Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii
Introduction / Diane P. Freedman, Olivia Frey, and Francis Murphy Zauhar 1
Part 1. Muse-ings on Genre, Autobiography, Narrative: Formative Strategies
Border Crossing as Method and Motif in Contemporary American Writing, or, How Freud Helped Me Case the Joint / Diane P. Freedman 13
Me and My Shadow / Jane Tompkins 23
Beyond Literary Darwinism: Women's Voices and Critical Discourse / Olivia Frey 41
"Everyday Life": My Sojourn at Parchman Farm / Cheryl B. Torsney 67
Excerpts from Letters to Friends / Susan Koppelman 75
Social Circles: Being a Report on J. Hills Miller's Campus Visitation / Linda R. Robertson 81
Touchstones and Bedrocks: Learning the Stories We Need / Victoria Ekanger 93
Part II. Critical Confessions
Creative Voices: Women Reading and Women's Writing / Frances Murphy Zauhar 103
Breaking Silence: The Woman Warrior / Shirley Nelson Garner 117
Different Silences / Traise Yamamoto 127
"What's in a Name?": Some Meanings of Blackness / Henry Louis Gates, Jr. 135
Poetry and the Age: "A Girl in a Library" to Randall Jarrell / Sandra M. Brown 151
My Friend, Joyce Carol Oates / Brenda Daly 163
Somebody Must Say These Things: An Essay for My Mother / Melody Graulich 175
The Scarlet Brewer and the Voice of the Colonized / Shirley Geok-lin Lim 191
Dividing Fences / Carol S. Taylor 197
What Do Women Really Mean? Thoughts on Women's Diaries and Lives / Suzanne Bunkers 207
Part III. Autobiographical Literary Criticism
Between the Medusa and the Abyss: Reading Jane Eyre, Reading Myself / Ellen Brown 225
Rereading Middlemarch, Rereading Myself / Peter Carlton 237
The Crippling of the Third World: Shiva Naipaul's Heritage / Rosanne Kanhai-Brunton 225
Penelope's Web / Gail Griffin 255
"Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around!": Reading the Narrative of Frederick Douglass / Dolan Hubbard 265
Catharine Trotter Cockburn and Me: A Duography / Kendall 273
In Between Abject and Object: The Mourning Sickness of the Expectant Mother, or, Three Movements of the Blues in B Minor / Dana Beckelman 283
La Ronde of Children and Mothers / Julia Balen 293
Selected Bibliography 303
Contributors 309

About the Author

Diane P. Freedman, Assistant Professor of English at University of New Hampshire, is the author of An Alchemy of Genres: Cross-Genre Writing by American Women Poet Critics.

Olivia Frey is Associate Professor of English and Director of Women's Studies at St. Olaf College.

Frances Murphy Zauhar is Assistant Professor of English at St. Vincent College.

Reviews

"The Intimate Critique marks the coming out of a new critical genre, sure to generate controversy, pleasure, rage, support, disbelief, acclaim (i.e., strong reactions!) among its readers."—Alice Kaplan, author of French Lessons: A Memoir

"Grouped together, these very different essays raise and respond to a question that feminist theorists continue to ask—about the extent to which individual experience and self-expression may be read as representative."—Rachel M. Brownstein, author of Becoming a Heroine: Reading About Women in Novels

"This book goes a long way toward breathing life into literary criticism, advancing the necessary effort to write about it in a personal, engaged, and interesting manner."—G. Douglas Atkins, University of Kansas