Autobiographical Discourse Research Articles

Gypsy pentecostal ascetism and body management

Pentecostal religious beliefs and practices consist of a complex set of strategies of transformation and personal renewal. Among other aspects of their experiences in the Church of Philadelphia, the social construction of Gypsy reality turns on the reform of the body. The present paper lies on aspects such as the body as object and subject of biopolitical and religious practices; the relationships between religious experience and body management; new social and community interactions; and autobiographical discourse as the ideological vehicle of personal conversion and transformation. All these processes reveal how social practices remake and shape bodily behaviour and its meaning. Pentecostal charismatic practices channel and express the community and individual demands of Church of Philadelphia converts, and represent central issues in the Pentecostal management of body and spirit. Our aim in this paper is to analyze the bodily practices which provide for believers´ transformation, and which shape community rituals and the congregation's interactions.

Expressing time in the autobiographical discourse of internally displaced persons (IDP) from Kosovo and Metohija

The oral corpus of recorded conversations with displaced persons from Kosovo and Metohija was formed in 2003. The transcript of a three-hour conversation with a female interlocutor originally from the environs of Suva Reka (Metohija) has been subjected to discourse analysis, an oft-used technique within linguistic anthropology. The focus of the contribution is on the interlocutor?s ways of expressing time. Her autobiographical discourse, as well as that of displaced persons from Kosovo and Metohija in general, shows that the war/bombing/displacement functions as a temporal divide, as a time marker in relation to which the past, present and future are expressed. The results of this pilot study into time expressions may be used as the starting point in studying the entire oral corpus.

Economy of objetcs. Objects as affective instance and economical value in globalized society

Pentecostal religious beliefs and practices consist of a complex set of strategies of transformation and personal renewal. Among other aspects of their experiences in the Church of Philadelphia, the social construction of Gypsy reality turns on the reform of the body. The present paper lies on aspects such as the body as object and subject of biopolitical and religious practices; the relationships between religious experience and body management; new social and community interactions; and autobiographical discourse as the ideological vehicle of personal conversion and transformation. All these processes reveal how social practices remake and shape bodily behaviour and its meaning. Pentecostal charismatic practices channel and express the community and individual demands of Church of Philadelphia converts, and represent central issues in the Pentecostal management of body and spirit. Our aim in this paper is to analyze the bodily practices which provide for believers´ transformation, and which shape community rituals and the congregation's interactions.

Through the I of the camera: Women and autobiography in contemporary European film

Given that contemporary European culture has been fundamentally shaped by issues of memory and history, and haunted by complex and problematic questions of identity, it is significant, if scarcely surprising, that European film production in the last quarter of the twentieth century should have been dominated by autobiographical discourse, by first-person memory narratives in which personal experiences of the past are articulated as a means of attaining a clearer understanding of the present. One of the most fascinating and least studied aspects of this phenomenon is the contribution that has been made by women filmmakers, and the purpose of this article is to provide a brief exploration of this issue. Situating its discussion within the wider parameters of the nature and generic identity of filmic autobiography, it will focus on a number of autobiographical films by women directors, in order both to evaluate the suitability of the genre to their discourse and to identify what insight such films reveal in relation to postmodern and postcolonial filmmaking in Europe.

History, Memory, and the Genre of Testimony

The essay focuses on the relationship between memory and history, which has changed in many ways under the impact of the Holocaust. Memory that had been discarded by historians as an unreliable and distorting source came to be acknowledged as an important factor in the reconstruction of past events, thus advancing from a rival to a partner of historiography. The question to be asked is no longer merely what has happened? but also how was the event experienced, how is it remembered and passed on to succeeding generations? The new mnemo-historical genre of video testimony is analyzed as an archive of trauma stories and set off against other forms of autobiographical discourse, on the one hand, and legal testimonies, on the other. It is argued that its specific value lies in forging a transgenerational link between the faces and voices of victims and those who listen to them, thus transcending the frame of family memory that, as a rule, fades after three generations.

