Encyclopaedic Autobiography in Roland Barthes’s Roland Barthes (1975) and Amy Krouse Rosenthal’s Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life (2004)

Lucy O’Meara

doi:10.1093/fmls/cqab014

Abstract

Abstract This article examines two works of autobiographical literature that are structured in fragmentary form and that engage explicitly with the formal and conceptual model of the encyclopaedia. One of the works, Roland Barthes’s Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975) is by a literary theorist, and the other, Amy Krouse Rosenthal’s Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life (2004) is by a popular mainstream columnist and broadcaster. Both works, despite a disparity of tone and material, display similar convictions about the utility of what I will call ‘encyclopaedic autobiography’ as a form. I argue that these autobiographical works allow us to reconceive not only of autobiography but of the question of what ‘encyclopaedic literature’ might be.

Highlights

WILLIAM WEST HAS RECENTLY SUGGESTED that ‘the encyclopedia may be an especially apt genre, or antigenre, for our cultural moment, stretched between singularities and system, selective curation and nets of relations in which everything seems interwebbed’.1 West’s neat evocation of the encyclopaedia’s interweaving of the specific with the general, and the overlapping of frames of reference we find within it, is perhaps, a description that could fairly apply to literature generally
I argue that these autobiographical works allow us to reconceive of autobiography but of the question of what ‘encyclopaedic literature’ might be
Since the middle of the twentieth century, critics of Anglo-American literature have identified ‘encyclopaedic literature’ as being long – often canonical – works of prose fiction that include allusions to many areas of knowledge or that are explicitly concerned with questions of the ordering of knowledge

Summary

Introduction

WILLIAM WEST HAS RECENTLY SUGGESTED that ‘the encyclopedia may be an especially apt genre, or antigenre, for our cultural moment, stretched between singularities and system, selective curation and nets of relations in which everything seems interwebbed’.1 West’s neat evocation of the encyclopaedia’s interweaving of the specific with the general, and the overlapping of frames of reference we find within it, is perhaps, a description that could fairly apply to literature generally. O'Meara, Lucy (2021) Encyclopaedic Autobiography in Roland Barthes’s Roland Barthes (1975) and Amy Krouse Rosenthal’s Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life (2004).

Results

Conclusion