Download or read book The Ethics of Life Writing written by Paul John Eakin and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our lives are increasingly on display in public, but the ethical issues involved in presenting such revelations remain largely unexamined. How can life writing do good, and how can it cause harm? The eleven essays here explore such questions.
Download or read book The Ethics of Storytelling written by Hanna Meretoja and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book provides a theoretical-analytical framework for a hermeneutic narrative ethics, which articulates the ethical potential and risks of narrative practices. It analyzes how narratives shape our sense of the possible by enlarging and diminishing the dialogic spaces of possibilities in which we act, think, and re-imagine the world"--
Download or read book Stitches written by David Small and published by McClelland & Stewart. This book was released on 2012-07-17 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Publishers Weekly Top Ten Best Book of the Year An Amazon.com Top Ten Best Book of 2009 A Washington Post Book World’s Ten Best Book of the Year A California Literary Review Best Book of 2009 An L.A. Times Top 25 Non-Fiction Book of 2009 An NPR Best Book of the Year, Best Memoir With this stunning graphic memoir, David Small takes readers on an unforgettable journey into the dark heart of his tumultuous childhood in 1950s Detroit, in a coming-of-age tale like no other. At the age of fourteen, David awoke from a supposedly harmless operation to discover his throat had been slashed and one of his vocal chords removed, leaving him a virtual mute. No one had told him that he had cancer and was expected to die. The resulting silence was in keeping with the atmosphere of secrecy and repressed frustration that pervaded the Small household and revealed itself in the slamming of cupboard doors, the thumping of a punching bag, the beating of a drum. Believing that they were doing their best, David’s parents did just the reverse. David’s mother held the family emotionally hostage with her furious withdrawals, even as she kept her emotions hidden — including from herself. His father, rarely present, was a radiologist, and although David grew up looking at X-rays and drawing on X-ray paper, it would be years before he discovered the shocking consequences of his father’s faith in science. A work of great bravery and humanity, Stitches is a gripping and ultimately redemptive story of a man’s struggle to understand the past and reclaim his voice.
Download or read book Vulnerable Subjects written by G. Thomas Couser and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-06 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "My primary concern is with the ethics of representing vulnerable subjects—persons who are liable to exposure by someone with whom they are involved in an intimate or trust-based relationship, unable to represent themselves in writing, or unable to offer meaningful consent to their representation by someone else.... Of primary importance is intimate life writing—that done within families or couples, close relationships, or quasi-professional relationships that involve trust—rather than conventional biography, which can be written by a stranger. The closer the relationship between writer and subject, the greater the vulnerability or dependency of the subject, the higher the ethical stakes, and the more urgent the need for ethical scrutiny."—from the Preface Vulnerable Subjects explores a range of life-writing scenarios-from the "celebrity" to the "ethnographic"—and a number of life-writing genres from parental memoir to literary case studies by Oliver Sacks. G. Thomas Couser addresses complex contemporary issues; he investigates the role of disability in narratives of euthanasia and explores the implications of the Human Genome Project for life-writing practices in any age when many regard DNA as a code that "scripts" lives and shapes identity. Throughout, his book is concerned with the ethical implications of the political and economic, as well as the mimetic, aspects of life writing.
Download or read book The Philosophy of Autobiography written by Christopher Cowley and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2015-10-26 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book promises to be the first of its kind: a philosophical investigation of autobiographical writing. All of us are autobiographers at least some of the time, and all of us crave certain kinds of recognition and confirmation from others, just as we fear blame and reproach from those who know us well. The philosophy of autobiography examines this fundamental story-telling process and its place in our lives. As such it straddles a number of long-standing philosophical questions, having to do with the meaning of life, the problems of autonomy and responsibility and authenticity, the nature of self-deception and bad faith, the structure of the self and its existence through time, the question of the reliability and meaning of memory, and the problem of understanding another person and imaginatively identifying with him. The contributors to the volume are mostly philosophers, but many of them have interests outside philosophy and have been informed by research findings from literary theory and from psychiatry. Some of the contributors are also literary theorists, and one of them has even published autobiographical work. Contributors also examine specific autobiographies and diaries, of philosophers and non-philosophers, as well as fictional works using an autobiographical format, in order to explore the philosophical implications and presuppositions of the genre. The result is a most useful and productive interdisciplinary exchange."
