Conventions Of Autobiography Research Articles

Writing the celebrity pseudo-autobiography: hauntings in Ellis and Ellroy

Pseudo-autobiography is an intriguing yet underexplored genre in literature and media. Combining both fictional and truthful elements, it subverts notions of what is expected in conventional autobiography by privileging the fictional over the truth. While conventional autobiography has proved to be a popular genre among stars and celebrity authors, certain authors have instead used the pseudo-autobiography as a method through which to deconstruct their mediated persona and manufacture their own sense of self. Bret Easton Ellis's ‘Lunar Park’ and James Ellroy's ‘The Hilliker Curse’ are both pseudo-autobiographies that purposefully disrupt the conventions of autobiography in an effort to undo the public's construction of their celebrity personas. Through the lens of pseudo-autobiography, an author is able to deliberately deceive and confuse the reader by utilizing both fact and fiction to create a hyperreal autobiographical narrative. This paper discusses, with reference to ideas of testimony, truth and the autobiographical pact, how the pseudo-autobiography proves more useful than conventional autobiography for celebrity authors whose personas have been manufactured in the media. More so than conventional autobiography, the pseudo-autobiography functions as a platform on which authors can construct their own hyperreal identity in an effort to undermine the public's creation of their identity.

Introduction:

Introduction:

Long Distance Performance: Autobiography and Globalization

Time was a defining preoccupation in the art of the 1960s and 1970s. In retrospect, much of the work from that period seems painfully slow, out of step with the speed of images in contemporary culture. This obsession with duration was often articulated through self-representation: appointments with the video camera that were exceptionally long; or frequent and punctual, daily photo sessions that documented the passage of time through the mundane details of everyday activities. The early works of artists as diverse as Bill Viola, Martha Rosler, and Tehching Hsieh are situated engagements with the camera. While the location is often secondary, these temporal studies had a geographic or architectural frame, be it a city, a house, an apartment, or a cage. The work of On Kawara and Bas Jan Ader, two artists of the same generation who share a similar preoccupation with time, is a significant departure from time-based art of that period. Whereas much of the work from the 1970s located temporality in a space or a body, Kawara’s and Ader’s practices take up time through travel, challenging conventions of autobiography by measuring their lives through movement. Their autobiographical and performative works engage travel as a means of articulating the collision between two distinct temporal paradigms: that of the individual subject, and the real time, networked temporality of communications and television that were becoming manifest in the 1960s. The televised events of the late 1960s set up the idea of the global as one that is intimately linked to real-time technologies. Liveness established its authority, not solely as the instrument of broadcast television but as a new paradigm of temporality that offered the possibility to bridge physical distance, conceptually closing the gap between disparate places. The imperatives of live culture that were established by the late 1960s prompted a conceptual shift in terms of identity governed by information and networks. The slow itinerant processes that Ader and Kawara took up in the mid-1970s served to open up the paradoxes of a global subject at a moment when live television had shifted from a studio-based production to a journalistic enterprise, the window on the world that gained authority from manufacturing liveness. In the strict sense, neither artist produced work live or in real-time, although their investigations can be read against the grain of mediated temporality, interrogating the vicissitudes of

'C'est pas du tout ce que tu penses': Improvisational Narrative Strategies in Ruppert and Mulot's La Maison close

Improvisation and performance are not traditionally associated with the comics form, but experiments with them are increasingly found in the area of alternative, or smallpress, comics. This essay analyses one example of improvisation in comics, Florent Ruppert and Jérôme Mulot's La Maison close. The work was created by Ruppert, Mulot and several other artists for the 2009 Festival International de la Bande Dessinée (FIBD), in Angoulême, France. It was produced by cartoonists who improvised a narrative within a general framework provided by Ruppert and Mulot: a series of drawn settings representing a bordello. The resulting story played with conventions of autobiography, as worked out in alternative comics over the past couple of decades. La Maison close was first presented to the public at the FIBD, then was put online for a year, and now has been published in book form. The contrast between the book and the first version demonstrates the degree to which the original was innovative: the printed volume smoothes out the original, improvised story, forcing it into a more conventional plot.