Negotiated Memory: Doukhobor Autobiographical Discourse (review)

Negotiated Memory: Doukhobor Autobiographical Discourse (review)

Fictional Fossils: Life and Death Writing in Carol Shields's The Stone Diaries

[T]he moment of death occurs while we're still alive. Life marches right up to the wall of that final darkness, one extreme state of being butting against the other. Not even a breath separates them. Not even a blink of the eye. 1 C. Shields, The Stone Diaries (Toronto, 1993), p. 342. Further references will be given in the text, as page number. R egarding life and death as ultimate opposites, as two irreconcilable extremes, is a “distortion” 2 challenged by texts, and in particular by life writing. Jeremy Tambling calls all writing “potentially posthumous since it cannot have a punctual relation to a life of writing”. 3 Michel Foucault, too, in his essay “What Is an Author?”, emphasises writing's relationship to death, which he sees as twofold: on the one hand narrativity has always been “intended to perpetuate the immortality of the hero”; on the other hand, it is “designed to ward off death”. 4 In Ivan Callus' words, “to memorialise a life in writing […] is to play with death's deferral”: 5 the text assumes eternal life in the place of the protagonist or writer, and thus allows her or him to live on in their stories. (Auto)biography as a genre thus “challenges a life–death distinction” 6 by softening the delimitations between the two, breaking down the seeming opposition between life and death. Life writing preserves aspects of past lives that would otherwise dissolve without trace, but, in the act of preservation, it destroys the very features which make “life” into the activity of living 7 – so as text it constitutes a contradiction in terms: it extracts life from life in order to conserve it. This is the reason why “the language of monuments [and] epitaphs […] pervades biographical and autobiographical discourse and testifies to the tensions between a posthumous memorialisation of a life and the attempt to grasp the ‘life’ as it was lived.” 8 Laura Marcus quotes W. H. Epstein, who asserts that the “cultural function of biography” is to “turn life into text and text back into life”. 9 I. Callus, “Comparatism and (Auto)thanatography: Death and Mourning in Blanchot, Derrida, and Tim Parks”, in: Autobiografictions: Comparative Essays , ed. L. Boldrini & P. Davies, Comparative Critical Studies Vol. I, No. 3 (2004), p. 337. J. Tambling, Becoming Posthumous: Life and Death in Literary and Cultural Studies (Edinburgh, 2001), p. 8. M. Foucault, “What Is an Author?”, in: The Foucault Reader , ed. P. Rabinov (London, 1984), p. 102. Callus, p. 337. Tambling, p. 7. L. Marcus, Auto/biographical Discourse: Criticism, Theory, Practice (Manchester & New York, 1994), p. 100. Marcus, pp. 27ff. Marcus, quoting from W. H. Epstein, Recognizing Biography (Philadelphia, 1987), pp. 27ff.

Selfhood, Autobiography, and Interdisciplinary Inquiry: A Reply to George Butte

In my essay What Are We Reading When We Read Autobiography? I investi gate narrative identity, idea that what we are could be said to be a story of some kind. Attracted by neurologist Antonio Damasio's belief that self and narrative are deeply rooted in our lives in and as bodies, I explore possibilities of a neuro biological approach to self-representation in autobiography. Integral to conscious ness is reflexive awareness, sense we have that we not only participate in but witness our experience. As Walt Whitman puts it in Song of Myself, we are both in and out of game. We embody this doubleness of our first-person perspective in I-narrators who tell stories of our I-character selves. Yet neurologically speaking, free-standing observer/teller figure that is so central a feature of autobiographical discourse and life it describes cannot be extrapolated from general matrix of consciousness. There is no site-specific location for self in brain, no phrenological bump, no homunculus to house reality of our phenome nological experience of selfhood. To express this puzzle, disjunction between testimony of experience and reality of its neurological underpinnings, Damasio likens play of consciousness to a movie-in-the-brain. While consciousness inevitably generates the appearance of an owner and observer for unfolding in our heads, Damasio stresses that owner-observer figure is located within it seems to witness and not outside it (11). Damasio's movie metaphor suggests that distinctions we draw

La función del modo narrativo tú frente al factor autobiográfico (yo y él) en La muerte de Artemio Cruz

In Carlos Fuentes's work we can witness, as with many other Boom writers, the proposal of a novel innovation through subverting traditional writing genres. Specifically, in La Muerte de Artemio Cruz, there seems to be an opposition between the narrative voice Tú and the narrative voices Yo and Él in order to establish a destruction of the conventional autobiographical discourse that the last two represent. In addition, Tú openly denounces the chingada, an essential element of the Mexican social life which Yo and Él defend and justify, so Fuentes goes beyond the proposed stylistic goal. Otherwise, after Aura, where the author introduces the tú form for the first time, the complex plot of Artemio Cruz's agony results in the success of the New Latin American Novel.

