Impossible Autobiography: For Philippe Lejeune

Bulletin for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies

Bulletin for Spanish and Portuguese Historical …, 2011

2016

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.

Auto/biography, 2006

Revista de Letras Série II N.º 11, 2011

Positoning myself in a critical agenda that reads autobiography not as the life of its authors, but rather as texts of that life, I consider that we can analyze these texts as a geography of the possible or as knowable community, in Elspeth Probyn’s and Raymond Williams’s words, respectively. Autobiographies are maps of possibilities of the self, landscapes of the self, where authors, simultaneously subjects and objects of their own discourse and representation, create conditions of possibility for their individual, social and political existence.

New Literary History, 1977

Oxford Handbooks Online, 2017

Emerging out of the traditions of exemplary lives and self-analysis at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the genre of spiritual autobiography writing is fluid and unstable both textually and generically. The individualism that has often been taken to define the autobiographical project is problematized in these accounts, which tend to foreground self-transcendence over self-assertion, collective over individual identities, and exemplarity over uniqueness. The spiritual framework provides a language of self-narrative and self-analysis, structured around affliction and redemption, and privileging inward over outward experiences. As a mode which insists on the truth of experience, it allows marginal selves (including women and lower-class men) a public voice, above all in the gathered churches of the revolutionary decades and after, while also containing those voices within tight conventions. The simultaneous restrictions and liberations of these various frames offer important ...

This article reviews the past three decades of autobiography studies in the context of the expansion of the autobiographic corpus. After distinguishing two interpretations of the omnipresence of autobiography, it moves on to describe through a couple of examples how scholarly discourse has addressed the proliferation of self-narratives and the problem of the exemplariness of the lives narrated. Beside autobiography studies, a field rooted in literary scholarship, it also renders the influential criticism of the interpenetration of the intimate and the public, an argument suggesting that the cultural significance of autobiography has been utterly shaken. In the end the article quotes Laurent Berlant's concept of "intimate publics," and argues that this notion has been inspiring for autobiography studies because it offers a complex framework for the interpretation of the current obsession with self-narratives.

Biography, 2014