Download or read book Criminals written by Robert Anthony Siegel and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2019-07-16 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A prismatic, provocative look at one family—led by a charismatic, defense attorney father—whose bonds exist on both sides of the law The Siegels of New York are a singular creation—quirky, idealistic, shaped in large part by Robert Anthony Siegel's father, a lovable, impossible man of gargantuan appetites and sloppy ethics, a criminal defense attorney who loved his drug–dealing clients a little too much and went to prison as a result. Siegel's mother decided to pour her energies into making her children art–loving mavens of fine dining in international settings—all the things that his father was not—with Robert as her most targeted ally. Once out of prison, Siegel's father struggled with depression, attempting to reenter legal practice, with age and finances nipping at his heels. Robert, as a son and later as an author, attempts to put all of these pieces together to make a coherent shape of family before realizing that perhaps no such thing exists. Where is the thin, permeable line between right and wrong? How does one family join the greater world of normal people beyond the demimonde of drug dealers, bikers, schemers, rock musicians, and artists that swirled around them? Criminals explores those questions without easy judgments, creating a prism of an eccentric collection of characters bound together as the mysterious tribe of family.
Download or read book What Is the What written by Dave Eggers and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2009-02-24 with total page 563 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What Is the What is the story of Valentino Achak Deng, a refugee in war-ravaged southern Sudan who flees from his village in the mid-1980s and becomes one of the so-called Lost Boys. Valentino’s travels bring him in contact with enemy soldiers, with liberation rebels, with hyenas and lions, with disease and starvation, and with deadly murahaleen (militias on horseback)–the same sort who currently terrorize Darfur. Eventually Deng is resettled in the United States with almost 4000 other young Sudanese men, and a very different struggle begins. Based closely on true experiences, What Is the What is heartbreaking and arresting, filled with adventure, suspense, tragedy, and, finally, triumph.
Download or read book Human Rights and Narrated Lives written by K. Schaffer and published by Springer. This book was released on 2004-08-20 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Personal narratives have become one of the most potent vehicles for advancing human rights claims across the world. These two contemporary domains, personal narrative and human rights, literature and international politics, are commonly understood to operate on separate planes. This study however, examines the ways these intersecting realms unfold and are enfolded in one another in ways both productive of and problematic for the achievement of social justice. Human Rights and Narrated Lives explores what happens when autobiographical narratives are produced, received, and circulated in the field of human rights. It asks how personal narratives emerge in local settings; how international rights discourse enables and constrains individual and collective subjectivities in narration; how personal narratives circulate and take on new meanings in new contexts; and how and under what conditions they feed into, affect, and are affected by the reorganizations of politics in the post cold war, postcolonial, globalizing human rights contexts. To explore these intersections, the authors attend the production, circulation, reception, and affective currents of stories in action across local, national, transnational, and global arenas. They do so by looking at five case studies: in the context of the Truth and Reconciliation processes in South Africa; the National Inquiry into the Forced Removal of Indigenous Children from their Families in Australia; activism on behalf of former 'comfort women' from South/East Asia; U.S. prison activism; and democratic reforms in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square Massacre in China.