Negotiated Memory: Doukhobor Autobiographical Discourse (review)

Negotiated Memory: Doukhobor Autobiographical Discourse (review)

Language and Identity Politics: The Linguistic Autobiographies of Latinos in the United States

Language and Identity Politics:The Linguistic Autobiographies of Latinos in the United States Lea Ramsdell One of the lasting effects of post-structuralism is our self-conscious use of language. Foucault's deconstruction of power-laden discourses, Derrida's insistence that language composes our consciousness itself, and Lacan's assertion that psychological development is predicated upon entrance into the "symbolic order" of language plant identity, language, and power firmly on even ground. The concrete results of this poststructuralist legacy are all around us in phenomena such as "politically correct" speech, bilingual education, and college level courses in Spanglish—as well as in the backlash against each of these linguistic movements. Language is identity and identity is political. This is the premise of the autobiographical writings Hunger of Memory by Richard Rodríguez, Heading South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey by Ariel Dorfman, and "How to Tame a Wild Tongue" by Gloria Anzaldúa. In these autobiographies, the description of language heritage is aligned with family and ethnic history. In each case, language development occurs in both Spanish and English from an early age. As adults, language choice becomes a political act for these writers, a means of positioning themselves in relation to power. Rodríguez, for whom monolingualism in English becomes a strategy for success in U.S. society, brings his personal experience to the political realm by promoting English as the sole language of public education in the United States. Dorfman, who also views English and Spanish as diametrically opposed, writes his autobiography in an effort to accept his "English side" by overcoming his association of English with North American imperialism. Anzaldúa, on the other hand, reflects on her linguistic background with a fine toothed comb, untangling the many strands [End Page 166] of English and Spanish that coexist in her multilayered identity. Nevertheless, while their politics may be widely divergent, all three writers view language as the very essence of their selves. They cannot conceive of telling their life stories without putting the spotlight on their linguistic affiliations. In recent studies on autobiography, the nature of the relationship between the self and language has become a point of contention among scholars. The traditional view of the autobiography holds that it is a genre in which the details of an independent self that transcends language are accurately recorded. According to convention, its claim to veracity and authenticity is precisely what distinguished the autobiography from other literary genres (Eakin, Fictions 185). Phillipe Lejeune has postulated that an "autobiographical pact," an implicit promise that the author, narrator, and protagonist be one in the same, is established between the writer of the autobiography and the reader (14). As the autobiography has risen to prominence in Western culture, together with the individualism that was the legacy of the Enlightenment, readers became trained to recognize and expect that the writer of an autobiography fulfill this "contract" (Eakin, Fictions 203). However, another branch of study on the autobiographical genre has questioned the "autobiographical pact" and has instigated a reversal in the perception of the self. Rather than assume that a life story is a non-fictional account of an autonomous being, some scholars investigate the manner in which the self is invented by the language that is used to narrate its life story. Paul DeMan's analysis of the genre has been particularly effective in revealing the fictitious nature of autobiography. For DeMan, the self is constituted by language and therefore cannot transcend it. His observation that "[. . .] autobiographical discourse tends to posit the self as the cause of language rather than its most profound effect" (Eakin, Fictions 191) underlines the impossibility of the genre to explain a "life" as if it were an entity under scientific study. DeMan's assertion that language precedes identity is also key to psychological approaches to the self that recognize that language is what grants humans "the self-reflexive dimension of their consciousness" and their ability to interact with others, thereby developing their own subjectivity (Eakin, Fictions 195). DeMan's critique has spurred interest in the role of language in creating a self via the autobiography. Paul John Eakin has carried this preoccupation with language one step further by...

