Autobiography Criticism Research Articles

“The Blow That Comes from Within”: Reading Alcoholic Denial in Fitzgerald's “The Crack-Up” and Other Autobiographies

Abstract This article argues that the relative dearth of critical analyses on Fitzgerald's autobiographical essays generally, and the three “The Crack-Up” pieces in particular, results from tensions in understanding alcoholic denial in a genre already fraught with self-invention and self-evasion. It offers a reading that addresses these tensions head-on by examining the way Fitzgerald codes his denial in these “confessional” efforts. By looking at metaphor and elision, the article argues that Fitzgerald's refusal to confront his alcoholism in his nonfiction is not just public performance, as some critics have argued, but reflects instead an addict's denial both internal and external. By using frameworks from addiction studies and autobiography criticism, its reading of Fitzgerald expands to discuss a heuristic of reading addicts' autobiographies in a larger context. The article navigates the two polar readings of addiction, the romantic genius and the moral failure, to understand the complexities of the link between Fitzgerald's writing and Fitzgerald's biography.

The Impress of Memory on the Postmodern Self in Audre Lorde Bell Hooks and Rebecca Walker

The question of Self and memory is inextricably linked to the question of the representation and representability as well as to the uniqueness or iterability of the sense of the Self. Criticisms through the times suggest thinking of the sense of Self in terms of one's memory for it--not how faithfully you represent yourself, but rather how accurately you remember your past Self and how much you know about your present Self. Memory is the key element in determining the production of an autobiographical work, it is the author's memory and his sense of Self which determines how accurately he will transpose his life in front of us and correspondingly the one that decides whether autobiography will take the form of a memoir, a semi-fictional autobiography, or a completely fictionalized version of one's life. The relationship between Self and memory has initially been considered by John Locke in his "Essay Concerning Human Understanding"(1698). In his view, a person's identity comprises of whatever a person can remember from his or her past. Consequently, what the person does not remember is not part of his identity. Differing from the other critics, Locke believed that identity and selfhood have nothing to do with continuity of the body, they are rather an extension of memory. The paper delves into the postmodern autobiographical writings of three women-of -color including Audre Lorde, bell hooks and Rebecca Walker .The autobiographies in this study share the arrangement of events in the form of quilts made of accidentally stitched patches, the presentation of life as a fictional narrative and the treatment of the forgotten past as a remembrance and a revisiting. While Audre Lorde s and bell hooks accounts bring an emphasis on myth,(hooks on the construction of a dreamscape and Lorde on the arrangement of the psychological quilt of life), Rebecca Walker asserts that wishful forgetting and the conditioned amnesiac status contribute to the preservation of the fluid character of memory, its organization into dualities and the increased impermanence of the autobiographical account. The reliability of memory, together with the accuracy of life writing determines the classification of a narrative as memoir, autobiography or fictional autobiography. The autobiography criticism corpora are the ones to question the mnemonic truth and the reconciliation of the forces of signification.

Post-ing Lives

This special issue of Biography may seem exotic. It engages with a series of concepts that are unusual in studies of life narrative: beginning with zoegraphy and ending with the anthropocene. It turns to scenes of auto/biographical expression that may seem bizarre: animalographies, bioart, narratives of chronic pain, autobiogeography. It embraces creatures, critters, produsers, and avatars. Its critical canon is not traditionally associated with studies of life narrative: Bruno Latour, Deleuze and Guattari, Cary Wolfe, Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, Jane Bennett, Neil Badmington, Judith Butler, Giorgio Agamben. The critical issues, concepts, and contexts we engage with in this issue, however, are anything but exotic. To the contrary: what it means to be human is a question that is fundamental to autobiographical narrative, and embedded in the history of autobiography in western modernity. Around posthumanism an assemblage of work is emerging that is important for critical work on life narrative now, and the essays in this special issue suggest why this is so.

