ABSTRACT
As Chapter 1 has already suggested, confession remains a dominant cultural mode, continuing to shape literature, television and other media. Confessions, be they televisual, literary or cinematic, authored by men or women and concerned with male or female central protagonists, have much in common: concerns with sexuality and suffering, the construction of ‘becomingness’, and a first-person mode of narration that confesses the subject’s/central protagonist’s past wrongdoings. This chapter is predicated, then, on the fact that confessions centred on female and male central protagonists/subjects and authored by men and women do share ground. Yet as Nancy Miller, quoting George Eliot on the relationship between English and American literature argued, literary criticism should approach literature authored by men and women, as ‘two literatures in the same language’ (Miller 1981: 38). In what follows, I suggest that a study of the temporalities of confession might provide a way to address the thorny question of shared ground and sexual difference.