Editor's Introduction

Editor's Introduction Ellen Cronan Rose This issue of jml introduces a new cover and interior design. It evokes, we think, the era of high modernism, a period jml (as the Journal of Modern Literature) was founded 35 years ago to celebrate and study. We like the old (is it a Royal?) typewriter—one that Virginia Woolf might have used in the afternoon to transcribe what she had written by hand in the morning when she drafted her novels and essays. We, editors selected in 2002 to replace our 20th-century predecessors, also like the crisp, functional sans serif font on both the cover and the interior of (dare we call it?) the 21st-century version of jml. Having indulged myself (and not bored you, I hope) with the rationale behind the new look of jml, I had better get on with introducing the contents of this special issue of the journal, devoted to autobiography and memoir. In 1993, at Drexel University, I taught a course called "Women's Autobiographies: Discovering/Inventing a Self" under the rubric of our upper division Women and Literature elective. That I was able to offer a course on that subject, with that subtitle, was owing to the work over the preceding decade of feminist scholars,1 building on deconstructionist and post-structuralist continental theory, who challenged the then-regnant theory that autobiography told the story of an exemplary great man, whose name signed to the manuscript attested to the truth of the story told therein, constituting an "autobiographical pact" between the writer and the reader (Lejeune 14). In the decade since I taught that course, both autobiographies and memoirs and scholarship on them have continued to proliferate, and this special issue of jml invites you to sample the work of a new generation of scholars who advance into the 21st century the post-structuralist challenge feminists issued at the end of the 20th century to understandings of autobiography shaped in the 1960s and 1970s by Georg Gusdorf, Philippe Lejeune, James Olney, and a few others. [End Page v] In particular, the first five essays in this issue of jml, although each focuses on a particular author and/or text(s), stake out new territory for autobiographical theory. Kalliopi Nikolopoulou reads James's classic tale, The Turn of the Screw, through the lens of autobiographical writing to show how James appropriates and deconstructs certain assumptions of the genre, thus anticipating and performing contemporary theorizations of autobiography. In Le grand incendie de Londres, the contemporary French poet and scholar Jacques Roubaud focuses on the destructive aspects of the relationship between writing and memory. By reading bodily metaphors of trace-making in this multi-volume work, Aleka Calsoyas shows that Roubaud's notion of the relationship between memory and writing both recalls and complicates the concept of the "trace" that Derrida develops through his reading of Freud. Despite many references in Beckett's texts that would seem to require autobiographical interpretation, Sarah Gendron suggests that his work is instead an exploration of the very notion of the self and its relation to writing. Thus, as she shows, his work enters into dialogue with postmodern theorists like Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze, who render problematic the relationship of writing to the written subject. Chloë Taylor Merleau presents a very strong case that her essay is not so much a study of Annie Ernaux (although it is that, too) but rather a groundbreaking examination of what Merleau calls "the confessional aspect of modern subjectivity." Finally, Janet Galligani Casey discusses one of the many popular women's magazines published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In The Farmer's Wife, a new form of self-narrative emerged in letters to the editor, in which women offered opinions on a variety of social issues and frequently shared their personal experiences. These letters, Casey shows, broaden the terrain of what we consider autobiographical discourse. Turning our attention to the body of autobiographical scholarship and criticism that has proliferated since Jane Tompkins published "Me and My Shadow" in New Literary History in 1987, Laurie McMillan demonstrates how Alice Walker incorporates performative elements into her autobiographical criticism, thus...

