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To write about your contemporaries, whose work is enmeshed in the stuff of your life, maybe even in the weave of your self, is risky business. Your interest may be too personal, your involvement too close - but this, as Susan Suleiman demonstrates here, is precisely what makes such a critical encounter worthwhile. Risking Who One Is 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 - to the dimensions of historical awareness and collective action. The book gives us a new way of looking at issues that are as personal as they are prevalent in the writing, the criticism, and the life of our times. Through subtle and incisive readings of Simone de Beauvoir, Mary Gordon, Julia Kristeva, Richard Rorty, Helene Cixous, Leonora Carrington, Max Ernst, Angela Carter, Elie Wiesel, and others, we observe Suleiman in a fascinating dialogue with those who share her place and time and whose interests and preoccupations meet her own. Suleiman 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 haunting memories of World War II. Through Suleiman's encounter with them, these writers and artists enter an exchange with each other, and with us as readers, that opens new perspectives on the representation of women's lives, history and memory, autobiography, and the intersection of gender and postmodernism. Itself a form of mediated autobiography, this worktakes us through the shaping of a critical approach to some of our closest and deepest concerns in reading, in writing, and in knowing ourselves.

Readers of Suleiman's earlier works ( Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant-Garde , Harvard Univ. Pr., 1990) will find in this book an engaging collection of 12 essays already published since 1985. In them she discusses fundamental themes such as creation and love, the relations between aesthetics and politics, and the place of beauty in contemporary art. Her book is to be read as a ``mediated, fragmented, nontotalized, postmodern, and fortunately still unfinished autobiography''; the unifying thread is Suleiman's autobiographical insights woven into her literary evaluations of contemporary works. Her fundamental concerns are tightly imbricated in the epilog. This well-orchestrated collection of essays highlights Suleiman's very personal views on contemporary artistic and literary expression. For informed lay readers and specialists.-- Danielle Mihram, Univ. of Southern California, Los Angeles Copyright 1994 Cahners Business Information.