Autobiographical Pact Research Articles

“Lebensmärchen”: Goethes Dichtung und Wahrheit als poetischer und poetologischer Text (review)

Reviewed by: “Lebensmärchen”: Goethes Dichtung und Wahrheit als poetischer und poetologischer Text Catriona MacLeod Gabriele Blod, “Lebensmärchen”: Goethes Dichtung und Wahrheit als poetischer und poetologischer Text. Würzburg: Königshausen and Neumann, 2003. 335. pp. Borrowing her title from Goethe's 1811 reference to the first books of his autobiography as "Lebensmärchen," a comment that is far from isolated among [End Page 223] Goethe's remarks on Dichtung und Wahrheit, Gabriele Blod argues in her excellent study that it is the product of a sustained literary co-operation between the genres of autobiography and fairy-tale. Both genres, as she points out, emerge as increasingly "literary" over the course of the eighteenth century, and interrogate, though from different standpoints, the following dualisms subtending Goethe's autobiography (as of course its title evinces): orality versus textuality, truth versus fictionality, femininity versus masculinity. Blod's central concern is to reread Dichtung und Wahrheit as a thoroughly poetic text, not as a poeticized rendering of a life. If Dichtung und Wahrheit began to receive sustained critical attention only in the 1970s, this is, as Blod shows, the outcome of a shift in definition of the autobiography itself, as a fictional rather than a factual genre. Blod's investigation opens with a chapter reviewing the history of criticism of autobiography in relation to questions of truth and authenticity, a tradition that has assumed Dichtung und Wahrheit's paradigmatic status. This book situates itself against earlier readings of the work that take referentiality for granted, such as that by Wilhelm Dilthey, and also takes issue with Philippe Lejeune's definition of the "autobiographical pact" made by an author with his or her reader to secure the book's meaning in the world. Lejeune anchors referentiality in the self-naming by the author: but Blod brilliantly shows the fragility of the pact by demonstrating the strategic evasiveness of self-naming (along with other apparently stable references such as dates, places and historical figures) in Dichtung und Wahrheit. As she points out, Goethe only inserts his name once, in the middle of the book, when it appears in a comic verse by Herder that identifies the origins of the name as "von Göttern," "von Goten," or "vom Kote." Another significant name for the work is Goethe's grandfather's name, Textor, with its connotations of weaving and textuality. (Blod herself refrains from referring to the autobiographical persona as Goethe.) Rather, in response to the school of autobiographical criticism inspired by Derrida, Blod argues that across several different levels of this work the notions of truth and authorship are under fictional construction: Goethe's is a poetic challenge to the reader, not a pact. Reviewing the place of the fairy-tale in Germany around 1800, Blod emphasizes the identity of the Kunstmärchen with aesthetic reflexivity. It is the fairy-tale, she concludes, that opens up the possibility of reading the autobiography as a fictional text. A particularly rewarding section of the book, which draws productively on Gérard Genette's narratological concept of the paratext, is devoted to Goethe's open-ended and reversible title; to the preface, in which Goethe stages himself as both sender and recipient of a letter occasioning the autobiography; and to the mottos. Close readings of several fairy-tale incursions into the text follow, with a focus on the role of the body, art, and ideology. The inset fairy-tale "der neue Paris," putatively the creation of a precocious seven year old, receives deserved attention and is positioned as Goethe's response to the contemporary debates on mythology. Far from a straightforward appropriation of the Homeric narrative, Blod suggests, the story of the "new Paris" blends elements of antique myth, biblical narratives, and oriental fairy-tales with references to Werther and the Farbenlehre and to artistic disagreements (with Heinrich von Kleist). Elsewhere, personal and historical events in Goethe's life are also conjoined under the sign of developmental phases termed "Märchen" ("Knabenmärchen," "Jünglingsmärchen," etc.) A second focal episode in the text, the Sesenheim idyll, is described in Dichtung und Wahrheit as a "Märchen" transforming art (The Vicar of Wakefield, [End Page 224] "der...