Download or read book The Value of Solitude written by John D. Barbour and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most people feel ambivalent about solitude, both loving and fearing it depending on how they experience being alone at certain points in their lives. In The Value of Solitude, John Barbour explores some of the ways in which experiences of solitude, both positive and negative, have been interpreted as religiously significant. He also shows how solitude can raise ethical questions as writers evaluate the virtues and dangers of aloneness and consider how social interaction and withdrawal can most meaningfully be combined in a life. Barbour's work differs from previous books about solitude in two ways: it links solitude with ethics and spirituality, and it approaches solitude by way of autobiography. Barbour ranges from the early Christian and medieval periods to the twentieth century in examining the varieties of solitary experience of writers such as Augustine, Petrarch, Montaigne, Gibbon, Rousseau, Thoreau, Thomas Merton, and Paul Auster. For many authors, the process of writing an autobiography is itself conceived of as a form of solitude, a detachment from others in order to discover or create a new sense of personal identity. Solitude helps these authors to reorient their lives according to their moral ideals and spiritual aspirations. The Value of Solitude both traces the persistence and vitality of the theme of solitude in autobiography and shows how the literary form and structure of autobiography are shaped by ethical and religious reflection on aloneness. This work should appeal to scholars in the fields of religious studies and theology, to literary critics and specialists in autobiography, and to readers interested in the experience of solitude and its moral and spiritual significance.
Download or read book The Ethics of Identity written by Kwame Anthony Appiah and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2023-10-03 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A bold vision of liberal humanism for navigating today’s complex world of growing identity politics and rising nationalism Collective identities such as race, nationality, religion, gender, and sexuality clamor for recognition and respect, sometimes at the expense of other things we value. To what extent do they constrain our freedom, and to what extent do they enable our individuality? Is diversity of value in itself? Has the rhetoric of human rights been overstretched? Kwame Anthony Appiah draws on thinkers through the ages and across the globe to explore such questions, developing an account of ethics that connects moral obligations with collective allegiances and that takes aim at clichés and received ideas about identity. This classic book takes seriously both the claims of individuality—the task of making a life—and the claims of identity, these large and often abstract social categories through which we define ourselves.
Download or read book Spinoza s Book of Life written by Steven B. Smith and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2003-01-01 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offering a new reading of Spinoza's masterpiece, Smith asserts that the 'Ethics' is a celebration of human freedom and its attendant joys and responsibilities and should be placed among the great founding documents of the Enlightenment.
Download or read book Autobiography of a Restless Mind written by Dee Hock and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2012-12 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Volume 1 Autobiography of a Restless Mind is a fascinating, exceptionally diverse collection of observations and reflections written over the past twenty-five years by one of the most innovative thinkers, writers, and leaders of the past half century. Witty and wise, playful and profound, prophetic and immensely quotable, it is a companion no thinking, caring person should be without. Written in an unforgettable style reminiscent of Aurelius, Montaigne, Lao-Tse, and Bacon, it is a classic that will be read with pleasure and profit for generations to come.
Download or read book Dispatches written by Michael Herr and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-11-30 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The best book to have been written about the Vietnam War" (The New York Times Book Review); an instant classic straight from the front lines. From its terrifying opening pages to its final eloquent words, Dispatches makes us see, in unforgettable and unflinching detail, the chaos and fervor of the war and the surreal insanity of life in that singular combat zone. Michael Herr’s unsparing, unorthodox retellings of the day-to-day events in Vietnam take on the force of poetry, rendering clarity from one of the most incomprehensible and nightmarish events of our time. Dispatches is among the most blistering and compassionate accounts of war in our literature.
Download or read book Friendship and Love Ethics and Politics written by Eva Österberg and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2010-01-10 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today, friendship, love and sexuality are mostly viewed as private, personal and informal relations. In the mediaeval and early modern period, just like in ancient times, this was different. The classical philosophy of friendship (Aristotle) included both friendship and love in the concept of philia. It was also linked to an argument about the virtues needed to become an excellent member of the city state. Thus, close relations were not only thought to be a matter of pleasant gatherings in privacy, but just as much a matter of ethics and politics.What, then, happened to the classical ideas of close relations when they were transmitted to philosophers, clerical and monastic thinkers, state officials or other people in the medieval and early modern period? To what extent did friendship transcend the distinctions between private and public that then existed? How were close relations shaped in practice? Did dialogues with close friends help to contribute to the process of subject-formation in the Renaissance and Enlightenment? To what degree did institutions of power or individual thinkers find it necessary to caution against friendship or love and sexuality?