Bureau of Missing Persons: Writing the Secret Lives of Fathers (review)

Reviewed by: Bureau of Missing Persons: Writing the Secret Lives of Fathers Molly Pulda (bio) Roger J. Porter . Bureau of Missing Persons: Writing the Secret Lives of Fathers. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2011. 202 pp. ISBN 978-0801449871, $35.00. The seed of Roger J. Porter's Bureau of Missing Persons might have been planted within the epilogue of his previous book, Self-Same Songs (2002). That auto biographical coda, entitled "Unearthing the Father," chronicles a trip to his father's alma mater, the University of West Virginia, more than four decades after his father's death at age forty-eight. In this passage Porter describes discovering a yearbook photograph of his father in the campus bookstore: "Now I looked at my young father, his lost youth meeting my aging face, and I felt as if he were a beloved subject, but one unfamiliarly shy, even fawnlike, not quite certain of himself, a haunting and somewhat haunted figure that I, detective of missing persons, had brought to light" (235). The title of Porter's new work of autobiography criticism nearly repeats that self-appellation as a "detective of missing persons." In Bureau of Missing Persons, Porter abandons the autobiographical codas of Self-Same Songs and focuses exclusively on others' work: autobiographies by adult children who narrate their investigations of their fathers' secrets. As Porter sets out in his introduction, "How the child learned about the father's covert life, the effect it had on the inquirer's own sense of self, and the way the autobiographical writing investigates and reveals the entwined identities of parent and child are my subjects" (1-2). The first of these subjects, the autobiographer's quest for concealed information, is most strongly emphasized in Porter's analysis, which is deeply human and attuned to the affective patterns of familial life. Ours is an age in which secrets comprise a popular and public drama—Oprah Winfrey's 2011 "family secret" episode drew her highest television [End Page 531] ratings in six years (the secret: a long-lost sister), and the political mores of the WikiLeaks scandal topped headlines for the greater part of 2010. Porter taps into the uncanny juxtaposition of the unknown within a family setting. While identifying room for further analysis—comparatively little has been written about secretive mothers, he contends—Porter focuses exclusively on elusive fathers and the children who turn to autobiography as a means to seek them out. "Why are fathers the overwhelming majority of the narrative subjects in this study?" he inquires in his introduction. "Coincidence? Hardly. Unconscious choice by me, a male writer interested in how men have lived furtively and surreptitiously? Quite possibly" (3). Porter's narrowed scope, however, does leave out some maternal secrets that have dominated contemporary autobiography—including follow-up memoirs by two of his chosen authors, Mary Gordon and Alison Bechdel, who devote subsequent volumes to their mothers' stories. And Maxine Hong Kingston, Art Spiegelman, and Colette (all cited in Porter's study) are arguably more interested in their mothers' secret histories than their fathers'. Emerging naturally from his paternal focus is one of Porter's central arguments: the provisionality of auto/biographical identity. For not only are the autobiographer's identity and relationships subject to change over time, but the father's identity is also mutable, endlessly revised as the son or daughter learns more about him. Porter orients his analysis toward the emotional and ethical consequences of uncovering a father's secrets and unveiling them in print. For him, the autobiographer's motive for writing is the most practical ethical measure; an ethical autobiography attempts to understand and empathize with a father, not to blame him or seek revenge for his secrecy. Writers like J. R. Ackerley and Mark Kurzem (revealing a father's homosexual history and hidden Nazi connections, respectively) succeed in "achieving filial closeness and understanding" with the father (32); Mary Gordon and Bliss Broyard (uncovering a father's concealed ethnicity and race) immerse themselves imaginatively in a father's past, seeking to understand his perspective and motivations long after his death. Porter's analysis frequently draws upon the work of Nancy K. Miller, whose 1996 book Bequest and Betrayal: Writing...