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Victorian Life Writing

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Victorian Life Writing

The Adventures of the Epic and Novel in Ahmadou Kourouma's Writings

Study demonstrates that be it the search for the Absolute or the quest of the total self, Kourouma’s narrative is always in and by itself a trip, as textual ity and as existential drama of a consciousness of lack. By its composition, the narrative is circular, going from the narrator’s i and coming back to it, in a perpetual movement of writing on itself. The autobiographical pact of Kourouma is a thematic one and therefore illustrative of life in Africa. The phantasmagoric pact creates a distance between the writer and the subject of his text to allow the symbols to convey more than the momentary dream’s drama. The textual reality is better suited to the desire to construct this what-i-am. Past and present form but one body to evoke a unique pres ence. The lived is at the service of the self image. The epic, metonymy of the tradition, in which the writer is immersed, anonym among anonyms: tradition, metonymy of the past only possible cover in this undifferenti ated plural, and this tearing of time and space, of uproar and number. The novel, metonymy of present; the present, metonymy of disruptions linked to colonization. The oxymoron is the trait par excellence of these wranglings and ambivalences. it comes from a contradictory perception of the world, undermining the principles of ordinary logic that sustain it.

Mi nombre es Nadie. Exilio y autobiografía en Tomás Eloy Martínez

Starting from Philippe Lejeune's definition of the 'autobiographical pact', this article aims to explore how this convention is inevitably broken in a writer's condition of exile. We have chosen an autobiographical essay by the Argentine writer Tomás Eloy Martínez, 'El lenguaje de la inexistencia' ('The language of non-existence') to study the consequences of such a situation. First, we analyse Lejeune's theories of autobiography. Second, we consider the vanishing of the self in the forced situation of exile. In the third part of the article, we demonstrate through textual analysis how, in the case of an exile, the precepts established by Lejeune are broken in three instances: the proper name, the 'I' (the first person) and the textual contract formerly established between the author and the reader.

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...

Authors Inc.: Literary Celebrity in the Modern United States, 1880-1980 (review)

Reviewed by: Authors Inc.: Literary Celebrity in the Modern United States, 1880-1980 Suzanne del Gizzo Authors Inc.: Literary Celebrity in the Modern United States, 1880-1980. By Loren Daniel Glass. New York: New York University Press, 2004. Paperback, 242 pp. $20.00 Authors Inc. by Loren Glass is an ambitious book that provocatively and deftly tackles the question of literary celebrity in modern America. Glass's project emerges from the convergence of several recent but distinct trends in literary scholarship: the rapidly expanding area of cultural studies known as celebrity studies, the on-going critical effort to recover the complexity of the relationship between modernism and mass culture, and the extension of gender studies into an active engagement with questions of masculinity. In Authors Inc., Glass yokes these different lines of study together in order to argue that "celebrity authorship in the United States was a resolutely historical phenomenon that began with the rise of mass culture and the first crisis in masculinity and ended with the emergence of postmodernity and the second crisis of masculinity in the late twentieth century" (23). In recent years, there has been a spate of academic work on celebrity, including Richard Dyer's Stars, David Marshall's Celebrity and Power, and Joshua Gamson's Claims to Fame, but not one of these studies has focused on literary celebrity. The reason for this oversight, according to Glass, is that [End Page 117] writers, unlike movie or TV stars, "have sustained an ethos of individual creative production over and against the rise of [the] cultural industries in which they nevertheless have had to participate" (4). In other words, agency—specifically the complicity with or resistance to celebrity—is a thornier issue when it comes to writers. Glass attempts to address this problem of agency in his decision to work primarily with autobiographical texts. Using a capacious definition of autobiography based on Philippe Lejeune's notion of the "autobiographical pact," Glass claims that such texts mark the point of contact between the public and the private life of an author and thus reveal his or her attempt "to reappropriate the public discourse that determines the authorial career" (7). This emphasis on autobiographical texts allows Glass to explore authors' anxieties about the way their identities and work circulate in public spaces against the social and cultural institutions and formations associated with modern celebrity. The most compelling part of Glass's thesis, however, is his assertion that literary celebrity is fundamentally linked to masculinity. He anchors this claim primarily on the work of Andreas Huyssen, whose article "Mass Culture as Woman"1 made it a truism among scholars in the field that high modernism with its emphasis on stable ego/textual boundaries and its reliance on a restricted field of cultural production was gendered male, while mass culture with its tropes of crowds and floods and its association with the seemingly inscrutable logic of mass consumption was gendered female. Launching his argument from this foundational understanding of the gendered dynamic between modernism and mass culture, Glass argues that masculinity and masculine posturing became a kind of armor in which celebrity authors steeled themselves from the corrosive effects of a feminized mass audience with its mob-like fluctuations in preference and its irrational assessments of value. For Glass, literary celebrity in the United States "super-sized" the preoccupation with masculinity that was already stitched into the rhetoric of the modernism/mass culture debate. Although the chapters are ordered chronologically and work together to develop Glass's claim about the necessarily masculine nature of modern literary celebrity, each of the six chapters also presents a self-contained argument generally focused on one literary figure. Glass begins by documenting the rise of a mass market for literature, and the challenges this new market posed for traditional notions of literary production and authorial identity. Artfully juxtaposing the contemporaneous autobiographies of Henry Adams, who [End Page 118] was an ancestor of a founding father and a literary elitist, and Edward Bok, an immigrant who rose to fame by editing the Ladies Home Journal, Glass reveals the way gender is woven into discussions of literary production and consumption. He then proceeds to explore writers...

