S'écrire frère et gardien de son frère : les memoirs fraternels de Jay Neugeboren et John Edgar Wideman
John Edgar Wideman’s Brothers and Keepers (1984) and Jay Neugeboren’s Imagining Robert. My Brother, Madness and Survival. A Memoir (1997) are memoirs in which two successful novelists and academics write about their respective isolated younger brothers: Robby Wideman, condemned to a life-sentence...
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| Format: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Idioma: | Français |
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2012
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| Accés en línia: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Sumari: | John Edgar Wideman’s Brothers and Keepers (1984) and Jay Neugeboren’s Imagining Robert. My Brother, Madness and Survival. A Memoir (1997) are memoirs in which two successful novelists and academics write about their respective isolated younger brothers: Robby Wideman, condemned to a life-sentence for robbery and murder in 1976, and Robert Neugeboren, who, in 1962, was institutionalized at the age of nineteen, and has since spent his life in various mental hospitals. In their fraternal memoirs, Wideman and Neugeboren both consider their constant presence next to their brothers in a biblical and literary light: what are a brother’s duties towards a suffering sibling? How can a novelist react to the suspended life of a confined brother? Their texts, which are in both cases collaborative works, propose to reconstruct the younger brothers’ lives, an undertaking which necessitates both a biographical, referential frame and an imaginary, fictional perspective. Thus “imagined,” Robby and Robert become part and parcel of their elder brothers’ self-narratives in two volumes which are as biographical as they are autobiographical, and which question the power of literary brotherhood. |
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