Hayden White Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Abstract in italiano:
Lo studio attira l’attenzione sulle molteplici possibilità interpretative delle biofiction, finzioni che assumono come protagoniste una o più figure del passato. Per la loro analisi critica, ad oggi identificata con una disamina ‘sintomatica’ di vari testi finzionali su un dato periodo/personaggio storico, saranno proposte alcune possibili direzioni non-canoniche: un metodo ‘orizzontale’, che riconduce la biofiction alla ‘galassia finzionale’ di un soggetto scrivente (il caso di Michèle Roberts), e un altro ‘verticale’, che esplora una biofiction-modello per decostruire e ricostruire l’intreccio di voci sincroniche e diacroniche del suo singolare modus operandi. Un’intera parte del saggio sarà dunque dedicata a Mab’s Daughters di Judith Chernaik, un caso estremamente interessante di biofiction ‘a mondi possibili’.
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The essay revolves around the multiple possibilities of interpretation of biofiction, fictional narratives with historical characters in the foreground. For their critical analysis, today a ‘symptomatic’ survey of fictional texts on a particular period/character, there will be proposed some possible anti-canonic directions : an horizontal method, which treats biofiction as part of the galaxy of a writing subject (the case of Michèle Roberts),and a vertical, which explores a biofiction as a model to deconstruct and reconstruct its synchronic and diachronic voices. A section of the monograph will be therefore dedicated to Mab’s Daughters by Judith Chernaik, a very interesting case of ‘possible world’ biofiction
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PART (I Percorsi critici verso la biofiction: la pre-storia delle riscritture).

The last seventy years have witnessed a proliferation of fictions with historical figures as main characters, whose biographies are included in the plot of the story. This first part of my work begins with an introduction of the cultural changes in the second half of the XX century that have brought about this diffusion, especially focusing on the modifying concepts of authoriality, originality, intertextuality as effect of linguistic, semiological and philosophical studies (the contribution of Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida, Michele Foucault are here analyzed). Then, the attention shifts to the reception of the French thought into the United States, meaning, to Hayden White’s ‘decoding’ of Foucault, to New Historicism and Cultural Materialism. It concludes with a survey of feminism, the feminist reader and criticism, the feminist subject in and beyond the sex/gender dichotomy, and the complex interaction between the feminist and the Foucauldian discourses. The interacting ideas of history, power, narration of the contemporary epistemology suggest that feminist rewritings may be able to provide some sort of ‘truth’, finally evoking the last obsessions of the French philosopher: some of these kinds of biofictions might indeed be read as a Greek parrēsia (παρρησία), the citizens’ faculty of expressing their own opinion in a public arena.

PART 2 (Il ‘genere’ letterario delle biofiction)

As I make clear from the title, I attempt here to discern a particular voice of biofiction among the many historiographic metafictions and “fiction biographies” (Naomi Jacob’s definition for non-traditional biographies), in a way that narrows their definition to narrations that, even if affected by hybridism, show recognizable characteristics. With the help offered by previous studies on the subject and the possible world semantics I compare then different biographical rewritings so as to distinguish texts with overt self-reflections from others where artificiality is not so highly stressed; fictions that exploit historical names only to ‘recombine’ them with identities and ideas ‘foreign’ to the original from ‘reconstructions’ where the fictional world is only slightly different with respect to its equivalent of the tradition (it is, paradoxically, this type of ‘semantically full’ rewriting that entails the consultation of history books for its criticism).
This section also investigates the ethical issues involved in the process of narrativization of history and regarding the theoretic description of the subject, both fictional and non-fictional. Afterwards, it examines some books of the French-English author Michèle Roberts, whose writing, one of the most successful artistic developing of the French psychoanalytic feminism of the 70s, is also very recognizable - kind of a“language of the body” entwined with other specific obsessions of the writer like food, sex, Catholic religion and the cultural collision between England and France. It seems to me that, her fictional worlds in the biofictions The Wild Girl, 1984, and Fair Exchange, 1999, The Mistressclass (2003) may be considered as part of the ‘galaxy’ of a writing subject. I call this ‘horizontal method’.

Part III (Quattro soggetti donna nel circolo di Shelley e il brusio dei discorsi sotto al foglio della storia)

This part is entirely dedicated to explore the strategies of Mab’s Daughters: Shelley’s Wives and Lovers: Their Own Story by Judith Chernaik, a case of possible-world biofiction focused on the years 1816-17 of the Shelley circle and narrated from the eccentric prospective of four female subjects: Harriet Westbrook, Percy Shelley’s first wife; Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, caught in her writing of Frankenstein and still unknown by her contemporary; Fanny Godwin, the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and Gilbert Imlay; Claire Clairmont, the second-born of Mary Jane Clairmont who was adopted by William Godwin. The large amount of documents consulted as a part of the interpretative process has included private and public writings such as biographies, autobiographies, novels, poems, and, in the case of the character Mary Shelly, also manuscripts of the authentic journals.
The analysis, exploiting the suggestions offered by the intercrossing perspectives of the novel, explores the modulations of the concept of identity in their phases of textual desegregation and reconstruction, emphasizing reflections on ideological stances and personal prejudices in the formation of the biographical and literary canon (I found particularly fascinating the quite overt ‘discourse’ on Mary Shelley as provided by the ‘left criticism’ in K.N. Cameron, D.H. Reiman, eds, Shelley and his Circle: 1773-1882, Harvard UP, Cambridge, MA ), as well as the collision between the concept of uniqueness and reproducibility and the relevance of the mark of ‘gender’ in the politics of language.
I call this method ‘vertical’ because it explores a biofiction deconstructing and reconstructing its synchronic and diachronic voices in the many and sometimes colliding discourses of history.

PART IV ( Postscriptum. Mab’s daughters e le ‘quinte prospettive’. Ricerche aperte)

The Postscriptum reflects upon some specific features of Mab’s daughters, a case of biofiction written by a scholar (kind of a ‘manuscript-rewriting’); and, taking into consideration an other biofiction of the same author (The Daughter, a Novel Based on the Life of Eleanor Marx, a rewriting of the life of the daughter of the ‘father’ of Communism, Karl Marx), suggests that the two methods of interpretation are not, finally, mutually exclusive. Some possible suggestions for further research also provided in this part, such as a symptomatic study on feminist rewritings set in the Romantic Age (Michèle Roberts’ Fair Exchange and Judith Chernaik’s Mab’s Daughters are, in some ways, similar) .