Download or read book A Million Little Pieces written by James Frey and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2004-05-11 with total page 596 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A gripping memoir about the nature of addiction and the meaning of recovery from a bold and talented literary voice. “Anyone who has ever felt broken and wished for a better life will find inspiration in Frey’s story.” —People “A great story.... You can't help but cheer his victory.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review By the time he entered a drug and alcohol treatment facility, James Frey had taken his addictions to near-deadly extremes. He had so thoroughly ravaged his body that the facility’s doctors were shocked he was still alive. The ensuing torments of detoxification and withdrawal, and the never-ending urge to use chemicals, are captured with a vitality and directness that recalls the seminal eye-opening power of William Burroughs’s Junky. But A Million Little Pieces refuses to fit any mold of drug literature. Inside the clinic, James is surrounded by patients as troubled as he is—including a judge, a mobster, a one-time world-champion boxer, and a fragile former prostitute to whom he is not allowed to speak—but their friendship and advice strikes James as stronger and truer than the clinic’s droning dogma of How to Recover. James refuses to consider himself a victim of anything but his own bad decisions, and insists on accepting sole accountability for the person he has been and the person he may become—which runs directly counter to his counselors' recipes for recovery. James has to fight to find his own way to confront the consequences of the life he has lived so far, and to determine what future, if any, he holds. It is this fight, told with the charismatic energy and power of One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, that is at the heart of A Million Little Pieces: the fight between one young man’s will and the ever-tempting chemical trip to oblivion, the fight to survive on his own terms, for reasons close to his own heart. "
Download or read book Memoir Ethics written by Mike W. Martin and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2016-02-10 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Memoir Ethics: Good Lives and the Virtues is a philosophical study of moral themes in memoirs, exploring how memoirists present and defend perspectives on good lives. It pays particular attention to the interplay of the virtues, including their interplay with additional (non-moral) types of values in good lives. More generally, it explores the relevance of memoir to moral philosophy, and in turn how moral philosophy enters into elucidating and critiquing memoirs. Memoirs are understood as non-fiction narratives written by oneself and significantly about oneself (including full-life autobiographies). Mike W. Martin explores perspectives on good lives as they are expressed in memoirs written by both philosophers and non-philosophers. Most of the chapters focus on one of the generic aspects of good lives: moral goodness, authenticity, meaningfulness, happiness, health, and self-fulfillment. The book clarifies how memoirists often employ life-based arguments in defending value perspectives, and it includes a discussion of whether philosophers’ memoirs are distinctive, compared to memoirs by non-philosophers and also compared to other forums for doing philosophy. Martin highlights some parallels between features of good lives and features of memoirs; for example, both can be said to be meaningful, authentic, and having virtues such as wisdom and courage. Demonstrating how memoirs are rich resources in exploring the good lives and exploring ways in which philosophical ethics provide tools for interpreting memoirs, Memoir Ethics will be of interest to a broad audience of students, scholars, and general readers, including anyone interested in ethics or the connections between literature and philosophy.
Download or read book The Book of Ethics written by Laura Weiss Roberts and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2009-06-03 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The definitive book on ethics for chemical dependency treatment professionals. The treatment of addiction as a biological, psychological, social, and spiritual disease requires a high standard of ethical knowledge and professional skill. This groundbreaking, reader-friendly guide to contemporary ethical issues informs and challenges health care professionals, students, and faculty with a thorough and compassionate examination of the dilemmas faced when providing care for individuals suffering from substance use problems or addiction. Renowned psychiatric ethicists Cynthia Geppert and Laura Weiss Roberts tackle issues of autonomy, respect for persons, confidentiality, truth telling and non-maleficence--setting the standard for contemporary ethical practices. These challenges are illuminated with real-world case examples that show potential effects on diverse patient populations.