Book Notes

Book Notes Compiled and written byKen DuBois NegotiatedMemory: Doukhobor Autobiographical Discourse, by JulieRak (UBC Press,Vancouver, B.C., 2004. Photographs, notes, bibliography, index. 192pages. $29.95 paper) The firstDoukhobor immigrants arrived in Halifax in 1899as refugeesfrom religious perse cution inRussia and, theauthor contends, their community has resisted assimilation ever since. Rak shows how theDoukhobors, faced with widespread misunderstanding and resentment of theirculture,have used a variety of autobio graphical forms to successfullypass along tradi tions and beliefs to successive generations. Democratizing the Enemy:The JapaneseAmerican Internment, byBrianMasaru Hayashi (Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J., 2004. Notes, index. 339 pages. $35.00 cloth) Racism, wartime hysteria, and poor leadership areoftencited as thereasons Japanese Americans were removed from theirhomes duringWorld War II and held against their will in concentra tion camps. But BrianHayashi contends thatthe U.S. government was also acting on a long-term plan forlanddevelopment in the AmericanWest and theAmerican occupation of Japan. A Common Ground: ErbMemorial Union 1950to 2000, byAdell McMillan (ErbMemorial Union, Eugene, Ore., 2003. Photographs, notes. 718 pages. $31.99 paper) McMillan chronicles the history of the Erb Memorial Union at theUniversity of Oregon and itschanging student cultures.The building opened in 1950 but was in the planning stages forover twenty-five years, fueledby thenotion that itwould promote "an appreciation of the other fellow'spoint of view." Chiefs and Generals:Nine Men Who Shaped the American West, edited by Richard W. Etulain and Glenda Riley (Fulcrum Publishing, Golden, Colo. 2004.256 pages. Photographs, maps, bib liography, index. $17.95paper) The latestbook inRichard Etulain and Glenda Riley's Notable Westerners Series, Chiefs and Generals focuses on Indian and U.S. military figuresand the cultures around them.Nine his torianscontributedpieces on Chief Josephof the Nez Perces,Apache Chief Victorio, Ger?nimo, George Armstrong Custer, Lakota Chief Red Cloud, O.O. Howard, George Crook, Ranald Mackenzie, and Nelson A. Miles. Mar mes Rocksheiter:A Final Report on 11,000 Years ofCultural Use, edited by BrentA. Hicks (Washington State University Press, Pullman, Wash., 2004. Charts, tables,photographs, bibli ography. 466 pages. $65.00 paper) Excavation at the Marmes Rocksheiter tookplace over thirty years ago, but this report is thefirst detailed analysis readilyavailable. Also included is the storybehind the remarkable dig. Despite thediscovery of a human presence dating from early Holocene times, archaeologists had to race to complete theirstudybefore theareawas flooded, in 1969,by the opening of the Snake River's Lower Monumental Dam. Letters To theEditor: As a scholar who has spent the last eleven years collecting new data and critically analyz ing published documentary evidence on the public life ofMeriwether Lewis, I read with particular interest,David Nicandri's article, "The Columbia Country and theDissolution of Meriwether Lewis" (OHQ 106:1,Spring 2005). I Letters 517 ...

Cuando Frankenstein encontró a Dorian Gray: dandysmo, post-identidad y sujetos virtuales

The appearence and popularization of the Internet has created new forms of writing, that compel us to think anew about identity and subjectivity. Webjournals or blogs are specially interesting because they are a massive phenomenon that uses autobiographical writing in a peculiar way. These forms of writing stress a traditional paradox of the genre: the coexistence between a purpose of private, confessional and spontaneous writing and a public image, carefully built, as a result of its writing. The technology is new, but, in fact, the paradox is old. This paper tries to explore this old paradox, our eternal condition of cyborgs, our use of technologies in order to construct a public, unique and recognizable identity. In order to do so, I will try to show the virtual condition of any written individual "this issue has already been dealt with by autobiographical studies", focusing on blogs, and especially on concrete example (Lord Whimsy's Journal). I will pay attention to gender as a technology that constructs identity and, at the same time, is deconstructed by the autobiographical narratives analyzed. In short, I attempt to show that virtual and autobiographical discourse do not bring forth a new kind of subject but the permanence of an old phenomenon "clearly developed by dandyism, for instance": the use of technologies to re-invent, re-formulate and re-construct us as multiple, hybrid and mixed subjects.

Nackt wandern. Karin Strucks Klassenliebe im Bekenntnisdiskurs (der siebziger Jahre)

The essay evaluates Karin Struck’s autobiographical novel Klassenliebe as radicalization of the autobiographical discourse in the seventies, which on his part is understood as specific form of confessional literature. The analysis of the themes, forms and intentions of Klassenliebe points out that the text has developed the rhetorical technique of confessum further into the poetics of writing naked. This kind of poetics constitutes a model of reflection which makes a distinction between a (new) kind of literature for everybody and a (traditional) kind of literature for the happy few. While executing this distinction in a dynamic way, a specific form is being emerged, typical for the seventies. This form tries to link private life to politics.