Jurisdictions:I, Rigoberta Menchú,The Kiss, and Scandalous Self‐Representation in the Age of Memoir and Trauma

Previous articleNext article No AccessJurisdictions: I, Rigoberta Menchú, The Kiss, and Scandalous Self‐Representation in the Age of Memoir and TraumaLeigh GilmoreLeigh GilmoreDepartment of English The Ohio State University Search for more articles by this author Department of English The Ohio State UniversityPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Signs Volume 28, Number 2Winter 2003 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/342594 Views: 252Total views on this site Citations: 13Citations are reported from Crossref © 2002 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Taylor Brown "How do you Criticize a Life Story?", Contemporary Kanata: Interdisciplinary Approaches To Canadian Studies , no.11 (Sep 2021): 1–6.https://doi.org/10.25071/2564-4661.21Amy L. Hubbell, Sol Rojas-Lizana, Natsuko Akagawa, Annie Pohlman Acknowledging Trauma in a Global Context: Narrative, Memory and Place, (Nov 2020): 1–12.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52056-4_1Olga Michael Reading Phoebe Gloeckner's A Child's Life and Other Stories at the Time of #MeToo, Life Writing 16, no.33 (Aug 2018): 345–367.https://doi.org/10.1080/14484528.2018.1507416Olga Michael The other narratives of sexual violence in Phoebe Gloeckner’s A Child’s Life and Other Stories, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 9, no.33 (May 2018): 229–250.https://doi.org/10.1080/21504857.2018.1462223Olga Michael Graphic Autofiction and the Visualization of Trauma in Lynda Barry and Phoebe Gloeckner’s Graphic Memoirs, (Jun 2018): 105–124.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89902-2_6Michelle Dicinoski Narrating from ‘Nowheres and Notimes’: Tense, Parataxis, and Trauma in Kathryn Harrison's The Kiss, New Writing 10, no.11 (Mar 2013): 99–110.https://doi.org/10.1080/14790726.2012.707215Julie Rak Memoir, Truthiness, and the Power of Oprah, Prose Studies 34, no.33 (Dec 2012): 224–242.https://doi.org/10.1080/01440357.2012.751260Albert Braz The Fictional Autobiographical Pact: Dunstan Ramsay's Poetic Autobiography of Magnus Eisengrim, University of Toronto Quarterly 78, no.44 (Oct 2009): 1000–1011.https://doi.org/10.3138/utq.78.4.1000Roberto Avant-Mier, Marouf A. Hasian Communicating “Truth”: Testimonio , Vernacular Voices, and The Rigoberta Menchú Controversy, The Communication Review 11, no.44 (Dec 2008): 323–345.https://doi.org/10.1080/10714420802511192Julie Rak Pop Life: An Introduction, Canadian Review of American Studies 38, no.33 (Dec 2008): 325–331.https://doi.org/10.3138/cras.38.3.325Annie Pohlman Testimonio and Telling Women's Narratives of Genocide, Torture and Political Imprisonment in Post-Suharto Indonesia, Life Writing 5, no.11 (Apr 2008): 47–60.https://doi.org/10.1080/14484520801902332Brenda Daly Body Work in Janice Williamson's Memoir Crybaby!, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 20, no.22 (Dec 2017): 170–194.https://doi.org/10.1080/08989575.2005.11949336Leslie Roman Ghostly evidence: Official and structural registers of voice, veracity, avarice, and violence in the "Rigoberta Menchú controversy", International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 16, no.33 (May 2003): 307–359.https://doi.org/10.1080/0951839032000086727

"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...

