Thursday, March 23, 2006

Wilmington, N.C. - Paul John Eakin, Ruth N. Halls Professor Emeritus of English at Indiana University, will speak at 4:30 p.m. on Wednesday, April 5 in Bryan Auditorium, Morton Hall. His talk, "Talking about Ourselves: Autobiography, Narrative Identity, and Everyday Life," will be followed by a book signing and reception.

Eakin will discuss "life writing," - a class of literature in which people tell life stories - and the ethics of writing from real life. This event is sponsored by the Buckner Lecture Series and the UNCW Department of English and is free and open to the public.

Eakin is best known for his book How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves, (Cornell UP, 1999) in which he prefers "to think of 'self' less as an entity and more as a kind of awareness in process." Using life writings as examples - including works by Art Spiegelman, Oliver Sacks, Henry Louis Gates, Lucy Grealy, and Philip Roth - Eakin demonstrates that the self and the story of the self are constantly evolving in relation to others. In his latest book, The Ethics of Life Writing (Cornell UP, 2004), Eakin demonstrates how some of the deepest matters of human self-understanding, such as justice, lie at the heart of autobiography. Along with other scholars of autobiography, religion, ethics, anthropology and philosophy, he explores the potential of life writing both to humanize and to corrupt.

Other works by Eakin include Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self-Invention (Princeton UP, 1985), which explores the role of fiction in the process of self-invention; Touching the World: Reference in Autobiography (Princeton UP, 2001), in which Eakin turns his attention to a defining assumption of autobiography: that people write not in some private realm of autonomy but rather in strenuous engagement with the pressures that life in culture entails; and The New England Girl: Cultural Ideals in Hawthorne, Stowe, Howells, and James (1976). He is also the editor of On Autobiography (1989) by Philippe Lejeune and American Autobiography: Retrospect and Prospect (1991).

The Buckner Lecture Series was established by Charles F. Green III, to provide funding to bring distinguished guest presenters to UNCW and in honor of his friend, Katherine K. Buckner.

For further information, please contact Janet Ellerby, Chair of the UNCW Buckner Committee, at 910.962.3764.

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