I Have Been Keeping Notes for Some Time Now”
Narrative Critique and Gendered Allegory in the Novels of Joan Didion
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12920248 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Megan Parker Peters (0000-0001-7461-1590, Miami University, corresponding author), Megan Peters |
| Year | 2016 |
| Volume | 10 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 236-252 |
| Publication date | 2016-01-06 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Contemporary Women s Writing (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1754-1476 • E-ISSN: 1754-1484 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1093/cww/vpv027 |
| OpenAlex | W2496729436 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 4 |
There is little of Joan Didion’s work, fiction or nonfiction, that does not, in some way, deal with the issue of narrative construction—the how of “how we tell ourselves stories in order to live” (“The White Album” 11). Her nonfiction is frequently self-reflexive: as she questions her own abilities as a journalist to accurately convey the “truth” of her subjects to her readers, she also knows that she must tell them all she can, even she can choose just one of the many “stories” that could be told. Her novels likewise center on the need to construct narratives out of even the most incomplete information. They are usually told through the lens of a self-reflexive narrator who acknowledges her troubled relationship to narrative and her need to capture what little she does know. In A Book of Common Prayer (1977), this figure is an anthropologist, and in Democracy (1984) and The Last Thing He Wanted (1996), she is a journalist. These works focus almost entirely on this figure’s inability to capture accurately the turbulent and frequently misrepresented events of a third-world country alongside the workings of the Democratic elite and the world of American covert operations abroad
Aesthetics · Art · Elite · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Storytelling · White (mutation · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · Global History, Politics, and Ideology · Narrative Theory and Analysis · History · Law
| Citations per year | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2026 - 2026 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |