The New Personalism

Taking H. Aram Veeser's Confessions of the Critics as its text, this article discusses the new personalism in terms of a major contrast between older forms of personalist writing that emphasized the individual as a unique personality facing unique situations, and newer forms of personalist writings that emphasize the self as a typical or collectivized subject who is defined in terms of the banality of the everday. Among the authors reviewed are Michael Bérubé, Marianne Hirsch, Gillian Brown, Jane Tompkins, Candace Lang, Linda Orr, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.