Susan Suleiman

A photograph with faint writing on the back. A traveling chess set. A silver pin. In her new memoir, noted scholar and author Susan Rubin Suleiman uses such everyday objects and the memories they evoke to tell the story of her early life as a Holocaust refugee and American immigrant. In this coming-of-age story that probes the intergenerational complexities of immigrant families and the inevitability of loss, Susan looks to her own life as an example of how historical events shape our private lives. After the Nazis marched into Hungary in 1944, five-year old Susan learned to call herself by a Christian name, hiding with false papers in Budapest with her parents. While her relatives in the provinces would be among the 450,000 Hungarian Jews deported to Auschwitz, Susan's close family survived and even thrived in the years following the war. But when the Communist Party took over Hungary, Susan and her parents emigrated to Chicago by way of Vienna, Paris, Haiti, and New York. In her adult life as a prominent feminist professor, she rarely allowed herself to think about these chapters of her past—but eventually, when she had children of her own, she found herself called back to Budapest, unlocking memories that would change the direction of her scholarship and career. At the center of this richly textured memoir is a little girl who grows up happy despite the traumas of her early years, surrounded by a loving family. As a teenager in the 1950s, she is determined to become "100% American," until a post-college year in Paris leads her to realize that her European roots and Americanness can coexist. At once an intellectual autobiography and a reflection on the nature of memory, identity, and home, Daughter of History invites us to consider how the objects that underpin our lives become gateways to our past.

Traces of an Immigrant Girlhood

Daughter of History

Susan Rubin Suleiman

Dillon Professor of the Civilization of France Professor of Comparative Literature Susan Rubin Suleiman

To write about your contemporaries, whose work is enmeshed in the stuff of your life, maybe even in the weave of your self, is risky business. Your interest may be too personal, your involvement too close - but this, as Susan Suleiman demonstrates here, is precisely what makes such a critical encounter worthwhile. Risking Who One Is shows how the process of self-recognition, even self-construction, in the reading of contemporary work can lead to larger considerations about culture and society - to the dimensions of historical awareness and collective action. The book gives us a new way of looking at issues that are as personal as they are prevalent in the writing, the criticism, and the life of our times. 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, we observe Suleiman in a fascinating dialogue with those who share her place and time and whose interests and preoccupations meet her own. Suleiman confronts with them the conflicts between writing and motherhood. Together, they inquire into "being postmodern" and explore the connections between creativity and love. They consider the place of beauty in contemporary art, examine the relations between aesthetics and politics, and reflect on haunting memories of World War II. Through Suleiman's encounter with them, these writers and artists enter an exchange with each other, and with us as readers, that opens new perspectives on the representation of women's lives, history and memory, autobiography, and the intersection of gender and postmodernism. Itself a form of mediated autobiography, this work takes us through the shaping of a critical approach to some of our closest and deepest concerns in reading, in writing, and in knowing ourselves.

Encounters with Contemporary Art and Literature

Risking who One is

Christie McDonald

Recasting French literary history in terms of the cultures and peoples that interacted within and outside of France's national boundaries, this volume offers a new way of looking at the history of a national literature, along with a truly global and contemporary understanding of language, literature, and culture. The relationship between France's national territory and other regions of the world where French is spoken and written (most of them former colonies) has long been central to discussions of "Francophonie." Boldly expanding such discussions to the whole range of French literature, the essays in this volume explore spaces, mobilities, and multiplicities from the Middle Ages to today. They rethink literary history not in terms of national boundaries, as traditional literary histories have done, but in terms of a global paradigm that emphasizes border crossings and encounters with "others." Contributors offer new ways of reading canonical texts and considering other texts that are not part of the traditional canon. By emphasizing diverse conceptions of language, text, space, and nation, these essays establish a model approach that remains sensitive to the specificities of time and place and to the theoretical concerns informing the study of national literatures in the twenty-first century.

Susan Suleiman

Books

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