Coordinated Lives: Between Autobiography and Scholarship

Autobiography is usually thought of as a solitary endeavor, like crossing ocean in a rowboat. Philippe Lejeune's well-known definition of autobiog raphy as a retrospective prose narrative written by a real person concerning his own existence, where focus is his individual life, in particular story of his personality, in which the author, narrator, and protagonist . . . must be identical, emphasized individualism of genre and difficulty of conceiving of as a collaborative project (Auto biographical Pact 4, 5). As Lejeune continued his exploration of genre, however, he came to realize importance of texts that could not be fitted into this definition, such as ethnographic narrative and ghost-written celebri ty memoirs.1 Other critics, too, have come to question autobiography's illu sion of self-determination, as Paul John Eakin has called it (43), and to underline degree to which autobiography is an inherently social act, in that an individual's narrative is dependent on other individuals, as David McCooey has written (46). Some autobiographers themselves have also chal lenged notion that a single ego must be at center of such a text: Car olyn Steedman's Landscape for a Good Woman interweaves her own story with that of her mother, and Luisa Passerini asserts that she could only give shape to her own story in conjunction with her effort to recapture expe rience of student generation of which she had been a part (174-75). Despite these theoretical and practical efforts to relativize autonomy of autobiographical authors and subjects, most discussion has continued to deal with texts which can be read as though they had a single dominant nar rator, even if their process of composition raises problems about authorial authority and point of view, and if their content stresses connections between author/narrator and other people whose lives figure in

Footprints of the Fugitive: Slave Narrative Discourse and the Trace of Autobiography

The fugitive slave narratives that were published between 1760 and 1865 concern the past sufferings, escape, and freedom of a former slave. 1 Although they are currently vital to the revision of historical knowledge regarding American slavery and the slave community, they can also be used to revise the fundamental rules and assumptions which constitute the limits and functions of autobiography. That is, although the narratives are considered "autobiographical," the theories with which we understand autobiography are only problematically useful for understanding these historical texts. Historians have found that fugitive slave narratives are essential for understanding slave experience, yet the narratives resist the representational function of writing with which autobiography theory has constructed the genre's availability to historical understanding. 2 This study brings critical theories about writing and signification to bear upon the language and readings of selected fugitive slave narratives to examine how autobiography theory is implicated in the reproduction of historical and cultural beliefs about writing, representation, and identity. The fugitive slave narratives often resist such beliefs, and therefore highlight the paradoxical and problematic use of autobiography to understand experience, and the use of autobiography theory in the context of historical life writing. This examination of the fugitive slave narratives' resistance to autobiography theory seeks to expand the current field of knowledge about life writing, which is possible when we examine the extent to which slave narratives prefigure post-modernism's trace of the lost subject. The subject of autobiographical writing--the life or identity of the author--forms a fundamental orientation for autobiography theory. In order to establish the grounds for understanding autobiographical writing, theorist Philippe Lejeune has identified a "contractual obligation" for the genre. Yet slave narratives resist such formalized contracts through discursive [End Page 215] manipulations distinctive to the historical contexts within which they were written. The contractual obligation is Lejeune's "autobiographical pact," which he says is "the affirmation in the text of [the author's] identity, referring back in the final analysis to the name of the author on the cover" (14). The proper name of the author, according to Lejeune, refers "not to a person, [but to] a person who writes and publishes . . . straddling the world-beyond-the-text" (11). The name on the text's cover, which is also the name behind the "I" of the autobiographical narrative, seals a contractual obligation between the writer and the reader. I cite Lejeune's theory for its "quasi-legalistic language of contracts, rights, obligations, promises, expectations, and pacts" (Olney, "Autobiography" 17-18). Such legalistic language foregrounds the problematic historical position of the fugitive slave narratives, and reveals the texts' paradoxical position as autobiographies. For in the case of fugitive slave narratives, the "autobiographical pact" is a contractual obligation that cannot be upheld. Moreover, if the "life" of autobiography, its "bios," is a reader's realization of the writer's "consciousness, pure and simple," then the "atemporal . . . vertical thrust from consciousness down into the unconscious" produces relative degrees of depth in the constitution of autobiography as a genre (Olney, "Some Versions" 239). The initial plunge occurs upon the surface of the proper name. Slave narratives, however, repeatedly refuse the contractual obligation. The name on the cover may not be the same as the "author's," or even the text's protagonist. And in the case of slave narratives, the proper name--of critical importance to Lejeune--is most often the patronymic of a slaveowner. The proper name of the fugitive slave is rarely the same as the name of the text's "I," and it is usually a name which does not seal an autobiographical pact, but a bill of sale. For this reason fugitive slave narratives can tactically manipulate a reader's interpretation through assertion of multiple names and multiple identities. A clear illustration of slave narratives' tactical manipulation of the proper name occurs in the Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789). The problem of...