"Blurbing" Biographical: Authorship and Autobiography

Especially with the growth of new media, and amid the boom in representations of self and life in literature and popular culture, questions of authorship continue to be keenly debated. This interest in the ways artists and consumers are positioned in relation to knowledge and creativity has been spurred by the increased attention given to notions of artistic origins and narrative ownership, particularly in recent autobiographical discourse. There is significant work encompassing the effects of scholarly criticism upon the figure of the author. Despite its public visibility, however, book publicity, and its particular significance to discussions of authorship, is one issue that has remained mostly unexamined. Such an examination unveils an interesting contradiction. At a time when two, or perhaps even three generations of literary theorists have primarily been raised on the notion that the biography of the author is almost irrelevant to the text, in the contemporary world of book publication and marketing, the author has if anything become even more crucial to a book's success. Such disparities between academic and commercial literary reception have of course been well noted over the years. Eric Homberger and John Charmley assert that "everywhere in academic life the subtle, [and] the not-so-subtle denigration of biography grows apace," as "influential voices tell us that the 'author' is dead, and that biographical study of a writer or artist is either irrelevant or not fully serious" (ix). Yet publishers and critics agree that, for better or worse, the production and popular consumption of life writing, and interest in the biographical details of contemporary authors, are experiencing a notable boom. As Hilary McPhee argues, "life-writing is now a profitable enterprise for publishers. The readership is growing all the time. First person narratives, especially those by 24-years-old footballers, sell much [End Page 806] better than novels" (4). There is little doubt that in the promotion of popular culture, "the personal" is profitable. Even in academic publishing, authors are increasingly being marketed by having prominent, professional photographs on their book jackets, or by making public appearances on talk shows, public panels, or conferences. As Paul John Eakin notes, it is very common for critics to be drawn into giving autobiographical accounts of their involvement in particular theoretical pursuits (xxiv). 1 And one of the most frequently asked questions at writers festivals is to what extent fictional works are autobiographical. Thus, in an age when writers and writing are commonly categorized according to fiction or non-fiction, gender, culture, age, and so on, by transgressing other genres autobiography as a literary form is finding itself more often than not implicated within theoretical discussions and popular culture critiques of literature. The significance of autobiography has in fact been a subject of much debate among literary scholars in recent decades, and Philippe Lejeune's "Autobiographical Pact" offers one explanation of how and why readers respond to autobiographical writing. The autobiographical pact involves the textual assertion that the author, narrator, and protagonist are the same. In making this self-reference, the author enters into an agreement with readers that they will be reading about an actual person whose existence is legally verifiable (Lejeune 11). The contemporary publishing industry is able to take this one step further by making public assertions that a text is autobiographical when publicizing it. Publicists and sellers of autobiographies agree that one of the keys to the successes of such texts is the connections they make between author and reader (see McPhee, Winters, and Gray). Autobiographies, according to popular discourse, offer insight into the lives of individuals (as community members). Their disclosures, interpretations, and records of experiences are thought to provide capital for readers to decipher their own life experiences. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson examine how life writing produces and reproduces discourses of community, arguing that "autobiographical narratives, their citation, and their recitation have historically been one means through which the imagined community . . . constitutes itself on a daily basis" (4). In the community that consumes autobiographical writing, how is the author positioned, and...

Jean Quigley, The grammar of autobiography: A developmental account. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2000. Pp. xiv, 232. Hb $49.95.

In The grammar of autobiography, Jean Quigley makes a claim that one often hears nowadays: that the self is constructed in autobiographical narrative discourse. Two dimensions of the work distinguish her analysis of narrative self-construction from many other treatments of the subject. First, she offers a genuinely interdisciplinary account, drawing on functional linguistics, theoretical and developmental psychology, and accounts of language development. Second, she studies a particular category of linguistic forms – modals – as the key to narrative self-construction.

