Overview

To write about your contemporaries is a risky business; your interest may be too personal, your involvement too close. But this, as Susan Suleiman aims to demonstrate here, is precisely what makes such a critical encounter worthwhile. Her book shows how the process of self-recognition - even self-construction - in the reading of contemporary work can lead to larger considerations about culture and society; and to the dimensions of historical awareness and collective action. Suleiman suggests a fresh way of looking at issues that are as personal as they are relevant in the writing, the criticism, and the life of our times. Through her readings of Simone de Beauvoir, Mary Gordon, Julia Kristeva, Richard Rorty, Helene Cixous, Elie Wiesel and others, Suleiman enters a dialogue with those who share her place and time, and whose interests and preoccupations meet her own. She confronts with them the conflicts between writing and motherhood. Together, they inquire into ""being postmodern"" and explore the connections between creativity and love. They consider the place of beauty in contemporary art, examine the relations between aesthetics and politics, and reflect on living memories of World War II. Through Suleiman's encounter with them, these writers and artists enter an exchange with each other, and with the readers, opening new perspectives on the representation of women's lives, history and memory, the intersection of gender and postmodernism, and autobiography.

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Reviews

Suleiman offers an arresting vantage point on the progress of postmodern thought as it grapples with its own proscriptions. -- Estella Lauter Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

In the shadow of ethnic cleansing and rigid nationalism, a noted academic literary critic examines exemplary creations of the plural self and urges an extension of the private ironies of postmodern subjectivity into the public sphere. Suleiman (Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant-Garde, not reviewed) studies authors and artists who live between safely fixed categories: between national identities (memoirs of Holocaust survivors and war refugees, including the Hungarian-born author herself); between motherhood and creativity (Mary Gordon, Rosellen Brown, Toni Morrison); between languages (Christine Brooke-Rose, Helene Cixous); between love of male peers and irritation at their debasing idealizations (Leonora Carrington). Among autobiographies she favors the kind that tries to recover, through writing, an irrecoverable absence, a mother tongue for the uprooted and decentered. Although Suleiman is an acute reader of playful novelists like Angela Carter, most of her subjects have been gravely hurt into poetry. Interested in the beautiful and the beautifully ugly, Suleiman is drawn to literature and visual art that offers disruptive, painful self-exposure and self-exploration. She is a prober of wounds, including her own, when a Chicana reader faults her for class-bound views on author-mothers (the letter and its cogent rejoinder are reprinted here), or when she confronts the much-admired Simone de Beauvoir's dubious war conduct. Suleiman argues, finally, in contrast to thinkers like Richard Rorty, for an essential continuity between public and private spheres. Pinning future salvation to the inculcation of divided loyalties, she asserts that such divisions would create tolerance by instilling an awareness of how many conflicting interests each of us is made of. The admittedly utopian-sounding proposal she leaves us with is this: Since public rhetorics of certainty... don't seem to have worked all that well... why not try a public rhetoric of doubt? Detailed, generous analyses of complex artists, buttressed by lucid cultural speculation. (Kirkus Reviews)

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