"Vielleicht ist unter allen Masken, aus denenman wählen kann, das Ich die beste" Über dieEntstehung einer Legende auf der Grundlage einer Autopbiografie: Alfred Anderschs Kirschen derFreiheit

With his autobiography Die Kirschen der Freiheit, in which he describes his desertion from the Wehrmacht in Italy in 1944, the German author Alfred Andersch (1914–1980) established his reputation as an antifascist writer. Nevertheless, as we know by now, the authors behaviour during the naziperiod was much more ambivalent than was generally assumed on the basis of this autobiography. This article reconsiders Die Kirschen der Freiheit with this ambivalence in mind and, proceeding from Philippe Lejeunes concept of the autobiographical pact, tries to explain the misconceptions behind its reception over the years.

Class in the discourses of Sindiwe Magona's autobiography and fiction

The origin of the tendency for class factors to be masked by the discourse of race in recent autobiographies by black women can be traced to the 1970s and the reversal, in Black Consciousness thinking, of the hierarchical binary of apartheid. This masking is evident at the level of experience in Sindiwe Magona's autobiography—at the level of discourse it continues as, writing in the 1980s, she retells her life. Magona's narration of selfhood is, however, comparatively conscious of the discursive foundations of subjectivity. Given the power of this discourse to conceal as well as to reveal, the functioning of autobiography as a source of ‘history from below’ becomes questionable and it is suggested that the autobiographical pact, as a reading pact, may mean that a writer like Magona is effectively more free to represent the experience and meaning of class through her fiction than in her autobiography.

Identity Politics and Confessional Acts: Suzanne Voilquin's Souvenirs d'une fille du peuple

WOMEN IN FRENCH STUDIES Identity Politics and Confessional Acts: Suzanne Voilquin's Souvenirs d'unefille du peuple If, as William Spengemann asserts, "the self is a hard ground to plough" (xiii), then to this newcomer, the field of autobiography is yet more obstinate and fertile. I will not attempt here a discussion of "this gerne which is not one"; rather, I will situate Suzanne Voilquin's memoir in the framework of the social production of memory and identity. In Souvenirs d'unefille du peuple ou la Saint-Simonienne en Egypte, first published in 1866, Voilquin both recounts her Saint-Simonian "vie apostolique" and presents a frank account of her experience as a working-class woman in a bourgeois, capitalist world. From the very title of the memoir, Voilquin wears her marginal status as a badge: not only is she a "fille," she is also "du peuple," and one of those feminist "SaintSimoniennes " to boot. Identity—or the creation of the self—is clearly at stake in Voilquin's Souvenirs. As opposed to Leslie Rabine's interpretation of Souvenirs as structured around an overlapping of the reader-writer, motherdaughter , and doctor-patient relations,1 I will be studying Voilquin's autobiographical narrative through the lens of confession. As it is presented in Souvenirs d'une fille du peuple, the act of confession serves as a model of reading, of narrating, and, in the larger picture, of organizing social relations. Voilquin chooses this confessional mode not only to present her life story, but also to re-fashion the "autobiographical pact" in order to accommodate women's stories. And although the memoir follows a rather conventional style, Voilquin's challenge to both the social contract and the autobiographical pact is anything but conventional. But before turning to Voilquin's Souvenirs, I will first determine the differences between confession and contract, and examine the role confession played in the Ecole Saint-Simonienne. The model of confession serves to convey Voilquin's experience and to position the reader and the writer in a non-contractual bond. When I refer to "contract," I refer both to the social contract—or the political fiction detailing the individual's entry into society—and to the autobiographical pact—or, as Philippe Lejeune would have it, the implicit agreement between the reader and the writer to a "commitment to telling the 'truth,' use of ?,' etc." (130). Both compacts, or agreements, presuppose the ability to contract, which in turn already presupposes an autonomous (male, bourgeois) subject.2 I am not suggesting that women are by "nature" not autonomous, but rather that they are perceived as such, and therefore construed as unable to contract. Sidonie Smith comments that according to the ideology of "western selfhood," "the essential self is ... a 'free' agent, exercising self-determination over meaning, personal destiny, and desire. Neither powerless nor passive, it assumes and celebrates agency" (8). Although Lejeune assures us that he chose the word "pacte" more for its romantic than its political resonance, the romantic and the political are 55 WOMEN IN FRENCH STUDIES not so easily disentangled, since both the autobiographical pact and the social contract are predicated on an ideology of the self, on the myth of the autonomous subject. The autobiographical pact mirrors the social contract: the reader enters into an agreement with the writer, just as an individual enters into an agreement with society, through mutual recognition and implicit approval of certain laws and conventions. If the "pacte autobiographique" structures the presentation of the self through the form of contract, what happens to voices that are by law unable to contract? The Civil Code of 1804 constructed women as legal minors, outside the social contract and unable to represent themselves. Voilquin neatly evades the form of contract (and its bourgeois liberal overtones) by appropriating the form of confession. Whereas the bourgeois public sphere endorses liberty, yet reserves natural rights for white, property-owning men, every race, class, and gender has access to the confessional. According to its traditional definition, confession is a sacramental act, in which the priest gives pardon in exchange for the narrative of sins committed. Confession rehabilitates the sinner, and marks the penitent's re-entry into if not...

