Many a time in the course of doing these memoirs, I have wished that I were writing fiction. These are Mary McCarthy's words as she blends memories with family myths to take us back to the twenties, when she was orphaned in a world of relations as colourful, potent and mysterious as the Catholic religion itself.

Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Learning and self-understanding 2. The psychology of war 3. House and home 4. Other people 5. Parenting 6. Animals and nature 7. Advertising and propaganda 8. Making a living 9. Gender 10. Religion 11. Preparing our schools Notes Bibliography.

Memories of a Catholic Girlhood

Critical Lessons: What our Schools Should Teach

ECAUSE IT IS MADE UP, a story ends where it ends. In this way there is a connection between the kind of shape and the kind of truth we expect in fictional narrative. When students come up after class to ask if Lady Brett Ashley or Jake Barnes is going to commit suicide, we ask them to unask the question. Were the deaths of Lady Brett or Jake Barnes at all important, Hemingway would have made them a part of the story. Students of course are free to invent more material so long as they know that what they are doing is writing their own story. But in Hemingway's story, as in any story, the last event is the last one the author chooses to give us. In this regard, fictional narrative has no futurity; it keeps happening eternally, which is why we commonly retell stories in the present tense. The policeman raises his baton, the taxi slows to a halt, Brett presses against Jake, and Jake delivers that bitter line: "Yes ... Isn't it pretty to think so?" What follows is a vast and irrelevant plenum of pure possibility. Conversely, were The Sun Also Rises supposed to be a "true story," its ending would inescapably seem false-a fictive touch. Naturally, historians have to end their histories somewhere, and, as Hayden White has argued, they draw on other conventions of storytelling besides that of an ending to render what happened in the real world. But Sartre was right when he said that there are no "true stories." Whatever is goes on forever; there is no end to give it shape. Brett

http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/469091.pdf

Autobiography, Autography, Fiction: Groundwork for a Taxonomy of Textual Categories

In this study, Charles Fanning has written the first general account of the origins and development of a literary tradition among American writers of Irish birth or background who have explored the Irish immigrant or ethnic experience in works of fiction The result is a portrait of the evolving fictional self-consciousness of an immigrant group over a span of 250 yearsFanning traces the roots of Irish-American writing back to the eighteenth century and carries it forward through the traumatic years of the Famine to the present time with an intensely productive period in the twentieth century beginning with James T Farrell Later writers treated in depth include Edwin O'Connor, Elizabeth Cullinan, Maureen Howard, and William Kennedy Along the way he places in the historical record many all but forgotten writers, including the prolific Mary Ann Sadlier "The Irish Voice in America" is not only a highly readable contribution to American literary history but also a valuable reference to many writers and their worksFor this second edition, Fanning has added a chapter that covers the fiction of the past decade He argues that contemporary writers continue to draw on Ireland as a source and are important chroniclers of the modern American experience

The Irish Voice in America: 250 Years of Irish-American Fiction

Much contemporary theory suggests that, unlike works of biography or autobiography, human life itself is fundamentally comprised of disconnected moments and is thus devoid of literary form. People may seek to bind these moments together as narratives in the course of their efforts at self-understanding; but these narratives, it is often held, are little more than fictions or myths, impositions of form and order upon the flux of experience. In Tolstoy's Death of Ivan Ilych , we find a powerful refutation of this view. For what we see in Tolstoy's story are the grave consequences of a life lived moment to moment, without any sense of the whole. Only in the face of death could Ivan Ilych gain the requisite distance to behold the true meaning of his dismal life and only upon beholding this meaning could he see the contours of the life well-lived, that is, the life possessed of narrative integrity . By exploring the relationship between death, narrative integrity, and the radical challenge of self-understanding via the story of Ivan Ilych, the present essay seeks ultimately to identify ways in which the study of ageing might contribute to our identifying the good and virtuous life.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0144686X97006508

Memories of a Catholic Girlhood

Citations

Critical Lessons: What our Schools Should Teach

Autobiography, Autography, Fiction: Groundwork for a Taxonomy of Textual Categories

The Irish Voice in America: 250 Years of Irish-American Fiction

Death, Narrative Integrity, and the Radical Challenge of Self-Understanding: a Reading of Tolstoy's Death of Ivan Ilych

Voice and Silence: A Feminist Model of Autobiographical Memory.

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