Autobiography and the Quest for ... Nothing

2021

The main purpose of this essay is to find out some of the fundamental principles and concepts, which constitute the essence of the art of autobiography as a “phenomenological narrative”. It seeks to recognize the common principles of phenomenology in that art, a recognition that it will clarify in theory and practice. Thus, it phenomenologically investigates the art of autobiography as a practice of phenomenology, i.e., as a phenomenological narrative. The introduction starts from the phenomenological tradition, which asserts the intimate relation between artistic vision and phenomenological approach to phenomena. Accordingly, it seeks to prove that autobiography can also be an art which bears the characteristics of the phenomenological approach, and perhaps more strongly than any other art can bear. In what I call “the art of autobiography”, the narrator practices reflection as an act of consciousness, in order to grasp the meaning of his/her lived experiences In this respect, I ca...

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.

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 ...

The European Journal of Life Writing, S. SV1–SV12, 2021

This editorial introduces the four articles of the section "The Self in Verse. Exploring Autobiographical Poetry" and connects their specific findings to a variety of more general aspects in the study of life-writing. It sketches out preliminary considerations concerning the definition of autobiographical poetry and the relevance of paratexts and autofictionality for the genre. Furthermore, it outlines some of the most common recurring themes in poems dealing with autobiographical issues, such as writing (through) the body and exploring life's crises, watersheds, and crossroads lyrically. We advocate for a more comprehensive study of autobiographical poetry as a form of life-writing that, in our view, has not yet been investigated systematically, neither by historical nor by theoretical approaches in literary and cultural studies.

Textual Practice, 2024

In an exploration of the problems of writing autobiography and biography articulated by Laura Marcus, I show how Yeats, Wittgenstein and Woolf, identify the note as the form that keeps alive the life that autobiography and biography are always paradoxically in danger of making absent. The promissory note written for autobiography’s impending realisation suggests that the past is best retrieved by means of a structure of permanent postponement for the future. Proust’s invocation of memory through the device of sliding metaphors, analogies and comparisons, by contrast, involves a translation of moments of the past through deliberate paramnesia, operating according to the translational structure of displacement articulated by Freud in his analysis of dreams. Once put into narrative form, an autobiography will never tell the story of the self alone, of the individual life, for to write an autobiography will always mean to fabulate one’s own ‘family novel’ (Freud’s ‘Familienroman’) in the terms of a romance in which the writer acts out their own desires as a character within a drama whose script has already been written by others.

Literator, 2017

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.

The Coleridge Bulletin, 2014

My theme is ‘life-writing’, understood as the shaping of one's life through the contemplation of values, although this activity is mostly unreflective. To become an art so that one's life can be shaped in greater accord with clearly held values, this process must become reflective. These values have an inescapably ethical dimension, because as we necessarily poetize our surrounding world, we contribute to our personal and communal ethos the character that arises from the culturally shaping power of guiding ideals. Even the immoralist cultivates life within an ethos where obscure feelings connect with some thing or other, whereby certain aims will then appear more valuable than others. To understand how we cannot help but shape our lives according to dimly or clearly intuited values, I compare Coleridge’s primary imagination, the ‘shaping spirit’ ‘necessary for all human perception’ with Kant’s ‘blind though indispensible function of the soul, without which we would have no cognition at all, yet of which we are scarcely ever conscious’. With Coleridge, we find in imagination an impulse to connect profound but obscure presentiments and ideas with our surroundings. This impulse propels great art and everyday aesthetics alike. Whether we pursue merely what attracts us, or seek value beyond this, all lives are freely shaped, without excuses, as the existentialists say, but not always in the most pellucid consciousness. Our choices inevitably engage us in the poetic art of life-writing. Cast in medias res, we necessarily improvise. But this is no argument against lives being moral-aesthetic works, spontaneous compositions in value.

2014

Creative nonfiction is a form of uncommon colloquy, resistant to easy answers, to information mongering, and to definition itself. No wonder, then, that both the practice of creative nonfiction and rhe thought inspired by it are sites of envy-producing jouissance. As rhe essay is to the article, so creative nonfiction is to journalism. I If conventional [oumalism transcribes, then creative nonfiction transforms; where one recounts, the other remakes. Rather than take experience as its orienting, originating ground, creative nonfiction (urns to language first and last. It docs not know what happened without recourse [0 rhe narratives available for saying so. It knows that words and their interpretations are everything (nothing neutral in its variegated land), that experience has a syntax, that feelings have a gramlnar, that rhetoric is nor confined to politics, and that the self is equivalent to the set of questions that preoccupies