Willa Cather's lesbianism has recently been publicly acknowledged, her personal and artistic political decisions about the revelation of her sexual preference have not been explored. Most critics who acknowledge Cather's homosexuality see no traces in her fiction of what Lillian Faderman calls "same-sex love." Because of the political consequences of writing openly about lesbianism in the time that Cather came of age, according to Faderm…
The Mock-Biography of Edwin Mullhouse
Steven Millhauser's first novel, Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of An American Writer, 1943-1954 by Jeffrey Cartwright , is an interesting and valuable book for a consideration of the complexities of the art of biography, especially the relationship between biographer and subject, and an important example of a subgenre of biography-the mock-biography-which combines elements of fiction and nonfiction (sometimes literally, sometimes mockingly …
Borderline Personality
A consideration of the relationship between actual documents reproduced within Girl, Interrupted, Susanna Kaysen's 1993 autobiography, and the genre of that text is especially complicated, not just because of the general instability of literary genres, and the nature of documentary in autobiography, but also because of the mental instability of the autobiographer during the year and half Kaysen spent in the psychiatric ward of McLean Hospital in …
My Gay Àntonia
Although Willa Cather's lesbianism has recently been publicly acknowledged, her personal and artistic political decisions about the revelation of her sexual preference have not been explored. Most critics who acknowledge Cather's homosexuality see no traces in her fiction of what Lillian Faderman calls "same-sex love." Because of the political consequences of writing openly about lesbianism in the time that Cather came of age, according to Faderm…
The Mock-Biography of Edwin Mullhouse
Steven Millhauser's first novel, Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of An American Writer, 1943-1954 by Jeffrey Cartwright , is an interesting and valuable book for a consideration of the complexities of the art of biography, especially the relationship between biographer and subject, and an important example of a subgenre of biography-the mock-biography-which combines elements of fiction and nonfiction (sometimes literally, sometimes mockingly …
Current Interests, Work in Progress
My Gay Àntonia
Although Willa Cather's lesbianism has recently been publicly acknowledged, her personal and artistic political decisions about the revelation of her sexual preference have not been explored. Most critics who acknowledge Cather's homosexuality see no traces in her fiction of what Lillian Faderman calls "same-sex love." Because of the political consequences of writing openly about lesbianism in the time that Cather came of age, according to Faderm…
Telling Lies in Modern American Autobiography
Introduction
(1995). Introduction: Term Limits. a/b: Auto/Biography Studies: Vol. 10, Terms of Identity: Essays on the Theoretical Terminology of Lifewriting, pp. 1-4
Deafness and Deftness in Coda Autobiography
This essay discusses two autobiographies by CODAs (Children of Deaf Adults) in which issues of language, naming, translation, and identity call into question some of autobiography's most basic questions. Parallels with native American autobiography, captivity narratives, and métissage help situate these narratives within a larger generic framework
Gertrude Stein and Richard Wright
"Heightened by Life" vs. "Paralyzed by Fact"
As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure. --Susan Sontag, On Photography In this essay I would like to discuss interrelations between photography and autobiography in Norma Elia Cantú's Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera (Figure 1), published in 1995, hoping that some of my discussion of the relationship between word and …
Hicks, Tribes, and Dirty Realists
Eschewing allegiance to particular literary movements, Robert Rebein offers a shrewd topographical map of contemporary American fiction. Rebein argues that much literary fiction of the 1980s and 90s represents a triumphant, if tortured, return to questions about place and the individual that inspired the works of Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, Faulkner, and other giants of American literature. Concentrating on the realist bent and regional orientati…
Twentieth-Century Autobiography
Borderline Personality
A consideration of the relationship between actual documents reproduced within Girl, Interrupted, Susanna Kaysen's 1993 autobiography, and the genre of that text is especially complicated, not just because of the general instability of literary genres, and the nature of documentary in autobiography, but also because of the mental instability of the autobiographer during the year and half Kaysen spent in the psychiatric ward of McLean Hospital in …
Confessions of an Autobiography Scholar; or, You Can't Handle the Truthiness
This piece is an autobiographical summary of my relationship to truth and genre over a long career as a scholar of life writing. In what is meant to be humorous, I lament the entanglements of my scholarly and personal life and my ever shifting views on teaching and writing in contrast to living a life in autobiography
Art (9 works) · Literature (9 works) · History (8 works) · Biography (7 works) · Philosophy (5 works) · Art history (4 works) · American and British Literature Analysis (3 works) · Autobiographical and Biographical Writing (3 works) · Sociology (3 works) · Genius (2 works)