A expansão da representatividade do "eu" no discurso autobiográfico de Jamaica Kincaid

Esse trabalho examina textos da escritora afro-caribenhaamericanaJamaica Kincaid – At The Bottom of the River, AnnieJohn, Lucy, The Autobiography of My Mother – como exemploslimítrofes do gênero autobiográfico, em que a representaçãodo “eu” se expande para representar o “nós”. Considerando oslimites entre autobiografia e ficção e como a representação doeu em romances autobiográficos opera a distância dasconvenções da autobiografia, analisa-se o relacionamento mãe-filha extremamente traumático e doloroso que perpassa ostextos como uma analogia da relação colonizador-colonizado.A construção de uma nova identidade livre de qualquerautoritarismo, no conjunto das narrativas, comparado a umbildungsroman de caráter mítico, simboliza a recompensa finalda busca.

More Than One Way to Tell a Story: Rethinking the Place of Genre in Native American Autobiography and the Personal Essay

More Than One Way to Tell a Story:Rethinking the Place of Genre in Native American Autobiography and the Personal Essay Tyra Twomey (bio) Native American autobiography is a problematic genre for historians and literary scholars alike for a number of reasons. First, there is the persistent question of authorship: because so many early Native autobiographies were, to varying degrees, recorded, edited, rearranged, and coauthored by whites, some scholars contest the idea that they be studied as samples of Native American writing at all. Next is the cultural specificity of the Western understanding of "autobiography," arguably a wholly foreign concept to the traditions of story-making characteristic of Native groups. The differences between Native autobiographies and their Western counterparts raise an array of problematic questions, not only about the conventions of autobiography as a literary genre, but also about the notions of self-hood and identity that characterize the people who write autobiographies. A case has been repeatedly made by literary scholars for the inability of Native American writers to conceive of themselves independently of their notions of tribal identity, for example. Other similar derivations argue for Native views of the passage of time, personal success, cause and effect, the nature of history, and meaning-making as differing from Western perceptions, all in ways said to be observable through analysis of these written records. Some writers seem content to draw conclusions about Native peoples based on such observations; others, frustrated with the degree of textual variation and authorial complexity these writings offer, have wondered whether Native autobiographies should be considered a different literary genre entirely. [End Page 22] Although I begin with an investigation of some of these complexities as they currently influence, and arguably impede, literary study of Native autobiographies, my contention is that this last question is both the most promising and the most emblematic of the basic assumption clouding the work of those scholars who have tried for years to unravel the mysteries of Native American autobiographical writing. In order to understand these early writings it is necessary not only to separate them from the conventional expectations of the generic Western autobiography but also to distinguish between literary and rhetorical notions of genre itself. Two Conceptual Approaches to Genre Literary genre, following the classification system established in Aristotle's The Poetics, has been traditionally understood as "a formalistic classification of types of texts" (Devitt 697). In application, although this is an oversimplification, a text belongs in a genre both because of how it is like other texts in that genre and because of how it is unlike texts in other genres.1 To question the inclusion of a particular work in the category of "autobiography," or to examine the ways in which its textual features distinguish it from other autobiographies, is to examine the work through the lens of this literary view of genre, one which leads directly to the kinds of broad cultural assumptions made above: if these autobiographies are not like other autobiographies, it must be because their authors are not like other authors. Current rhetorical study, however, tends to approach genre in a very different way. In a rhetorical understanding of the term, according to scholars in the branch of rhetoric now calling itself "genre theory," genres are not forms at all but rather "typified rhetorical actions based in recurrent situations" (Miller 31), where "recurrent" describes similar situations arising under similar circumstances and inspiring similar responses, and the forms produced are the result of the rhetorical action best suited to the situation, becoming typified by repeated application. Following this definition, a rhetorical understanding of autobiography can only be gained through an [End Page 23] understanding of the situations that prompt a writer to tell the story of his or her life. And if a piece of writing does not seem to be an autobiography, what needs to be known to understand the piece as it is, is not how it differs from things that do seem to be autobiographies but what rhetorical context called it into being, and what purpose was served by the rhetorical action the written product represents. The Question of Authorship By definition, in literary studies, an autobiography is a reflexive...