Touching the World: Reference in Autobiography , and: The auto/biographical I (review)

RESPONSES AND REVIEWS 261 PAUL John Eakin. Touching the World: Reference in Autobiography. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992. 249 pp. $29.95. LiZ Stanley. The autolbiographical I. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1992. 289 pp. £35. 816.95 paper. In die recent history of the dieory of autobiography, it is possible to speak of two important periods. The first was marked by the "naive" referential approach, when autobiography was seen as a factual genre where the autiior was telling of his or her life from a subjective but sincere point of view. The model for this approach is of course Rousseau, but more recently it is represented by die "first generation" of autobiography theorists—Pascal, Gusdorf, Olney, and Lejeune— who among themselves represent a rich variety of theoretical orientations. The second period was brought about by the poststructuralist revolution, which made suspect all the elements of the autobiographical pact: autos, bios, and graphein, that is, the self, die life, and die writing. In its extreme form, we can only have a text which has no relationship with any kind of "external" reality or real events and in which die audiorial self is purely fictional. Thus there is no referent and no representation, and both die autiior and die reader are free to impute any signification and truth value to any statement or person in the text. Here die theoretical references include Barthes, Derrida, and Foucault, as well as Rorty, Austin, White, and Carr. It is difficult to say to what extent autobiographical theory has really absorbed the second period. At least feminist autobiography has adopted diis position quite wholeheartedly, but one can perhaps say that any self-respecting theorist in the field has had to modify his or her own positions because of this assault on the basic tenets of autobiographical writing. On the other hand, it is difficult to point to any actual autobiographies which would be adequate firom this point of view. In fact, even the most central figures of the poststructuralist theses —Barthes , Foucault, or feminists—have in different ways sinned against their own precepts, so that one could speak of a fascination with die forbidden fruit. Recently we have seen a new period, a new orientation emerge: those who wish to resurrect the specificity of autobiography as a genre, still acknowledging to some extent the pertinence of the poststructuralist/deconstructionist critique, but rebelling against it especially in the absolute denial of referentiality. To put it simply, if there is no "my life" that the autiior of an autobiography can tell about, there is no autobiography. But as both autobiographies and biographies continue to flourish, the life must be there, too. The two books reviewed here, Paul John Eakin's Touching the World and Liz Stanley's The autolbiographical I, are good examples of this new orientation, albeit from very different perspectives. Eakin is a theorist of literature who has written several important books on autobiography, discussing in particular the relationship of fiction and autobiography. Liz Stanley is a feminist social historian and sociologist, who has herself written several biographical studies and is especially well acquainted with feminist autobiography and biography (she prefers the term auto/biography, to cover both possibilities). She moves with equal ease among high literary as among unpublished, "ordinary" autobiographies, while Eakin is a purely literary dieorist of autobiographies. 262 biography Vol. 18, No. 3 Both books are extremely interesting and fascinating texts, reflections of the current turmoil in the writing of autobiography and die demise of the poststructuralist orientation in autobiography. In literature theory, it is now commonplace to denigrate the influence of Derrida, Barthes, and Co. as a fashion long since overcome, but it is clear that dieir effects have been much deeper and more permanent than a mere fashion, and diat most of the work related to any kind of qualitative sociology, ethnography, or social history is now more or less informed by dieir conceptual world. They give us, as it were, a set of new stills (to use the photographic imagery of Liz Stanley) of the relatively slow-moving film of autobiography as a genre. Paul John Eakin's Touching the World begins with Bardies and his paradoxical denial of referentiality, which...