Recollecting, Repeating, and Walking Through: Immigration, Trauma, and Space in Mary Antin's <i>The Promised Land</i>

I was born, I have lived, and I have been made over. Is it not time to write my life's story? I am just as much out of way as if I were dead, for I am absolutely other than person whose story I have to tell. --Mary Antin, (1) With these lines, Mary Antin begins her best-selling 1912 immigrant autobiography and establishes immigration as an experience akin to death and resurrection. language of new beginnings is familiar to readers of bildungsroman, immigration narratives, and autobiographies. (1) However, what is remarkable here is Antin's emphasis on death, rather than birth, of her identity. Antin alludes to losses and psychological ruptures that divide her life before and after immigration journey--between living in an eastern European shtetl and in urban Boston, between subject positions of immigrant and American, and between temporalities of past and future. Immigrant autobiographies are commonly structured around this rupture. Yet while critics have usually focused on Land's rosy-hued vision of America as a paradigmatic example of assimilation narrative, this essay shows significance of incommensurable, and hence traumatic, break created by immigration and Antin's attempt to create psychological coherence out of that trauma through related practices of autobiographical narrative and spatial orientation. Published at height of America's great immigration boom, (2) tells a now-familiar story through its text and photographs. Due to worsening economic and political conditions for Jews in Russian territories, at age thirteen Mary Antin immigrates to Boston with her mother and siblings, where they join Antin's father, who had come to America three years prior. family struggles to gain an economic foothold in US, moving frequently in search of cheaper rents and better business opportunities. Owing to her intellectual abilities, immature physical development, and her father's favoritism, Mary goes to school instead of work; her older sister is not so fortunate. (3) As is typical in immigrant autobiographies, Antin emphasizes how she distinguishes herself academically, winning a scholarship to a prestigious private high school. In book's final chapter, Antin triumphantly recounts going to Barnard College, earning money from writing, and learning to speak without an accent. autobiography thus contrasts political, economic, and social restrictions that defined life for Jews in eastern Europe with seemingly unlimited opportunities in United States for those with wit and will to succeed. America is Antin's Zion, Promised Land of autobiography's title, (4) and Antin is heir of ages, ideal citizen worthy of American freedom and opportunity (Antin, Selected Letters 55). (5) In many ways, reinforces idea that America is truly democratic and meritocratic, a place where every immigrant can create his or her own destiny. This assimilationist arc has been primary focus of criticism of autobiography in recent decades. Mary V. Dearborn is typical when she claims that The seems to lack any alternative, protesting voice (42). Sarah Blacher Cohen is more damning; she asserts that the autobiography lacks depth. conquest it describes seems too rapidly won and too unqualifiedly successful.... [I]t certainly prevented her from becoming a profound writer of Jewish-American literature, or for that matter, any kind of literature (31-32). Michael P. Kramer, a more sympathetic reader, nonetheless insists that for Antin, the process of Americanization is wholly unproblematic (128), and that the assimilationism of is more characteristic of American Jews than critics care to admit (123). Matthew Frye Jacobson, however, reads Antin's assimilation as a rebuke to contemporary critics of immigration--nothing less than the core principle in a quiet politics of antinativism (206). …

Trauma as Site of Identity: The Case of Jeanette Winterson and Frida Kahlo

Taking as a starting point Dominick LaCapra and Roger Luckhurst's respective critiques of the traumatic foundations of identity and traumaculture, this article explores the intersection between trauma, identity and art in the work of Jeanette Winterson. In 2005 Winterson wrote two art reviews on the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo (1907–1954). Van der Wiel argues that the combination of topics that emerge here—celebrity status, autobiography and the body in pain—reflect Winterson's outlook on being a female artist in the twenty-first century. For Winterson, the patriarchal label of autobiography is closely related to the cult of celebrity, focusing on personal, preferably traumatic, facts rather than on women's artistic achievements. Van der Wiel problematises Winterson's substitute term ‘authenticity’, however, arguing that in its narrow referentiality it cancels out the important work done by feminist autobiography criticism in the 1980s and 1990s regarding the liberating potential of blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction in women's autobiographies. She subsequently turns to Winterson's fictional work to see how this compares with the critical notions located in her non-fictional writing. Through a close reading of Winterson's autobiographical debut novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985), and the more recent novels The.PowerBook (2000) and Weight (2005), van der Wiel posits that trauma has become an integral part of Winterson's identity, fostered by recurrent self-narration. Rather than simply reading her work as symptomatic of personal trauma, however, she argues that Winterson has embraced the prevailing identity narrative engendered by traumaculture—an identity rooted in a conception of trauma entailing an abortive process of working through and acting out. She thus proposes to read Winterson's work, and in particular the recent (re)turn to an ‘authentic’ account of her traumatic childhood within her fiction, as symptomatic of traumaculture.

