Vulnerable Subjects: Ethics and Life Writing

Couser cares about all biographical subjects and the various authoring permutations that exist, but he is especially concerned with the truly vulnerable: the very young and old, illiterate, disabled, mentally impaired, institutionalized, jailed, unborn, or dead-anyone, who must relinquish rights in order to bring a biographical account into existence. The issues are manifold and no one who reads this study will ever be able to consider a formal overview of a person's life-whether biographical or autobiographical, whether authored or ghost-written, whether written or cinematic-in quite the same way.... Couser raises so many possibilities and problems, many that would never occur even to a sophisticated, knowledgeable, and caring scholar, that one is awestruck with trepidation.

What responsibilities do 'life writers' have to others' asks the scholar Couser, an English professor at Hofstra University. He urges the embrace of key tenets of bioethics: respect for autonomy, nonmaleficence, and beneficence.

Clear to me in this reading is that no matter who we are, we are all potentially vulnerable subjects.... I highly recommend this book to anyone studying ethics, life writing, or any of the chapter subjects.

G. Thomas Couser's courageous scholarship and close readings of life writing bring text, body, intersubjectivity, and power into tension, narrativizing ethics and opening an urgently needed dialogue about the duties incurred by writing of another. This book is critical reading not only for students and practitioners of life writing but also for ethicists, clinicians, and all who recognize the peril, vulnerability, liberation, and necessity of writing and reading of lives.

In Vulnerable Subjects, G. Thomas Couser brings his customary care and intelligence to a remarkably wide range of literature, from celebrity 'as-told-to' autobiographies to problematic 'as-told-about' disability memoirs. This is not only an important contribution to the scholarship on lifewriting and to the advancement of disability studies in the humanities, it's also, quite simply, a fascinating, engrossing book.

Thomas Couser's Vulnerable Subjects: Ethics and Life Writing explores the moral perils of speaking for those who either cannot speak for themselves or can give no meaningful consent to being depicted by others. The range of cases Couser entertains is remarkably broad, and many of them are fascinating.... Vulnerable Subjects is a fine read, opening up a discussion about the ethics of representing vulnerable others that is long overdue. Couser has performed a valuable service by directing our attention to this underexplored issue, and we may perhaps leave it to others to continue the work that he has here begun.

Well conceived, well focused, and well written, Vulnerable Subjects shows G. Thomas Couser to be particularly gifted at clarifying the philosophical problems of life writing. Couser's concern that life writing generate discovery and possibility rather than control is evident throughout, yet he is very careful to avoid a judgmental stance, preferring to map the issues. He goes to the heart of problems that are both urgent and very difficult for individuals, for communities, and for the interpretive activity that is auto / biography.

What are our responsibilities to others when we write about their lives? And how should lives be valued? Searching for answers to these hard questions, G. Thomas Couser grapples with a wide range of sensitive problem cases. His conclusions are judicious and never prescriptive. There is no better guide than Couser to life writing today. Vulnerable Subjects is an absorbing and important book.

When may life writing violate the privacy of its subject? This question is the theme of this interesting, accessible examination of quandaries of authorial ethics.... Highly recommended.