A gorgeous memoir about the 17 year estrangement of the author and her homeless schizophrenic mother, and their reunion.

There has been a significant growth in autobiographical documentary films in recent years. This innovative book proposes that the filmmaker in her dual role as maker and subject may act as a cultural guide in an exploration of the social world. It argues that, in the cinematic mediation of memory, the mimetic approach in the construction of documentary films may not be feasible, and memory may instead be evoked elliptically through hybrid strategies such as critical realism and fictional enactment. Recognizing that identity is formed by history and what ‘goes on’ in the world, the book charts the historical trajectory of the British independent filmmaking movement from the mid-1970s to the present growth of new online distribution outlets and new media through digital technologies and social media.

Reviews and integrates the many theories, perspectives and approaches in the field of autobiographical memory.

J ill Ker Conway, one of our most admired autobiographers--author of The Road from Coorain and True North--looks astutely and with feeling into the modern memoir: the forms and styles it assumes, and the strikingly different ways in which men and women respectively tend to understand and present their lives. In a narrative rich with evocations of memoirists over the centuries--from Jean-Jacques Rousseau and George Sand to W. E. B. Du Bois, Virginia Woolf, Frank McCourt and Katharine Graham--the author suggests why it is that we are so drawn to the reading of autobiography, and she illuminates the cultural assumptions behind the ways in which we talk about ourselves. Conway traces the narrative patterns typically found in autobiographies by men to the tale of the classical Greek hero and his epic journey of adventure. She shows how this configuration evolved, in memoirs, into the passionate romantic struggling against the conventions of society, into the frontier hero battling the wilderness, into self-made men overcoming economic obstacles to create an invention or a fortune--or, more recently, into a quest for meaning, for an understandable past, for an ethnic identity. In contrast, she sees the designs that women commonly employ for their memoirs as evolving from the writings of the mystics--such as Dame Julian of Norwich or St. Teresa of Avila--about their relationship with an all-powerful God. As against the male autobiographer's expectation of power over his fate, we see the woman memoirist again and again believing that she lacks command of her destiny, and tending to censor her own story. Throughout, Conway underlines the memoir's magic quality of allowing us to enter another human being's life and mind--and how this experience enlarges and instructs our own lives.

This book by one of Latin America’s leading cultural theorists examines the place of the subject and the role of biographical and autobiographical genres in contemporary culture. Arfuch argues that the on-going proliferation of private and intimate stories – what she calls the ‘biographical space’ – can be seen as symptomatic of the impersonalizing dynamics of contemporary times. Autobiographical genres, however, harbour an intersubjective dimension. The ‘I’ who speaks wants to be heard by another, and the other who listens discovers in autobiography possible points of identification. Autobiographical genres, including those that border on fiction, therefore become spaces in which the singularity of experience opens onto the collective and its historicity in ways that allow us to reflect on the ethical, political, and aesthetic dimensions not only of self-representation but also of life itself. Opening up debate through juxtaposition and dialogue, Arfuch’s own poetic writing moves freely from the Holocaust to Argentina’s last dictatorship and its traumatic memories, and then to the troubled borderlands between Mexico and the United States to show how artists rescue shards of memory that would otherwise be relegated to the dustbin of history. In so doing, she makes us see not only how challenging it is to represent past traumas and violence but also how vitally necessary it is to do so as a political strategy for combating the tides of forgetting and for finding ways of being in common.

A brilliant, ambitious follow–up to The Secret Lives of Buildings, in which Hollis turns his focus from the great architectural constructions of the past to the now–vanished chambers they once contained. The rooms we live in are always more than just four walls. As we decorate these spaces and fill them with objects and friends, they shape our lives and become the backdrop to our sense of self. one day, the structures will be gone, but even then, traces of the stories and the memories they contained will persist. In this dazzling work of imaginative reconstruction, edward Hollis takes us to the sites of great abodes now lost to history and piecing together the fragments that remain, re–creates their vanished chambers. From Rome's palatine to the old palace of Westminster and the petit Trianon at Versailles, from the sets of MGM studios in Hollywood to the pavilions of the Crystal palace and the author's own grandmother's sitting room, The Memory Palace is a glittering treasure trove of luminous forgotten places and the alluring people who lived in them.

Easa Al-Gurg writes frankly about the Gulf's political structures and the inevitability of change, about diplomacy and equally frankly about Islam and the West, and the present dilemmas of the Arab World.

Our memories, many believe, make us who we are. But most of our experiences have been forgotten, and the memories that remain are often wildly inaccurate. How, then, can memories play this person-making role? The answer lies in a largely unrecognized type of memory: Rilkean memory.

In this deeply personal work, acclaimed art historian Dora Apel explores how memory can be mobilized for social justice and how inherited traumas can be channeled in productive ways. Examining memorials, photographs, artworks, and her own experiences as a cancer survivor and the child of holocaust survivors, she discovers strategies for "unforgetting" the past.

Martha Graham, dancer, choreographer, & teacher, has been called the most important & influential American artist ever born. From her birth in 1894 to her death in 1991, she remained an uncompromising individualist who sought nothing less than to map the mysterious landscape of the human soul. This book is Graham's own account of her life & career. Contains portraits of artists & innovators she has worked with: Louise Brooks, Helen Keller, Aaron Copland, Isamu Noguchi, plus students: Gregory Peck, Bette Davis, Rudolf Nureyev, Margot Fonteyn, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Liza Minnelli, & Madonna. More than 100 photos.