Transcript Dias nummer 1

ENGLISH LITERATURE & CULTURE
‘I’ IS ANOTHER:
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
ACROSS GENRES
Camelia Elias
I and “I”
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traditional modes of narration:
 autobiography in a nutshell
radical modes of representation
 I’m not there
 review
“I don’t think anybody should write
his autobiography until after he is
dead”
Samuel Goldwyn
I is another, “Je est un autre“
(Arthur Rimbaud from his letters (aka The Seer’s Letters) to Georges Izambard (May
13, 1871) and Paul Demeny (May 15, 1871). The following extract is from his letter to
Paul Demeny:
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"For I is someone else. If brass wakes up a bugle, it is not his fault.
That is obvious to me: I witness the unfolding of my thought: I watch
it, I listen to it: I make a stoke of the bow: the symphony makes
movement into the depths, or comes in one leap upon the stage.
If the old fools had not found only the false significance of the Ego, we
should not now be having to sweep away these millions of skeletons
which, since an infinite time,! have been piling up the fruits of their
one-eyed intellects, proclaiming themselves to be the authors!
(...) The first study of a man who wants to be a poet is his selfknowledge, complete; he looks for his own soul, he inspects it, he tests
it, learns it. As soon as he knows it, he must cultivate it. That seems
simple: in every mind a natural development takes place; so many
egoists proclaim themselves authors; there are many others who
attribute their intellectual progress to themselves! - But the soul has to
be made monstrous: after the fashion of the comprachicos, if you like!
Imagine a man planting and cultivating warts on his face.
I say that one must be a seer, make oneself a seer."
Norbert Elias: The Society of
Individuals (1991)
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One must start from the structure of the relations
between individuals in order to understand the
‘psyche’ of the individual person. (37)
this statements situates itself between the idea of an
autobiography written by one person and the context
on which the person writing is dependent.
one of the assumptions in traditional autobiographical
studies rests on the idea that the aim in
autobiography is the understanding of the individual
through the individual’s own understanding. (Dilthey,
Pattern and Meaning in History)
Autobiography
• a retrospective prose narrative produced by
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a real person concerning his own existence,
focusing on his individual life, in particular
the development of his personality.
(Lejeune 1982)
the absolute condition of autobiography:
 there must be ‘identity’ between author,
narrator, and protagonist
 identity as ‘intention’
intention
 honest
 truthful
 serious
 authoritative
 honors the signature of a pact/contract
 sincere (implies a masculine subject; a
man by definition is more credible when
he says he is who he is)
St. Augustine: Confessions
(AD 397-398)
Benjamin Franklin: Autobiography
(1771)
Jerome Buckley: The Turning Key
(1984)
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“The ideal autobiography […] describes
a voyage of self-discovery, a life-journey
confused by frequent misdirections and
even crisis of identity, but reaching at
last a sense of perspective and
integration. It traces through the alert
awakened memory a continuity from
early childhood to maturity or even old
age […] and as a work of literature it
achieves a satisfying wholeness.” (3940)
history
• Robert Southey first uses the term in1809
• subsequent pros and cons:
 the author as a genius (beyond outside
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judgment)
the author attains literary legitimacy and a
desired subjectivity
the author is resituated in ‘his’ work, and thus
becomes knowable to his readers
the author suffers public exposure of the private
self
the author lacks integrity if he exposes his self
for commercial purposes (pop stars)
traditional modes of
autobiographical writing
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author’s life
first person point of view
author’s feelings expressed
author’s attitude toward events of life
non-fiction
the author:
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as hero
draws his own portrait
describes his likes and dislikes
describes what he has done and what
has been done to him
presents one point of view
presents his past from the limited
perspective of his present self-image
poststructuralist background
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French theory
psychoanalysis
poststructuralism
feminism
Common concerns:
 interrogate the selfevident nature of the
subject and knowledge
 de-center the author (who
is not a source of
meaning)
 undermine the unified
subject of autobiography
tensions
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the experiential I vs. the discursive I
authorship
selfhood
the representation of the division
between fact and fiction
open questions
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fact or self invention?
literary event (whose primary being
resides in and through the writing
itself) or is it life being represented?
the life of the signifier or the life
being signified?
if fiction is a way of mystifying, is
autobiography a way of demystifying?