Zora Neale Hurston and the Post-Modern Self in Dust Tracks on a Road

In last thirty-five years, Zora Neale literary grown from obscurity in which died to status of major American author. However, despite her substantial body of work, revival of her relies largely on Their Eyes Were Watching God, her second novel, which provoked far more scholarly writing than all of other books combined.(1) Nonetheless, other books are interesting and merit serious consideration too, and current literary theory offers new and different ways to appreciate them, especially her 1942 autobiography Dust Tracks on Road, and its complex representation of its subject. autobiography received some of most negative criticism of any of her books and for this reason serves as an interesting case in point about canon. warmest admirers have criticized Dust Tracks. In his biography of Hurston, Robert Hemenway calls Dust Tracks a discomfiting which has probably harmed reputation (276); Alice Walker called Dust Tracks the most unfortunate thing Zora ever wrote (xvii)(2); and Nellie McKay includes Dust Tracks among most problematical of autobiographies by black women (179). However, post-structuralist theory can help readers to appreciate Dust Tracks-and for some of very reasons that it previously received criticism. Three complaints recur most in critics' ambivalent response over years to autobiography, and they no doubt account for much of book's relative scholarly neglect: its apparent unreliability, its inconsistency or fragmentary nature, and its seemingly assimilationist racial politics. Although these deficiencies exist in other texts, including Their Eyes,(3) their presence in Dust Tracks is particularly problematic. The complaints about Dust Tracks are valid, especially those about its unreliability and its fragmentariness, if one insists on conventional notions of consistency of autobiography and of individual. But Dust Tracks is never consistent: not with itself, not with conventions of autobiography in general or those of African American autobiography, not with facts of life, not with what probably were its author's real about racial politics.(4) The individual persona who is both subject and object of Dust Tracks on Road is not homogeneous, unitary, and autonomous protagonist of conventional autobiography but heterogeneous, fragmentary, and inextricably and in various ways part of culture and society in which she lives. So as to correspond better to persona represented in and by text, Dust Tracks resists two cardinal conventions of autobiographical representation: traditional autobiographical structure and formal organization, and focused projection of autobiographical persona. Instead of satisfying these conventions, Dust Tracks on Road focuses on life of Zora's imagination, on psychological dynamics of her family, on retelling community stories, on depicting character of certain friends, and on ambiguous pronouncements about race. In so doing, Dust Tracks portrays an individual persona that resists reduction to coherent, consistent unity and instead portrays person of many moods who is in tension with world in which she moves.(5) In calling Dust Tracks unreliable, critics are arguing that does not represent herself truthfully and that book is deceptive and unfaithful representation-although it may be best fiction Zora Neale ever wrote (Turner, Introduction iv). According to Maya Angelou, It is difficult, if not impossible, to find and touch real Zora Neale Hurston (xi-xii) in Dust Tracks. For Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Hurston's autobiography singularly lacks any convincing picture of her own feelings (My Statue 78-79; To Write 172-73). And Mary Helen Washington accuses Dust Tracks of at all times deftly avoiding self-revelation (19-20). …

Coleridge's Biographia : When is an Autobiography Not an Autobiography?

Critical discussion of Coleridge's Biographia Literaria has been dogged by questions about its form and genre since the book was first published in 1817. This article aims to answer these questions by considering the historical conditions under which the work was published; certain distinctive features of Coleridge's project; and the conventions of autobiography at large.

The Face in the Mirror: Villette and the Conventions of Autobiography

The Face in the Mirror: Villette and the Conventions of Autobiography