Speaking Volumes about Auto/biography Studies in Canada

THE TWO VOLUMES, Autobiography in Canada: Critical Directions, edited by Julie Rak, and Tracing the Autobiographical, edited by Marlene Kadar, Linda Warley, Jeanne Perreault, and Susanna Egan, demonstrate the vigour of contemporary auto/biography criticism in Canada. Published in Canada by Wilfred Laurier University Press in 2005, each book contains twelve essays by Canadian scholars, with an editorial introduction.' Although the only two authors to contribute to both collections are leading Canadian auto/biography scholar Susanna Egan and her respected younger colleague, the late Gabriele Helms, the citations and cross-references convey the sense of a lively and interactive scholarly community. While reading these essays on contemporary Canadian autobiography I attended a conference on Art and Authenticity, at which a fascinating discussion followed a paper on the recently discovered Mungo (School of Humanities, Australian National University, 2 November 2006). Traces of ancient people, men, women, and children, on the move, going about their daily life, were accidentally preserved they crossed a muddy area about twenty thousand years ago, in the form of four-hundred-and-fifty fossilized human footprints in the remote Lake Mungo region of Australia. Yet an art historian pointed out, the footprints are of a quite different order to ancient handprints on the walls of caves in Australia and elsewhere, where the hand was deliberately placed against the rock surface to make an imprint. The constitutes an act of communication with aesthetic implications, whereas the footprints are an incidental, though extraordinary, capturing of passing people with a quite different purpose, travel for hunting, ceremony, or some other reason. The autobiographical act is more like the than the fossilized footprint. The question, Footprint or handprint?; was on my mind I considered these Canadian essays, many which owe a strong debt to the collection edited by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Getting a Life: Everyday Uses ofAutobiography (1996). Smith and Watson themselves introduce the image of the fingerprint to indicate the vast possibilities of their project, without making a clear distinction between the print an accidental by-product of an individual going about daily life and the deliberate mark that an individual chooses to make upon a surface: We could have included discussions of bumper sticker subjects, of identity clothing, of hair. Once we got started on this project, almost everything presented itself implicated in the choosing, imposing, evading, or negotiating of an identity. Fingerprints were everywhere (18). Autobiography in Canada, edited by Julie Rak, examines how the field of auto/biography is developing specifically in Canada, discussing Canadian auto/biography only, whereas the essays in Tracing the Autobiographical range well beyond Canada's borders to consider life-writing from Palestine/Israel, works by Australian Aboriginal writers, and gypsy Holocaust texts, well emerging forms of life-writing on the internet. The essays in Tracing the Autobiographical all represent the work of female academics identifying feminist scholars. In introducing the essays in Autobiography in Canada, Julie Rak also gives prominence to feminist scholarship in autobiography criticism, although the critical perspective is somewhat broader and essayists include both male and female scholars. Rak leans more toward a footprint than a handprint conception of autobiography in that she sees more potential in cultural than in literary studies for productive development in Canadian autobiography studies. She also advocates continuing work in feminist autobiography criticism, work on trauma and culture, and on non-literary and mass-marketed texts. Rak sees the study of non-fiction discourse in auto/biography criticism as an effective way to engage with ideas about truth, representation and power in a broader social sense. …

“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...

