The Art of Time in Memoir: Then, Again

by Sven Birkerts

Overview

The Art Of series is a new line of books reinvigorating the practice of craft and criticism. Each book will be a brief, witty, and useful exploration of fiction, nonfiction, or poetry by a writer impassioned by a singular craft issue. The Art Of volumes will provide a series of sustained examinations of key but sometimes neglected aspects of creative writing by some of contemporary literature's finest practioners.

In The Art of Time in Memoir, critic and memoirist Sven Birkerts examines the human impulse to write about the self. By examining memoirs such as Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory; Virginia Woolf's unfinished A Sketch of the Past; and Mary Karr's The Liars' Club, Birkerts describes the memoirist's essential art of assembling patterns of meaning, stirring to life our own sense of past and present.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781555973391
Publisher:	Graywolf Press
Publication date:	05/20/2014
Series:	Art of...
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	120
Sales rank:	608,194
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Sven Birkerts is the author of Reading Life: Books for the Ages, Readings,
The Gutenberg Elegies, and a memoir, My Sky Blue Trades. He teaches at Harvard University and at the Bennington Writing Seminars and is the editor of AGNI. He lives in Arlington, Massachusetts.

Sven Birkerts is the author of several books, including The Art of Time in Memoir, Reading Life, Readings, and The Gutenberg Elegies. He has taught at Harvard University and currently directs the Bennington Writing Seminars and is the editor of AGNI. He lives in Massachusetts.

Editorial Reviews

Respected critic Birkerts has written an insightful appreciation of the memoir form, works that occupy a "growing... place in our literary culture." Analyzing five ways different writers have chosen to transform their memories into coherent narrative, Birkerts discerns the underlying principle of the memoir form: balancing two perspectives by revisiting significant events in the past to discover a pattern in one's present life. Nabokov, Virginia Woolf and Annie Dillard are what he calls the "Lyrical Seekers," who use "sensuous apprehension" to explore the nature of being. Frank Conroy's Stop-Timeis one of the examples of the coming-of-age memoir, as is Birkerts's own My Sky Blue Trades. Fathers and sons, e.g., Paul Auster, Geoffrey Wolff and Blake Morrison, are distinguished from mothers and daughters, e.g., Jamaica Kincaid and Vivian Gornick. Finally, works by Mary Karr and Lucy Grealy are among those illustrating the category of trauma and memory. The appeal of this slim volume lies in Birkert's graceful prose and lucid analysis. Written for the general reader, it artfully conveys the basics of the craft and will be a particular boon to reading groups. (Jan.)

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