Self Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature

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1 University Press Scholarship Online You are looking at 1-10 of 72 items for: keywords : life writing Self Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern Published in print: Published Online: May Item type: book acprof:oso/ This book explores how writers from the 1870s to the 1930s experimented with forms of life writing biography, autobiography, memoir, diary, journal increasingly for the purposes of fiction. It argues for an upsurge in new hybrid forms identified in a surprisingly early essay of 1906 (which provides a key term) as autobiografiction. Examples include Mark Rutherford, Gissing, Samuel Butler, Gosse, and A. C. Benson. The book offers a taxonomy of their extraordinary variety, showing how they arose as the pressures of secularization and psychological theory disturbed the categories of biography and autobiography. It argues that a group of concepts, forms, and tropes regularly co exist: portraiture, imaginary portraits, collections of such portraits; and (because they are often of imaginary artists) imaginary works of art and literature. Autobiografiction also sheds strong light on modernism. Modernism is often characterized as a movement of impersonality' a rejection of auto/biography but most of its major works engage in profound ways with questions of life writing. The second part looks at writers experimenting further with autobiografiction as impressionism turns into modernism, and consists of detailed readings of Joyce, Stein, Pound, Woolf, and others, and juxtaposing their work with contemporaries whose experiments with life writing forms are no less striking. It argues that connecting modernist games with auto/biography and the New Biography with their turn of the century precursors allows them to be understood in a new way. A coda considers the after life of these experiments in postmodern fiction. A conclusion considers the theoretical implications developed throughout, and argues that autobiografiction can also shed light on under theorized questions such as what we mean by autobiographical and the relations between autobiography and fiction. Page 1 of 7

2 Introduction Published in print: Published Online: May acprof:oso/ The introduction starts from comments by Wilde and Nietzsche arguing that criticism and philosophy and by extension all writing can be read as autobiographical; and argues that such a move simultaneously puts autobiography into question. It considers how recent theoretical accounts of autobiography have had little to say about the difference between autobiography and an autobiographical work. It introduces key terms for this study, especially life-writing and autobiografiction. It argues that most critical discussions of modernism have failed to take account of its complex formal engagements with life-writing. It discusses the methodological implications of such terminology. Conclusion Published in print: Published Online: May acprof:oso/ This conclusion argues that auto/biography is shadowed by the alter ego of scepticism, whether directed at the reality or intelligibility of selves; their representability; or the adequacy of the available forms of representation. It summarizes the resulting positions of anti subjectivity and autobiograficton, arguing that the sceptical engagements with lifewriting display a markedly performative dimension, using theoretical concepts from Judith Butler and Sidonie Smith. The notion of the performative reintroduces the ideas of fictionality and creativity to the heart of the autobiographic project; and to that extent could be said to inscribe even in formal autobiography some of the key qualities discovered here in more hybrid works, of autobiografiction and imaginary writing. A literary autobiography's relation to a fictional oeuvre is discussed as working according to Derrida's logic of the supplement, with a comparable effect: posing autobiography as outside fiction, but Page 2 of 7

3 infiltrating the autobiographical into the fiction, and thus reciprocally, the fictional into the autobiography. What such arguments bring out is how autobiography and fiction, while posed as mutually exclusive, are in fact profoundly interdependent, and constitute throughout the last two centuries a system of modern self representation which might itself be termed autobiografiction. Im/personality: The Imaginary Portraits of Walter Pater Published in print: Published Online: May acprof:oso/ This chapter begins with Walter Pater as a key figure, representing a gateway from impressionism to modernism and beyond. It discusses the implications of Pater's impressionist aesthetics for autobiography and for modernist writers; and explores his investment in the form of the Imaginary Portrait in literature, arguing that while Imaginary Portraits can be found in earlier writing, they become increasingly important for modernist engagements with life writing. The relation between Paterian subjectivity and Victorian subjectivism is discussed, together with his scepticism about the boundary between fact and imagination. Mapping Lives: The Uses of Biography Peter France and William St Clair (eds) Published in print: 2004 Published Online: January 2012 ISBN: eisbn: Item type: book Publisher: British Academy DOI: /bacad/ Why biography? This collection of chapters on the problems and functions of biography, and particularly the biography of writers, thinkers, and artists, investigates a subject of enduring importance for those interested in culture and society. In the last century, it has been a controversial subject, as old models of biographical writing were attacked and superseded, while critics and theorists questioned the once self-evident value of the biography of writers. Yet the genre continues to attract notable authors and is unfailingly popular with readers. The present volume, while containing chapters by practising biographers, is intended primarily as a stimulus to critical thinking. It focuses on the diverse functions assumed by life-writing in different European countries Page 3 of 7

