Faculty Publications (selected list)

WS 505: Media: Issues of Race, Class and Gender:

The Intimate Critique: Autobiographical Literary Criticism

edited by Diane P. Freedman, Olivia Frey, and Frances Murphy Zauhar
Duke University Press, 1993

excerpt from book cover: For a long time now, readers and scholars have strained against the limits of traditional literary criticism, whose precepts—above all “objectivity”—seem to have so little to do with the highly personal and deeply felt experience of literature. The Intimate Critique marks a movement away from this tradition. With their rich spectrum of personal and passionate voices, these essays challenge and ultimately breach the boundaries between criticism and narrative, experience and expression, literature and life. Grounded in feminism and connected to the race, class, and gender paradigms in cultural studies, the twenty-six contributors to this volume—including Jane Tompkins, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Shirley Nelson Garner, and Shirley Goek-Lin Lim—respond in new, refreshing ways to literary subjects ranging from Homer to Freud, Middlemarch to The Woman Warrior, Shiva Naipaul to Frederick Douglass.