Assimilation Blues: Maureen Howard's Facts of Life

Narratives of exile and immigration arguably bring into sharper focus than other autobiographical modes concept identified by Philippe Lejuene as the autobiographical pact.(1) One reason why this may be case is that there is an implicit struggle in autobiography, an application to self of sense of confrontation and critique that is applied to objective world in Realist fiction. The typified and challenged in both Realist fiction and autobiography can, very generally, be called change. And in age of capitalism, which also happens to be age when change has become structural principle of both social reality and models of identity to which that reality gives rise, no change is more comprehensive than that articulated by immigrant experience. Its comprehensiveness may be appreciated not only with regard to actual immigrant generation itself, but also in view of its lingering effects on subsequent generations. Quite apart, therefore, from its numerous artistic excellences and from fact that its combination of detail and insight make it a unique record of Irish-American of embourgeoisement,(2) Maureen Howard's Facts of Life(3) functions as a meditation on mercuriality of an identity trained in, but not conditioned by, a strong awareness of ethnicity. The roots of tension between training and self-awareness that pervades Howard's novels are explored in a way that reveals limitations of identity conceived of solely in terms of its ethnic origins and problematic shapelessness of identity conceived of without an adequate negotiation of those origins. The vehement panache of Maureen Howard's Facts of Life is not just a matter of style, a matter of applying cosmetics purchased through a Smith education and in academia (if life is what institutions offer academic wives). The ability to put on makeup is certainly there: I wish someone had noted for - it is pure Chekhov - my grandfather's feelings when he bought property on which he was to build his grandiose house from Mr. and Mrs. William Abbott Parrott, faded Yankee gentility for whom his mother had served as Irish maid. (97) More often than not, though, art's sake is beside point. A sardonic, satirical, self-mocking tone announces its impatience with high gloss and finishing school and assumption that one of objects of is syntactical etiquette. Time and again social surface doesn't hold good. lace mantilla lay gently folded in a puff of tissue paper: it was finer than veils parish girls would wear (always, always finer, single tedious note of our supposed distinction). white gloves buttoned at wrists with pearls. These clothes would never be worn. I picked up a grapefruit knife and tried to commit suicide. (34) This, from later life, of a literary luncheon: There was something pure in utter filth of experience (117). Writing, here, is not an apology for order. Its force and conviction derive from its resistance to conferred codes, a resistance an more winning for attempts to identify with those codes - whether they are attitudes (posture, deportment and declamation as budding daughters of middle-class Bridgeport should embody them) or as a faculty spouse: My education and career were sham intentions, smart mid-century substitutes for embroidery work and social graces of an earlier time (73). Is there an alternative to belonging? Not on your life. But it seems that there is also no alternative to pressures that ostensibly belonging brings. The question forever naggingly remains, belonging to what? Maureen Howard organizes her life and its facts in three categories - culture, money and sex - one of effects of which is to remind reader of race, class and gender. …

La Ficción Del Narrador Superestrella EnHistoria De MaytaDe M. Vargas Llosa

AbstractHistoria de Mayta by Mario Vargas Llosa is concerned with historical discourse and, more specifically, with that of contemporary Peruvian political history. It thus positions itself within the reflective tradition surrounding the role of the intellectual in Latin America. This article proposes an analysis of the author's discourse, the presence of which appears as an underlying text camouflaged by the devices of the narrator. The novel, ostensibly the biography of the trotskyist militant Mayta as presented by the narrator-journalist, transports the reader to the plane of the author who, in creating the biography of Mayta, comes to reveal his personal intellectual history. The “autobiographical pact” demands that the author, the narrator and the character appear under the same name; however in this novel this is not the case. Alternating between the voice of the character Mayta and that of the narrator-journalist allows the author's discourse on Latin America to emerge simultaneously with his conce...

