To write about your contemporaries, whose work is enmeshed in the stuff of your life, is risky business. But as Susan Suleiman demonstrates in this lively and personal book, that risk is what makes such a critical encounter worthwhile. "Risking Who One Is" shows how the process of self-recognition in the reading or viewing of contemporary work can lead to larger considerations about culture and society--to increased historical awareness and collective action. 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, Suleiman engages in a fascinating dialogue with those who have shared her place and time, and whose preoccupations meet her own. Through Suleiman's encounter with them, these writers and artists enter an exchange with each other, and with us as readers. These encounters open new perspectives on motherhood and its conflicts, on creativity and love, on the intersections of history, memory, and autobiography, and on the politics and poetics of postmodernism. In "Risking Who One Is," Suleiman offers us a new way of looking at issues that are both personal and historical, defining the life of our times.
About the Author: Susan Rubin Suleiman was born in Budapest and came to the U.S. with her parents as a child. She is the C. Douglas Dillon Professor of the Civilization of France and professor of comparative literature at Harvard, where she has chaired the Department of Romance Languages & Literatures and the Department of Comparative Literature. Suleiman has won many honors, including the Radcliffe Medal for Distinguished Achievement (1990), and a decoration by the French Government as Officer of the Order of Academic Palms (Palmes Académiques) in 1992. She has held a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rockefeller Humanities Fellowship, and a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship, among others. Her books include Authoritarian Fictions: The Ideological Novel as a Literary Genre (1983), Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant-Garde (1990), the memoir Budapest Diary: In Search of the Motherbook (1996), and Crises of Memory and the Second World War (2006). She has edited and co-edited several volumes, including Exile and Creativity (1998), Contemporary Jewish Writing in Hungary (2003), and French Global: A New Approach to Literary History (with C. McDonald), 2010. She lives in Belmont, Masschusetts.