4 at different periods, challenging both the notion of a genre with constant characteristics and aims and the view of modern biography as the happy culmination of centuries of progress. After Lives: Postmodern Experiments in Meta Auto/ biografiction: Sartre, Nabokov, Lessing, Byatt Published in print: Published Online: May Page 4 of 7 acprof:oso/ This shorter chapter is a coda considering the afterlife of modernism's engagements with life writings covered in Part II. It begins by sketching how the ideas traced in this study of imaginary portraiture, imaginary self portraiture, and aesthetic autobiography figure in experiments in life writing by two authors coming after modernism: Jean Paul Sartre in Les Mots, and Vladimir Nabokov in Speak, Memory. The second section sketches ways in which postmodernism has drawn upon and extended the tradition of experimentations with life writing. Here the emphasis is on metafictional strategies, especially those of auto/biografiction and imaginary authorship. Auto/biografiction can be understood as a strand of what Linda Hutcheon defines as historiographic metafiction, focusing on the representations of individual life stories rather than on representations of historical crises or trauma. Modernist works explicitly thematizing their own processes of representation (such as Orlando or The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas) are reconsidered as pioneers of the postmodern development that might be termed auto/biographic metafiction. Key examples discussed are A. S. Byatt's Possession (as biographic metafiction); Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook (as autobiographic metafiction) and Nabokov's Pale Fire (as auto/ biographic metafiction). Where historiographic metafiction represents a postmodernizing of the historical novel, auto/biographic metafiction represents a postmodernizing of auto/biography. Pierre Michon's Lives of the Saints Ann Jefferson in Biography and the Question of in France Published in print: 2007 Published Online: September 2008 ISBN: eisbn: acprof:oso/

5 The turn to life-writing in France after the two decades of literary theory and the nouveau roman did not represent a rejection of concerns with the issue of literariness. Michon's biographical portraits in his Vies minuscules set literary ideals at the heart of each of the biographical narratives that recount the lives of figures from his own past, each of whom placed exorbitant value in the literary. Literariness becomes associated with belief, as well as with imposture, and the figures in Michon's pantheon which in other works also includes writers and artists are implicitly likened to saints whose example the would-be writer meditates and seeks to emulate. Literariness is not analyzed or theorized here but illustrated through the recounting of the lives of various believers in literature, in the hopes of sustaining belief in the narrator himself. Freud and the Art of Biography Malcolm Bowie in Mapping Lives: The Uses of Biography Published in print: 2004 Published Online: January 2012 ISBN: eisbn: Publisher: British Academy DOI: /bacad/ This chapter discusses Freud and the art of biography. It discusses Freud's psychoanalysis, which took an important role in the structuring of biographies, and the role of writing of lives in clinical psychoanalysis. Although Freud understated the role that writing lives has had in clinical psychoanalysis, biographies nevertheless contributed to Freudian psychoanalysis. While they were initially seen from a different perspective, clinical psychoanalysis is, on the whole, closely related to biography, for the encounter between the analysand and the analyst involves the writing and rewriting of a life history. Biography and the Question of in France Ann Jefferson Published in print: 2007 Published Online: September 2008 ISBN: eisbn: Item type: book acprof:oso/ This book explores the relations between literature and biography in France by tracing their history since the emergence of the two terms during the 18th century. This is when term biographie first saw the Page 5 of 7

6 light of day in the French language, and the word littérature began to acquire its modern sense of writing marked by an aesthetic character. Arguing that the idea of literature is inherently open to revision and contestation, the book examines the way in which biographically orientated texts have been engaged in turning literature into a question about its own definition. At the same time, it tracks the evolving forms of biographical writing in French culture, and proposes a reappraisal of biography that takes account not only of its forms, but also of its functions. The capacity of biography to intervene in debates about definitions of the literary argues for the need to consider this functional dimension of biographical writing. Although the study has important theoretical implications as regards both biography and the literary, it is intended first and foremost as a history, offering an account of the development of French literature through a dual focus on the question of literature and its relations with biography, and tracing the changing ideas about literature and chronicling the different forms taken by biography in the period. It includes readings of major authors and texts in the light of these concerns, from Rousseau to the life-writing of contemporary authors such as Michon and Roubaud. Other authors discussed include Mme de Staël, Victor Hugo, Sainte-Beuve, Barbey d'aurevilly, Baudelaire, Nerval, Mallarmé, Schwob, Proust, Gide, Leiris, Sartre, Genet, Barthes, and Laporte. Introduction France Peter in Mapping Lives: The Uses of Biography Published in print: 2004 Published Online: January 2012 ISBN: eisbn: Publisher: British Academy DOI: /bacad/ Jean Sartre's fictional hero Roquentin believes that one cannot seriously take the task of writing one's life. For him, biography is an impossibility, a work of pure imagination subjected to the biases of the writer and devoid of resemblance to the subject. In the early days, biographies served as testimony to the greatness a person. They served as models from which people could emulate the exemplary individual. Then, the essential thing was to tell a story based on external facts and on psychological plausibility. However, in the age of Rousseau's Confessions, it was argued that biographies were accounts of inner truths, and that self-revelation was only achieved by the person himself: No man can write a man's life but himself. Even in the days when new methods of understanding the life of a man were increasingly becoming available, biographies were often seen as suspect enterprises. They Page 6 of 7

7 were often seen as approaches that obscure the proper comprehension of the literary process and as illusions of profound knowledge of the inner truth, when in fact biographers continue to approach biographies with misgivings. In spite of all the criticisms against biographies, they have remained of great interest. They reach out to a broad public as a literature in its own right and have played a vital role in the history of European culture. Biographies have served as an inspiration, as a celebration of the great personages of the nation, as an insight to the gender roles of the society, and so on. Page 7 of 7