Description
Autobiography is a long-established literary modality of self-exposure with commanding works such as Augustine’s Confessions, Rousseau’s book of the same title, and Salvador Dalí’s paradoxical reformulation of that title in his Unspeakable Confessions. Like all genres with a distinguished career, autobiography has elicited a fair amount of critical and theoretical reflection. Classic works by Käte Hamburger and Philippe Lejeune in the 1960s and 70s articulated distinctions and similarities between fiction and the genre of personal declaration. Especially since Foucault’s seminal essay on "Self Writing," self-production through writing has become more versatile, gaining a broader range of expression, diversifying its social function, and colonizing new media of representation. For this reason, it seems appropriate to speak of life-writing as a concept that includes but is not limited to classic autobiography. Awareness of language’s performativity permits us to read life-writing texts not as a record but as the space where the self is realized, or in some instances de-realized. Such texts can build identity, but they can also contest ascribed identity by producing alternative or disjointed scenarios of identification. And they not only relate to the present, but may also act upon the past by virtue of their retrospective effects in the confluence of narrator and witness.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Joan Ramon Resina
Jean Améry: Between Critical Reason and Despair
Enzo Traverso
The Novel as Life Writing: Fiction and Testimony in Jorge Semprún and Imre Kertész
Antonio Monegal
Life – Death – Writing: Robert Walser’s Snow Images
Martin Roussel
Assumed Identity: Writing and Reading Testimony through and as Anne Frank
Laurie McNeill
Autobiographical Inscription and the Identity Assemblage
Sidonie Smith
Lines of Flight: Self-Writing and the Assembled Body in Kirmen Uribe’s Bilbao-New York-Bilbao
William Viestenz
How to Stay Alive in Your Own Story – Ulysses in Dante and Homer
Jan Söffner
Life in the Dream: Freud’s Self-Display through Screen Cultural Memories
Joan Ramon Resina
Writing Oneself as Another – Writing Another as Oneself: Julia Kristeva and Teresa of Ávila
Jenny Haase
Painting Faces: A Swedish Portraitist and his Native American Subjects in 18th-century North America
Linda Haverty Rugg
The Afterlife of a Disaster: Everest 1996 Memoirs as Gendered Testimony
Julie Rak
Self-Writings and Egodocuments: Personal memoirs in Catalonia (16th-19th centuries)
Oscar Jané
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