Northrop Frye: Anatomy of
Criticism (1957)
Autobiography
• transforms empirical facts into artifacts
• it is definable as a form of prose fiction
• it is conditioned on the process of selecting,
ordering, integrating a writer’s lived
experiences life according to its teleological
demands as a narrative
• relies on an imaginative discourse
• relies on fictional techniques
self-cognitive dilemma
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truth
imagined truth
designed/written truth
 manifests a spontaneous, ironic, experimental effort
the problem of levels:
 is the writer’s representation of his experience
subordinated to the experience itself, or does
memory rule the selection of events?
 is autobiography a writer’s attempt to elucidate his
present or his past?
 the discursive “I” and the recollected “I”
realization vs. representation
realization of the self
• vital impulse to order
• against fragmentation
• guarantee unity
representation of the self
• the form of autobiography
must provide both conditions
and limits
• criticism and autobiography
are the same: self-conscious
discourses about ‘language’
St. Augustine: The Confessions
(397/1963)
Roland Barthes: To Write: An
Intransitive Verb? (1972)
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“when a narrator [of a written text]
recounts what has happened to him,
the I who recounts is no longer the
one that is recounted”
the I is always new even if it is
repeated
the I is an instance of discourse
 the autobiographer necessarily
impersonates the effect of discourse
Henry David Thoreau: Walden
(1854)
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“In most books, the I, or first person,
is omitted; in this it will be retained”
 a self-conscious insistence on the self-
referentiality of the I
 split intentionality: I becomes he
(Louis Renza: “The Veto of the
Imagination”)
D. H. Lawrence & Helene Cixous
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Never trust the teller, trust the tale.
All biographies like all
autobiographies like all narratives tell
one story in place of another
(Rootprints)
Jacques Derrida: The Law of Genre
(1980)
• “As soon as genre announces itself, one
must respect a norm, one must not cross a
line of demarcation, one must not risk
impurity, anomaly or monstrosity.”
 no text can fulfill its own generic designations
(autobiography in a title indicates that the
statement indicated in the title doesn’t belong to
the genre itself)
 texts are open to transgression
 genre ‘does’ the subject by ‘undoing’ the subject
Paul de Man: Autobiography as Defacement (1979)
• autobiography is self-indulgent and disreputable
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compared to the novel
autobiography is a figure of reading or understanding
texts
 author reads himself in the text
 author acquires a face through personification
 “any book with a readable title-page is
autobiographical” (922)
• autobiography reveals that all knowledge and self-
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knowledge depends on figurative language or tropes
autobiography produces fictions or figures
the giving of face is the disfiguring of the subject (in the
end there is only writing)
John Eakin: How our lives become
stories
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Definitions of autobiography have
never proved to be definitive, but
they are instructive, reflecting
characteristic assumptions about
what may well be the slipperiest of
literary genre – if indeed
autobiography can be said to be a
genre in the first place. (1-2)
autobiographical genre(s)
• subdivision of the novel (Northrop Frye)
• literature with a difference (Barrett J. Mandel)
• figure of reading (Paul de Man)
• neither a genre, nor a form, nor a style, nor
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even a language, but a literary attitude
(George May)
autosociography, autoautography,
autopsychography, autophylography,
autoobituagraphy, autosoteriography (James
Olney)
not a formal genre but an act (Elizabeth Bruss)
autobiographical modes
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memoir mode:
 the writer suppresses his evocation of the past by
surrendering to the public currents of language.
 the writer uses language to declassify information
about his life
 the writer doesn’t emphasize his own development
but focuses on people he knows, and events he
witnessed
confessional mode:
 writing becomes a manifest part of the writer’s
performance of his textual project
narcissistic mode:
 the writer introduces signs of vigilance intended to
guard against subliminal expressions
J.J. Rousseau: Confessions (1954)
• “I may omit or transpose facts, or make
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mistakes in dates; but I cannot go wrong
about what I have felt, or about what my
feelings have led me to do; and these are
the chief subjects of my story.” (262)
“I shall continue just the same faithfully to
reveal what J.-J. Rousseau was, did and
thought, without explaining and justifying
the strangeness of his feelings or ideas or
inquiring whether any others have thought
like him.” (595)
H. Porter Abbot: Autobiography,
Autography, Fiction (1988)
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autobiographical narrative begins and
ends in the presence of its making
to read fictively is to ask of the text:
how is this complete?
to read factually is to ask of the text:
how is this true?
to read autobiographically is to ask of
the text: how does this reveal the
author? (613)
autobiography as anthropology
(John Eakin, 1999:4)
gendered autobiography
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The Play
Surprise
Men and Women
Hoffman, Codrescu, Simic,
Federman
Eva Hoffman
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Born in Cracow, Poland
studied music
Emigrated to Canada 1959 and then to the US (1979)
studied English literature at Rice and Harvard
becomes editor and literary critic for New York Times
Books
• Lost in Translation : A Life in a New Language. London:
Vintage, 1989.
