Bøger af Susan Rubin Suleiman

To write about your contemporaries, whose work is enmeshed in the stuff of your life, is risky business. But as Susan Suleiman demonstrates in this lively and personal book, that risk is what makes such a critical encounter worthwhile. "Risking Who One Is" shows how the process of self-recognition in the reading or viewing of contemporary work can lead to larger considerations about culture and society--to increased historical awareness and collective action. Through subtle and incisive readings of Simone de Beauvoir, Mary Gordon, Julia Kristeva, Richard Rorty, Helene Cixous, Leonora Carrington, Max Ernst, Angela Carter, Elie Wiesel, and others, Suleiman engages in a fascinating dialogue with those who have shared her place and time, and whose preoccupations meet her own. Through Suleiman's encounter with them, these writers and artists enter an exchange with each other, and with us as readers. These encounters open new perspectives on motherhood and its conflicts, on creativity and love, on the intersections of history, memory, and autobiography, and on the politics and poetics of postmodernism. In "Risking Who One Is," Suleiman offers us a new way of looking at issues that are both personal and historical, defining the life of our times.

In this acclaimed book, renowned Harvard scholar Susan Rubin Suleiman discusses individual and collective memories of World War II, as reflected in literary memoirs, autobiographical novels, works of history and philosophy, and films. Suleiman argues that memories of World War II transcend national boundaries, due not only to the global nature of the war but also to the increasingly global presence of the Holocaust as a site of collective memory. Among the works she discusses are Jean-Paul Sartre's essays on the Occupation and Resistance in France; Marcel Ophuls's innovative documentary on the Nazi interrogator Klaus Barbie, who was tried for crimes against humanity in 1987; István Szabó's film "Sunshine," a chronicle of Jewish identity in central Europe; literary memoirs by Jorge Semprun and Elie Wiesel; and experimental writing by child survivors of the Holocaust, Georges Perec and Raymond Federman.

A poignant piece of self-revelation, sprinkled with some trenchant observations on the way the dead hand of history has weighed down the former Warsaw Pact countries