I Could Tell You Stories Sojourns in the Land of Memory

by Hampl, Patricia

• ISBN13: 9780393320312
• ISBN10: 0393320316
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2000-08-17
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Summary

In this timely gathering, Patricia Hampl, one of our most elegant practitioners, "weaves personal stories and grand ideas into shimmering bolts of prose" ( Minneapolis Star Tribune ) as she explores the autobiographical writing that has enchanted or bedeviled her. Subjects engaging Hampl's attention include her family's response to her writing, the ethics of writing about family and friends, St. Augustine's Confessions , reflections on reading Walt Whitman during the Vietnam War, and an early experience reviewing Sylvia Plath. The word that unites the impulse within all the pieces is "Remember!"'”a command that can be startling. For to remember is to make a pledge: to the indelible experience of personal perception, and to history itself.

Author Biography

Patricia Hampl is Regents' Professor at the University of Minnesota

Table of Contents

To the Reader	11	(4)
Red Sky in the Morning	15	(6)
Memory and Imagination	21	(17)
The Mayflower Moment: Reading Whitman during the Vietnam War	38	(23)
What She Couldn't Tell	61	(22)
Czeslaw Milosz and Memory	83	(20)
A Book Sealed with Seven Seals: Edith Stein	103	(26)
The Smile of Accomplishment: Sylvia Plath's Ambition	129	(37)
The Invention of Autobiography: Augustine's Confessions	166	(18)
Reviewing Anne Frank	184	(11)
The Need to Say It	195	(13)
Other People's Secrets	208	(23)
Acknowledgments	231