• Exit Into History : A Journey Through the New Eastern
Europe. New York. N.Y.: Penguin Books, 1994.
• Shtetl : The Life and Death of a Small Town and the World
of Polish Jews. Boston : Houghton Mifflin, 1997.
• The Secret. London: Vintage, 2001
Andrei Codrescu
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Born in Romania, Sibiu 1946
studied mathematics and philosophy at Univ. of Bucharest
came to the US in 1966, after a transit period in both
France and Italy
professor of English and Comparative Studies at Louisiana
State University
Books:
• Poetry: Alien Candor (1996); Thus Spake the Corpse (2 vol)
1999-2000
• Novels: Casanova in Bohemia (2002); The Blood Countess
(1995); National best-seller;
• Essays: Zombification: Essays from NPR (1995); The Muse
Is Always Half-Dressed in New Orleans (1995); Hail
Babylon! Looking for the American City at the End of the
Millenium (1998)
Charles Simic
• born in Yugoslavia, Belgrade 1938
• came to the US through France in 1953
• studied at NYU
Books:
• Poetry: The World Doesn’t End (Pulitzer
Prize) 1990; Walking the Black Cat (1996)
• Essays: The Metaphysician in the Dark
(2003); The Unemployed Fortune Teller
(1994)
Raymond Federman
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born in France, 1928
came to the US in 1947
studied at Columbia University (first PhD on Beckett)
professor of French, English, and Comparative
literature SUNY
Books:
• Criticism: Critifiction (1993); Surfiction (1975)
• Novels: Double or Nothing (1971); Take It or Leave It
(1976); The Twofold Vibration (1982)
common concerns
• the experience of the immigrant
• double emigration
• double perspective
 feel double
 be double
• double expectation
Malcolm X, Kerouac, Ginzberg,
Coupland, Lidz, Allen
Malcolm X
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Malcolm X (born Malcolm Little; May 19, 1925 –
February 21, 1965)
was an American Black Muslim minister and a
spokesman for the Nation of Islam.
he made the pilgrimage, the Hajj, to Mecca and
became a Sunni Muslim (after leaving the Nation of
Islam in 1964)
founded the Muslim Mosque, Inc. and the
Organization of Afro-American Unity.
was assassinated in Washington Heights on the first
day of National Brotherhood Week.
his politics and ideology — is contested in part
because his entire body of work consists of a few
dozen speeches and a collaborative autobiography
whose veracity is challenged
Allen Ginsberg
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Allen Ginsberg (June 3, 1926 – April
5, 1997)
one of the most celebrated American
poet.
best known for Howl (1956), a long
poem celebrating his friends of the
Beat Generation
anti-materialist and anti-conformist
Jack Kerouac
• March 12, 1922 – October 21, 1969
• American novelist, writer, poet, and artist.
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Along with William S. Burroughs and Allen
Ginsberg, he is amongst the best known of
the Beat Generation writers
is considered an important and influential
writer whose book On the Road inspired
many others.
His writing is credited as a ‘reluctant’
catalyst for the 1960s counterculture.
Woody Allen
• film director, writer, actor, jazz musician,
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comedian and playwright. (won the Oscar 3
times)
his many films mix various styles:satire, wit
and humor
writes and directs most of his films movies
and also acts in the majority of them.
draws heavily on literature, sexuality,
philosophy, psychology, Jewish identity,
European cinema, and New York City,
where he was born and has lived his entire
life.
Franz Lidz
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a Sports Illustrated senior writer
a New York Times film essayist
Books:
 Ghosty Men
 Unstrung Heroes: My Improbable Life
with Four Impossible Uncles (which was
made into a 1995 Disney feature film)
Arbus, Sherman, Emanuel, Hejinian