Work of Life Writing

G. Thomas Couser received his doctorate in American Civilization at Brown University in 1977. After teaching English at Connecticut College, he moved on to Hofstra University, where he founded and directed a Disability Studies Program. From his dissertation on, his scholarship has been concerned with autobiography and memoir, especially with life writing stimulated by disability and illness and the ethics of life writing. His academic books include Recovering Bodies: Illness, Disability, and Life Writing (1997), Vulnerable Subjects: Ethics and Life Writing (2004), Signifying Bodies: Disability in Contemporary Life Writing (2009), and Memoir: An Introduction (2012). He has also published dozens of articles and book chapters. In addition to scholarship, he has published personal essays in the Southwest Review, New Haven Review, and Hudson Review and Letter to My Father: A Memoir (2017).

"The Work of Life Writing collects several of the most important essays of G. Thomas Couser’s exemplary career at the forefront of life writing scholarship. Reminding us that life writing deserves our attention for its social significance as much as its artistic strength, these dozen pieces treat the many varieties of life writing as unique literary forms that enact relationships and identities, especially under-represented ones. It was Couser who reminded us that memoir is our most democratic of genres, and who brought the study of life writing to bear on disability and illness representation—one of the most important shifts in literary disability study in the past twenty years. This is a book for students and scholars alike, and will appeal to anyone compelled by the important cultural work of auto/biographical texts."Susannah B. Mintz, Professor of English, Skidmore College"G. Thomas Couser is a central figure in the field of life writing. His lively and accessible prose enters into conversation with scholarship in a variety of fields, including disability studies, narrative medicine, pedagogy (literary studies, creative writing), cultural studies, and sociology. Readers will appreciate having some of his harder-to-find pieces, along with some of his best-known essays, collected in one volume. This book demonstrates the ways in which memoir and autobiography, even those forms that are unlikely to garner critical acclaim, should be taken seriously as forces with the potential to shape our everyday lives. I appreciate the personal touches in his writing—his work feels urgent because, as a reader, I have the opportunity to learn about the life experiences that inspired it."Megan Brown, Professor of English, Drake University

• Chapter 1. Prologue: Death and Life Writing: Reflections on My Morbid CareerChapter 2. Introduction: The Work of MemoirChapter 3. Quality-of-life Writing: Illness, Disability, and Contemporary American MemoirChapter 4. Is There a Body in this Text? Embodiment in Graphic SomatographyChapter 5. Genre Matters: Form, Force, and FiliationChapter 6. Memoir and (Lack of) Memory: Filial Narratives of Paternal DementiaChapter 7. Paper Orphans: Writers’ Children Write Their LivesChapter 8. Filiation in Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father."Chapter 9. Disability, Depression, Diagnosis, and Harm: Reflections on Two Personal ScenariosChapter 10. Vulnerable Subjects: Caveat ScriptorChapter 11. The Shape of Death in American AutobiographyChapter 12. On "Freedom Writing": Expression and RepressionChapter 13. Life in Letters: Letters as Life