Final Acts by Tom Ratekin

Final Acts by Tom Ratekin

Writers facing death offer a rare glimpse into human mortality--they have the unusual opportunity to craft the closing chapter of their life stories. Final Acts explores memoirs of terminal illness, and shows a paradoxical pattern where the diagnosis of terminal illness evokes not despair, but a new freedom and richness in life. The memoirs analyzed--by Allon White, Harold Brodkey, Gillian Rose, and Derek Jarman--provide insight into the experience of radical contingency that an awareness of mortality brings. Tom Ratekin engages the concept of traversing the fantasy, elaborated by Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Zizek, to argue that the new richness in life each of these memoirists' experiences arises from the abandonment of a particular fantasy that guided his or her earlier work--a fantasy that both protected and inhibited the memoirist. Freed from convention, these writers, while close to death, can reinterpret the stories presented in their earlier work, and gain new perspectives on their worlds and existence.

"A few pages into the text and it is easy to understand that Final Acts: Traversing the Fantasy in the Modern Memoir by Tom Ratekin will interest a large radius of writers, psychologists and specialists involved in the area of terminal careIt presents new and interesting territory relating to the twentieth century memoir boom and the work of writer patients facing death." — M/C Reviews

Tom Ratekin teaches English at Barnard College.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781438427300
ISBN 10	1438427301
Title	Final Acts
Author	Tom Ratekin
Series	Suny Series In Psychoanalysis And Culture
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	State University of New York Press
Year published	2010-07-02
Number of pages	175
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.