Transcript Dias nummer 1

ENGLISH LITERATURE & CULTURE
‘I’ IS ANOTHER:
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
ACROSS GENRES
Camelia Elias
Charles Simic, 1938
• poets.org
• Charles Simic and
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David Lehman
griffin poetry prize
 video on Shelley
• on the radio
aesthetics
• "At least since Emerson and Whitman,
there's a cult of experience in American
poetry. Our poets, when one comes right
down to it, are always saying: This is what
happened to me. This is what I saw and
felt. Truth, they never get tired of
reiterating, is not something that already
exists in the world, but something that
needs to be rediscovered almost daily.“
"Poetry and Experience"
• Because I could not stop for Death,
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He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality. We slowly drove, he knew
no haste,
And I had put away
My labor, and my leisure too,
For his civility.
We passed the school, where children strove
At recess, in the ring;
We passed the fields of gazing grain,
We passed the setting sun.
Or rather, be passed us;
The dews grew quivering and chill,
For only gossamer my gown,
My tippet only tulle.
We paused before house that seemed
A swelling of the ground;
The roof was scarcely visible,
The cornice but a mound.
Since then 'tis centuries, and yet each
Feels shorter than the day
I first surmised the horses' heads
Were toward eternity.
Autobiography
Memoir
(Bios: life in history; Autos:
the self developed out of
that history
(Memoria (Lat.): memory; a
note written in order to
remember
• Deals with facts
• Claims to be objective
• Deals with an earlier
• Subjective, reflective and
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period of time from the
perspective of a
relatively fixed later
point
Seeks to find coherence
in the past
Requires more
knowledge of craft
Employs the literary
devices of the novel:
structure, point of view,
voice, character and
story
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philosophical
Deals with moods and
feeling
Deals with any period of
time and it does not
necessarily follow a
sequence of events
More concerned with the
present
Requires skill if literary
intended, but is does not
rely on knowledge of
structure
Fragmented and
experimental
Style
• academics engage in transactional writing:
explain, report, inform, propose;
 they view the work as a means to an end
• writers of other literary forms such as
poetry, fiction and drama put themselves in
the work: they reflect, explore, speculate,
imagine, discover;
 they view the work as an end in itself
Essayistic style
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self-discovery:
 identify determined by belonging to a group
self-exploration:
 identity derived: belongs to a group that is
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different from other social classes
surprise
 at the existence of social hierarchies:
 no paper/status, no value
 no value, no recognition
tone
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intimate/personal
conversational
connective
connecting styles:
 digression
 meandering
 meditation
 rumination
 speculation
Filmic style
• Form:
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cut-up technique
close ups
black and white/colour
social realist/fantasy/
noir/cowboy
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dramatic
distant, detached,
understated
double awareness: all
films are fictional but
some are ‘really
fictitious’ while others
are fictitiously real
• Content:
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subjectivity through seduction
• Gene Tierney
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double awareness:
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all films are fictional
but some are ‘really
fictitious’ while others
are fictitiously real
Musical style
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jazz
minor key
melancholic
nostalgic
sentences are often off-beat
I was stolen by the gypsies.
My parents stole me right back.
Then the gypsies stole me again.
This went on for some time.
One minute I was in the caravan, suckling the dark teat of my new
mother, the next I sat at the long dining room table eating my
breakfast with a silver spoon.
It was the first day of spring. One of my fathers was singing
in the bathtub; the other one was painting a live sparrow the colors
of a tropical bird.
Genre
Memoir  Autobiography
• thinks about how one’s life is socially
constructed
• a means of self-expression
• emphasizes personal and social growth
• shows development of insight
• occurs within social and cultural contexts
and constraints
• demonstrates the relationship of
autobiography to history and culture
The personal essay
• writing that relates to what happened to
the author.
 Narrative non-fiction relates facts and opinions,
and tells a story.
 It has a thesis, but it's rarely stated outright,
and support for it is scattered throughout the
work
• there are autobiographical scenes or
moments to return to, which:
 arrange themselves
 are representative
 are enduring
Autobiography as manifesto
• “Autobiography now has the potential to be
the text of the oppressed and the culturally
displaced, forging a right to speak both for
and beyond the individual. People in a
position of powerlessness – women, black
people, working-class people – have more
than begun to insert themselves into the
culture via autobiography, via the assertion
of a ‘personal’ voice, which speaks beyond
itself” (Swindells in Anderson 1995: 7)
Discursive strategies
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the personal is political
the personal is personal
the personal is both political and
personal
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both ourselves and other people
both here and some place else
both poets and philosophers
identity is both socially constructed and
individual
Wittgenstein
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“A perspicuous representation
produces just that understanding
which consists in seeing connexions”
(Philosophical Investigations)
Characters
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mother: mediated descriptions
father: filtered descriptions
grandparents: reported descriptions
(more nuance)
(women)
(brother)
(friends)
Character relations
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provide certain implications:
 ambiguity
 superstition
 atheism
 contradictions
 mystery
 awe
Setting
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Yugoslavia:
- the city  the streets (the country)
France
- the city  the streets (window shopping)
America
- the city  the streets (books)
Themes
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individuality
non-conformity
tolerance
solitude
eating
poetry  poetry manifesto
 identity (“here now, I am amazed to find
myself living my life...”)
 reality (“truth matters”)