Introduces the intermediate and advanced intermediate student of French to women writers.

Contre-Courants: Les femmes s'écrivent à travers les siècles

Literature & Fiction

CAWS, Mary Ann

Miller, Nancy K.

Houlding, Elizabeth A.

Morgan, Cheryl

History & Criticism

Pearson

"My mother's death was a shock--an athletic non-smoker, she was diagnosed as having lung cancer days after her sixty-eighth birthday and died a few months later. It was only in the years following her death, when my father became physically and mentally crippled by Parkinson's disease, that I began to think and to write about the end of life." So notes Nancy K. Miller in the opening pages of Bequest and Betrayal, an innovative form of memoir that blends astute literary criticism and gripping autobiographical passages as it illuminates an experience that is both universal and intensely private: the death of a parent. Bequest and Betrayal is composed like a tapestry, weaving together insightful readings of books like Philip Roth's Patrimony with harrowing autobiographical material about the last years of Miller's own parents. By incorporating her own deeply felt memories into the text, the author gives weight to her examination of the central themes that emerge: the relations between mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, and fathers and daughters; the crisis of aging and of bodies in decline; what it means to write about someone else's suffering; how questions of class and religion shape the relationship between parent and child. With great sensitivity, she shows how the adult child--confronted with the loss of parents--comes to terms through autobiographical narrative. To do this, Miller examines a series of autobiographical works in which a parent's death is central to the family plot, including Simone de Beauvoir's A Very Easy Death, Susan Cheever's Home Before Dark, and Art Spiegelman's Maus. Telling the story of a parent's death, Miller demonstrates, is a way of rewriting one's own sense of history, one's present self in relation to childhood. Whether she is shedding light on the memoirs of other contemporary writers or relating a detail of her father's struggle with Parkinson's disease, Miller captivates us with her fearless, original intelligence. Combining Miller's broad knowledge of literature, her wry sensibility, and engaging prose style, Bequest and Betrayal is a book of outstanding grace and complexity, highly readable and often very moving.

Bequest and Betrayal: Memoirs of a Parent's Death

Parenting & Relationships

Oxford University Press

What can reading for the gender of signature tell us about the act of reading as a poetics and politics? In Subject to Change Miller demonstrates the textual effects of female authorship in the production, reception, and circulation of women&#39;s writing. In the wake of Roland Barthes&#39;s famously Dead Author, Miller argues for the cultural vitality of feminist writing subjects.

Subject to change: Reading feminist writing (Gender & Culture)

Columbia University Press

Subject to Change: Reading Feminist Writing

But Enough About Me

In her latest work of personal criticism, Nancy K. Miller tells the story of how a girl who grew up in the 1950s and got lost in the 1960s became a feminist critic in the 1970s. As in her previous books, Miller interweaves pieces of her autobiography with the memoirs of contemporaries in order to explore the unexpected ways that the stories of other people's lives give meaning to our own. The evolution she chronicles was lived by a generation of literary girls who came of age in the midst of profound social change and, buoyed by the energy of second-wave feminism, became writers, academics, and activists. Miller's recollections form one woman's installment in a collective memoir that is still unfolding, an intimate page of a group portrait in process.

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

My Brilliant Friends: Our Lives in Feminism (Gender and Culture Series)

My Brilliant Friends is a group biography of three women’s friendships forged in second-wave feminism. Poignant and politically charged, the book is a captivating personal account of the complexities of women’s bonds. Nancy K. Miller describes her friendships with three well-known scholars and literary critics: Carolyn Heilbrun, Diane Middlebrook, and Naomi Schor. Their relationships were simultaneously intimate and professional, emotional and intellectual, animated by the ferment of the women’s movement. Friendships like these sustained the generation of women whose entrance into male-dominated professions is still reshaping American society. The stories of their intertwined lives and books embody feminism’s belief in the political importance of personal experience. Reflecting on aging and loss, ambition and rivalry, competition and collaboration, Miller shows why and how friendship’s ties matter in the worlds of work and love. Inspired in part by the portraits of the intensely enmeshed lives in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, My Brilliant Friends provides a passionate and timely vision of friendship between women.

Arts & Literature

Explores gender and culture through the filter of feminist writing over the past several centuries.

Subject to Change

"In a book that will change the ways we think about autobiography and criticism, Nancy K. Miller produces poignant revelations about what it means to live with a dying parent―as a son or daughter, as well as the difference that gender makes in such a painful situation. In Bequest and Betrayal, she develops an original feminist perspective by counterpointing lyrical introspection about her own grief with critical insights into memoirs by Simone de Beauvoir, Philip Roth, Art Spiegelman, Susan Cheever, Carolyn Steedman, and Annie Ernaux." ―Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, co-authors of The Madwoman in the Attic, No Man's Land, and The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women
"Miller's use of the memoir form offers a new model of serious criticism, and a way of imagining community through ‘bonds of paper’ as well as ‘bonds of blood.’" ―Elaine Showalter, London Review of Books
Melding the details of her own experience with the familial biographies of well-known contemporary writers, Miller recreates a common experience―the loss of a father or a mother―and exposes the often tortuous paths of mourning and attachment that we follow in the wake of loss. In the process, she offers pieces of personal history, revealing the mixed emotions provoked by her mother's sudden death from cancer and her father's painful struggle with Parkinson's disease. Memoirs about the loss of parents show how enmeshed in the family plot we have been and the price of our complicity in its stories. The death of parents forces us to rethink our lives, to reread ourselves. We read for what we need to find. Sometimes, we also find what we didn't know we needed.

Indiana University Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Miller, Nancy K.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Miller, Nancy K.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Miller, Nancy K.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Contre-Courants: Les femmes s'écrivent à travers les siècles

Bequest and Betrayal: Memoirs of a Parent's Death

Subject to change: Reading feminist writing (Gender & Culture)

Subject to Change: Reading Feminist Writing

But Enough About Me

But Enough About Me

My Brilliant Friends: Our Lives in Feminism (Gender and Culture Series)

My Brilliant Friends: Our Lives in Feminism (Gender and Culture Series)

Subject to Change

Bequest and Betrayal: Memoirs of a Parent's Death