New Spellings: Auto-orthographies in Zami and Vanity of Duluoz

Abstract

Concentrating on the fixation with names and the processes of naming and renaming in Audre Lorde's Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982) and Jack Kerouac's Vanity of Duluoz: An Adventurous Education, 1935–1946 (1968), this article will investigate the inner workings of these processes—and the creative, emancipative and regenerative possibilities that arise from them (in terms of both text and the ‘empirical world’)—in the context of ‘auto-orthography’. This notion combines autobiography and ‘self-spelling’ to elucidate the blurred lines that separate fiction and biographical fact, the deconstruction of which Jacques Derrida makes central to his work on autobiography, The Ear of the Other. The aim of the article is to demonstrate what these two states, of (auto)biographical fiction and fact, can lend to each other in combination; drawing on Derrida's theses, and later working through certain psychoanalytic and ‘schizoanalytic’ discourses, in order to discover how the respective authors' auto-orthographies interact with their own times and create pathways to the future.