Counterfeit Perversion:Vita Sackville-West'sPortrait of a Marriage

A standard formula in criticism of autobiography is to contrast autobi? ography as accurate recording of a self to autobiography as a slippery mask. Critics easily pinpoint early criticism, such as Philippe Lejeunes or Elizabeth Bruss's work, which sensibly equates the genre with an historical account ofthe self, a record of subjectivity, and a truthful presentation of facts. Those equations posit autobiography as the literary genre most closely linked to experiential fact, citing a reader's expectation of truth and understanding of contract.1 In contrast, by analyzing the role of textual construction (often through a realization of the influence of gender on presentation of the self), autobiographys shifting I?created, mirroring, and doubling?becomes apparent. Leigh Gilmore's mark of the I, Paul De Man's revolving door, Jean Starobinski s double deviation, and Susanna Egans mirroring all meta? phorically represent the shifting textual I. Authenticity ofthe self, it seems, when it depends upon a text, can never be secure. Gilmores work on trauma bridges these two standard polarities when she theorizes autobiography as characterized less by a set of formal elements than by a setting in which a person places herself or himself within testimonial contexts as seemingly diverse as Christian confession, the scandalous memories ofthe rogue, and the coming-out story in order to achieve as proximate a relation as possible to what constitutes truth in that discourse (3). The autobiographer writes a self in terms of that discourse, seemingly historical and truthful, with the self necessarily fictionalized to fit the available rhetorical setting. Usually, one would suspect, an autobiographer would choose a dis? course that allows him to express himself most fully. When that supposition

Como debajo de un vidrio: Rafael Alberti and the Autobiographical Act

It is my intention in this article to draw attention to the often undervalued autobiographical writings of the Spanish poet and dramatist Rafael Alberti (1902–1999), focusing specifically on his first libro de memorias, La arboleda perdida. Drawing on recent seminal criticism of autobiography as genre by John Paul Eakin and James Olney, amongst others, I will attempt to analyze some of the implications of biography for the writer and to focus on the conflict between truth and memory. I will also examine the narrative techniques employed by Alberti in the construction of an autobiographical self.

Becoming and Be/Longing: Kate Bornstein's Gender Outlaw and My Gender Workbook

It is perhaps only fitting that one of the key tenets of autobiography criticism at the dawn of the new millennium—that we become subjects through the workings of constituting social order within which, however, we can still exercise agency and self-determination—should echo the teachings of the ancients. A Midrashic commentary of the seventh century has it that a man is called by three names: one given him by his father and mother, one that others call him, and one that he calls himself.1 Here are two contemporary autobiographical articulations of this logic of self-naming. neither man nor woman, affirms Michael Hernandez in short self-portrait included in Leslie Feinberg's TransLiberation: Beyond Pink or Blue, just am (76). And in her Foreword to the collection Boys Like Her: Transfictions, Kate Born stein reflects on the pain she would have been spared if, as youngster, she could have simply told the world: 'I'm girl, but I'm boy, I am' (11). The texts by Hernandez and Bornstein foreground issues of vital interest to contemporary autobiography studies: the existential necessity of having sense of self—of affirming am—and the function of self-narration as medium of/for such self-creation (Eakin 46); the range of culturally and his torically specific vocabularies of the self through which subjects are con stituted (Bjorklund 7); and the possibility that subject so constructed

What's The Use?: Critical Theory and the Study of Autobiography

In recent years, theoretical work on the criticism of autobiography has greatly accelerated. Some of this work has been generated by a study of autobiography itself, but much of it has come from work in contemporary critical theory. Theorists have begun to pay close attention to autobiography for the questions it raises about referentiality and about the nature of the literary subject. As a consequence, structuralist, deconstructive, psychoanalytic, Marxist, and feminist critical theories have begun to have a profound impact on the criticism of autobiographical literature.