"Carefully I Touched the Faces of My Parents": Bergman's Autobiographical Image

Despite the promise implicit in my title, which alludes to the films and texts of Ingmar Bergman, it is not entirely clear in what sense we may speak of cinematic autobiography. The process of writing an autobiography calls for a single author who produces a narrative account of his or her own life. As famously defined by Philippe Lejeune (1982), a "true" autobiography must have an author who bears the same name as the protagonist who is identical with the narrator of the account. While there has been much criticism of the apparently absolutist nature of Lejeune's paradigm, his basic contention, that the reader of an autobiography expects to find the type of identification he describes, seems to me pragmatically sound. And there are a number of important ways in which cinematic life-narratives disrupt traditional expectations of autobiography. First of all, film is graphic but not graphia, not writing. The use of the photographic, cinematic medium brings a host of new considerations to bear on life representations. Elizabeth Bruss, in her groundbreaking essay on film as autobiography, dwells on one of them: assuming that we are to identify the person directing the film with the subject of the autobiography, how can we understand that the person in front of the camera is identical with the person behind it? In textual autobiography, the pronoun "I" performs the magic of collapsing two bodies, that of a remembered child and that of the remembering adult, into one person. Cinematic autobiography necessarily creates a physical distinction between the narrating and experiencing selves. In the photographic medium, the body becomes the center of our attention, and the divorce between the directing and acting selves, though not visible on the screen, undermines the foundation of autobiographical discourse. [End Page 72] Further, the collaborative nature of cinema, with its cast of actors, cameramen, technicians, set designers, make-up artists, caterers, corporate or national sponsors, and so on, must inevitably disrupt the concept of the solitary autobiographer, confronted with the blank page, memories, and a subjective and singular vision of his or her own life. Not surprisingly, all of these objections to film as a vehicle for self-representation have been raised in a different context, in the debate over auteur cinema. Auteurism was first proposed as a requisite feature of cinematic art by the French journal Cahiers du Cinéma in the 1950s. There it was maintained that only the clearly recognizable fingerprint of a cinematic author (in most cases, the vision of a director) could elevate the popular movie to the status of art film. This theoretical move claimed the cinematic medium for the realm of high art, making it possible for the concept of artist as Romantic genius to migrate into new technological media. Concomitantly, the idea of a cinematic autobiographer became possible. Thus we saw the emergence of a cadre of directors--Godard, Truffaut, Fellini, and Bergman, for instance--who took their places as auteurs and proceeded in a number of their films to offer visions of childhood and adolescence, in some cases clearly marked (albeit through extra-textual indicators) as autobiographical visions. Autobiographical, perhaps--but can this be autobiography? Opponents of the auteur concept have regarded its inherent elitism with suspicion. This suspicion was fueled in part by questions about the propriety of subsuming the work of dozens (or hundreds) of individuals under the artistic imprimatur of one man (almost always a man), and obscuring the corporate or national underpinnings of cinematic production. It seems clear that if we are to regard cinematic autobiography as a possibility, we must come to terms with these objections as well. One constructive response, articulated already by Elizabeth Bruss and developed further by Susanna Egan, might be to imagine a new type of selfhood, a collaborative subjectivity (intersubjectivity) that would expand the genre of autobiography to include cinematic self-representation. It will be my contention in this essay that Ingmar Bergman...

Historia e identidad nacional en dos autores latinoamericanos contemporáneos: Rudolfo Anaya y Magali García Ramis

The article explores the use of autobiographical discourse to produce a narrative capable of formulating a national identity. It discusses the different strategies used by the main character of each novel to reach a cultural identity for them and their people in a social context alien to their reality, their search for a cultural identity in the midst of a disintegrating tradition, and the historical silences imposed by mainstream culture over Latino socieites in the United States.

Interactional Positioning and Narrative Self-construction

Many have proposed that autobiographical stories do more than describe a pre-existing self. Sometimes narrators can change who they are, in part, by telling stories about themselves. But how does this narrative self-construction happen? Most explanations rely on the representational function of autobiographical discourse. These representational accounts of narrative self-construction are necessarily incomplete, because autobiographical narratives have interactional as well as representational functions. While telling their stories autobiographical narrators often enact a characteristic type of self, and through such performances they can become that type of self. A few others have proposed that interactional positioning is central to narrative self-construction, but none has given an adequate, systematic account of how narrative discourse functions to position narrator and audience in the interactional event of storytelling. This article describes an approach to analyzing the interactional positioning accomplished through autobiographical narrative, and it illustrates this approach by analyzing data from one oral autobiographical narrative.