The notion of autobiographical form redefined (original) (raw)
Achieving Autobiographical Form is a scholarly study of a selection of autobiographical works, published during the 20th and early 21st centuries, aiming to bring a new perspective on the carefully crafted nature of such texts. The authors under consideration are William Butler Yeats (Irish), Joseph Conrad, Martin Amis, Frank Kermode, Andrew Motion (all British), Richard Murphy (Anglo-Irish), Roy Campbell and J.M. Coetzee (both South African). Meihuizen's reading of these works is informed by the main issues in contemporary theoretical debates on autobiographical forms of writing, such as the representation of the past versus the configuration of the past, the reflection of selfhood versus the creation of selfhood, the centred self versus the fragmented self and fact versus fiction. The author emphasises the highly reflexive nature of these texts and convincingly argues that these are carefully crafted works of art of which the sum is always more than the parts. In other words, there is a Levinasian 'saying' that always exceeds the 'said'. This argument, one may add, is reminiscent of Roland Barthes's conviction about the multiplicity of meanings embedded in the structure of literary texts. Meihuizen, for his part, highlights the fact that every word in these texts is weighed and that their style also conveys a form of autobiographical truth.
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The Excess of Autobiography: Texts, Paratexts, Contexts
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This paper is focused on the reconsideration of the limits and advances of the genre of autobiography. Given the recent boom in autobiography and personal narratives this timely topic poses a great challenge to current literary and cultural studies. Autobiography frequently takes the form of a disturbance, upsetting the expectations and classifications of both general public and literary critics. What presuppositions does the genre of autobiography build upon, and how should we respond when more strictly literary genres integrate autobiographical elements? This paper will explore selected, representative examples of how autobiography and autobiographically inclined literary works have challenged pervading norms over the last two centuries. The use of autobiographical elements in literature has repeatedly been part of an estranging revitalization of more or less settled literary forms, in addition to contributing to the reimagining of nationality through the example of representative or marginal identities, such as in the case of W. B. Yeats. The examples will span from the Romanticism of William Wordsworth and Lord Byron, via the 19th century call for uncompromising “sincerity” and the ensuing experiments of Modernism, to more recent instances of confessionalism in writers such as Robert Lowell and Karl-Ove Knausgård. The borders and dialogue between life and writing will be in focus in this paper, and the degree to which critical terms text, context and paratext help us understand and clarify their complex interaction will be subject to discussion.
To conjure a hero in her or his own story telling or narrative is what an author's prime task is. He tries to make it so, so that the whole narrative revolves around the hero's life. While the creation of a hero in fiction is highly challenging, the portraiture of the self as a hero is a task of humongous nature. To the readers of narrative a Hero is one who stands out as one of the primary characters in a narrative. The portraiture of self as and when done forgoes all the standards of glorifying a character, which is created in a fiction. In an autobiography, the author hardly tries to glorify himself but states the blatant truth of the life that he has led from the perspective of the person he is now. At the core of autobiography or the autobiographical mode in story telling the question of the subject and the first person speaking position occurs. An exclusion from this theory is found in J. M Coetzee's autobiographical ventures where although the hero's creation is done in his own mirror image but he uses third person and present tense to talk about his past self. At the backdrop of a troubled motherland i.e South Africa Coetzee creates his own image in three different selves in Boyhood, Youth and Summertime. In one of his other book, named Elizabeth Costello Coetzee again uses autobiographical mode but chooses a female protagonist to portray his own consciousness. For Coetzee it has never been the case to glorify the hero in his art, it was all about the act of putting forth the truth about the life of a writer be it through a male protagonist or a female one, and his relation to the present hero of the book and his past self. The other important focus of his works was also the relationship of the hero with his motherland, which was again in the womb of a moment called Apartheid. This paper aims to focus on the autobiographical ventures of Coetzee as the portraiture of self as a Hero. Published with open access at www.questjournals.org No other kind of genres in literature allows a relation between the self as author and the self as subject-as an autobiography. This is possible because in autobiography the subject is always in search of an identity as is the writer. The subject in the autobiography is not someone who is present at the time of writing but is someone who is discovered in the due course of time. The question here is whether autobiographies are at strict adherence to historical and factual truth as they claim to be or is it a discovery and a creation of a deeper design of truth. The politics inevitably present at the making of an autobiography is the representation of the present writerly self and at the same time, of the past writerly self. The subject then born out of these selves' takes up a life of its own. The self thereby created is too close to the author in the form of differences rather than in the form of similarities. The self-born here is mostly the moments located in a history-the writer's history. The evolution of the textual self if brings about a huge amount of differences with the writerly self than as readers where should we fix the autobiographical events-in the moment of the writing or in the history of the writer and his time. It cannot be denied that even during the construction of an autobiography too narrativization occurs, and as soon as it occurs there are so many possibilities.
Autobiografiction: Experimental Life-Writing from the Turn of the Century to Modernism 1
Literature Compass, 2009
This essay approaches the large but surprisingly under-theorized topic of the relation between autobiography and fiction, concentrating on the period between 1880 and 1930, arguing for a new account of the relation between Modernism and life-writing. It introduces and analyses a key essay from 1906 by Stephen Reynolds, author of A Poor Man’s House, which, strikingly, coins the post-modern-sounding term ‘autobiografiction’. It argues that Reynolds’ central concept sheds light on the vexed theoretical question of the relation between autobiography and fiction, and in ways that reach further than either Reynolds or the essay’s few commentators have appreciated; in short, that ‘autobiografiction’ is potentially a much vaster topic than his essay countenances. The second section discusses the significance of the concept of ‘autobiografiction’ from the points of view of literary history and literary theory. It argues that Reynolds’ essay not only offers a powerful analysis of the literature of the previous quarter-century, but also suggests how the literature of the following decades – of Modernism – can be reconsidered in its light. Such attention enables a re-description of Modernism: instead of the conventional account of its quest for the impersonal, the movement can be seen as developing these fin-de-siècle experiments in fusing life-writing and fiction. Reynolds’ essay appears at a pivotal moment as Edwardian authors such as Edmund Gosse evince an anxious awareness of the radical potential of autobiografiction; and when Modernists such as Joyce and Proust embark on their most profound engagements with it: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and A la recherche du temps perdu. The essay goes on to argue that the issues raised by Reynolds enable a more sophisticated theoretical approach to the relation between autobiography and fiction, and explores the ambiguities which inhere in the term ‘autobiographical’ when applied to fictional works. Where Reynolds outlines the rationale for autobiografiction in fairly defensive terms, I argue for an appreciation of its radical potentialities. The study concludes by considering the trope, identified by Philippe Lejeune in Modernism, but here traced back to Aestheticism, that fiction constitutes a writer’s true autobiography. This is placed in a broader philosophical and aesthetic context of reading fiction as autobiography, and autobiography as fiction.
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