Bound to the memory of regional and relational life : Harry Crew's A Childhood: The biography of a place

UNCW Author/Contributor (non-UNCW co-authors, if there are any, appear on document)

Melinda Arlene Hollis (Creator)

Institution

The University of North Carolina Wilmington (UNCW )

Web Site: http://library.uncw.edu/

Advisor

John Clifford

Abstract: This thesis explores A Childhood: The Biography of a Place, a work of “non-fiction” by Harry Crews, as a relational, ethnographic, creative series of “memories” that are constructed by and bound to the culture of Bacon County, Georgia and its harsh, rural ways of life. In Crews’s text, seeing the “selves” and articulating the stories of a life are the same as seeing and articulating the implications of the place from which the man who signs the text was born and raised. Both sights and articulations (“selves” and place) are plastic and ever-evolving both through the text and the reader’s interpretations, which stretch beyond the text. The act of reading several maps (spatial, topological, topographical, textual, cultural), which both Crews and the reader must do to understand the selves in this text, construct the text. Yet while the place and the text reproduce a series of life stories that surround the construction of Harry Crews, he can never fully reproduce either his life story or his place.

Bound to the memory of regional and relational life : Harry Crew's A Childhood: The biography of a place
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Created on 1/1/2009
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Additional Information

Publication

Thesis

A Thesis Submitted to the University of North Carolina at Wilmington in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirement for the Degree of Masters of Arts

Language: English

Date: 2009

Keywords

Crews Harry 1935-A childhood: The biography of a place--Criticism and interpretation

Subjects

Crews, Harry, 1935- A childhood: the biography of a place -- Criticism and interpretation

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