Seeing Through Rousseau

Seeing Through Rousseau Peggy Kamuf T O SEE, OR RATHER TO SHOW SIGHT in its proper light is a fairly good description of what Rousseau says he is up to in the Dialogues. Whereas the Confessions proposed to “ montrer à mes semblables un homme dans toute la vérité de la nature,” Rousseau juge de Jean-Jaques takes this project either one step further or one step back, depending on how you look at it. In his preface to the Dialogues, he writes: “ il fallait nécessairement que je dise de quel œil, si j ’étais un autre, je verrais un homme tel que je suis.” 1Between the seemingly straightforward “ Voilà l’homme que je suis” of the Confessions and this otherwise contorted demonstration of the Dialogues, there had inter­ vened the general failure of Rousseau’s contemporaries to see the man he had taken such pains to show them .2It is easy to suppose how (unable logically to conclude that the fault was his, that he had obstructed public view rather than set himself in plain sight), Rousseau had to diagnose an obstruction, malformation or distortion within the very faculty of sight he had counted on to apprehend his true nature. After all, there is little point in showing someone what to see—“ un homme,” for example—if that person does not even know how to use his own eyes. The experiment of the Confessions had shown that, with few exceptions, Rousseau was surrounded by unsighted creatures who persisted in “ seeing” not the man who had placed himself squarely in the light but only dim figures in the shadows with which the light contrasted. The Dialogues, therefore, would undertake to show nothing more nor less than sight, which is in itself nothing. The text is not a “Lettre sur les aveugles” but a “ Lettre aux aveugles” and therein lies the considerable if not impossible dilemma it has posed for itself. In one sense, one can say that Rousseau never resolved this dilemma; that is, he never figured out to whom he could show this letter once it was written. Addressing it first as he did to divine providence only confirmed the dilemma without resolving it. In another sense, however, the terms in which the dilemma is posed—the visual terms—are themselves made obsolete or at least irrelevant by the performance of the Dialogues. 82 W in t e r 1988 K a m u f Saying what you See This performance requires a division of the “je” among at least three positions: “ il fallait nécessairement que je dise de quel oeil, si j ’étais un autre, je verrais un homme tel que je suis.” There is the “ je” who says “ What if I were another?” ; there is then this other “je” who offers his judgment on the man he sees; and there is finally the man like me, “ un homme tel que je suis.” These are the three positions implicit in every socalled autobiographical writing—The Confessions, for example—where writer, narrator and principal character of the narration are presumed by the conventions of what Philippe Lejeune calls the autobiographical pact to be identifiable by the same nam e.3 But the Dialogues depart from Lejeune’s schema in a manner which is finally troubling for any effort to define the limits of the genre because, precisely, the text does not break with or abandon the convention; on the contrary, it re-marks that con­ vention and exploits it to the limit. In so doing, the Dialogues demon­ strate the essentially fictional resource at the source of autobiography, the fiction of “ si j ’étais un autre” that is conventionally covered over and forgotten by convention. The programming sentence of this text, however, remarks the fiction not only in a thematic mode but also in a grammatical one. Its syntax assigns not three but four positions to “je,” although the second two are logically identified with each other: “ . . . de quel œil, si y ’étais un autre, je verrais. . . .” The fact that there is a surplus articulation of the “je” should not be overlooked because it is this surplus, precisely, of a neces­ sary articulation (“ ilfallait que je dise” ) over...

Autobiography in the Third Person

HE IDEA Of an autobiography in third person may seem as paradoxical as that of a biography in first person. In both ]cases there appears to be a contradiction between saying he when one is I, and when one is he. This contradiction can only be reconciled with reading contract [contrat de lecture] of genre in question if one sees it as afigure.2 I propose to examine some of these figures, because they enable one to study the use of personal pronouns in autobiography, as Michel Butor would put it. I have chosen marginal, somewhat exceptional situations, in which an author pretends to speak about himself as someone else might, by using third person, or by inventing a fictive narrator to present author's point of view or tell his life story. Naturally, this takes place within framework of a text controlled by an autobiographical pact [pacte autobiographique].3 The discussion will therefore center on modern or contemporary French works. I could have added older texts to this corpus, or modern texts corresponding to different horizons of expectation. For instance: historical memoirs such as those of Caesar, religious autobiographies in which writer styles himself the servant of God, or seventeenth-century aristocratic memoirs like those of President de Thou; or highly coded short genres such as preface, thirdperson publisher's blurb, or biographical notice composed by author, all of which are related to publishing practices. While occasionally referring to above kinds of texts, I have focused on modern autobiography in order to give greater coherence to my study, for use of figures depends on reading contract and on genre's horizon of expectations. The sophisticated games, by means of which modern autobiographers express identity problems or seek to charm their readers, are revealing kinds of borderline cases. They allow us to bring out what is