Nina Bosničová
(Charles University Prague)
Truth in Richard Wright’s Black Boy and
Zora Neale Hurtson’s Dust Track on a Road
Richard Wright’s Black Boy (American Hunger) is one of those African American
works over whose status as autobiography critics have repeatedly argued. The question asking
whether the events in the book are fact or fiction has been raised over and over again. Those
believing that the book is not a true account of Wright’s life have accused the author of
presenting the world around him in an exorbitantly dark and violent way. Other critics, who
were trying to preserve Black Boy (American Hunger) within the genre of autobiography
(such as Margaret Walker or Yoshinobu Hakutani), have defended the truth in Wright’s book
calling it the truth as the author had chosen to render it.
My paper, while using the analysis of Black Boy (American Hunger), will try to
address a more general question of the meaning of truth in the autobiographical genre. Is it
possible to define autobiographical truth as a one-to-one reflection of the outer world’s events
or do we allow for the narrator’s individual perception and interpretation of what is going on
around him? Is it really that important to believe every single detail of the author’s
experience, if the overall picture we are presented with impresses us as “true”? Does the
incorporation of fictional devices, especially the use of the fictional genres, such as the
Bildungsroman or the sentimental novel, in an autobiography, take away from or contribute to
the portrayal of truth? Should the dilemma of fact vs. fiction be given a priority over all other
issues when trying to designate a work as autobiographical or are there other, equally
important, criteria that should be used in the definition of this genre?
Effie Botonaki
(Aristotle University, Greek Open University)
Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen's Autobiographical Writings:
Disclosing Enclosures
The main question that my paper tries to answer is why so many women began to write
diaries and autobiographies in the seventeenth century. In order to answer this question I
examine the texts in parallel with the Protestant guides to self-examination and I show that the
latter had a very powerful influence upon autobiographical writings. I also examine the space
within which these writings were produced-the closet-and trace the similarities between these
two spaces, treating both as "rooms of one's own." Finally, I examine the relationship between
tombs and autobiographies, viewing them as "sepulchres that prevent the fame from
violation." As I argue in my paper, the building of closets and tombs in the seventeenth
century and the proliferation of autobiographical writings in the same period was not at all
accidental.
The overall argument of my thesis is that the early modern women's autobiographical
writings at once enclosed/restricted and disclosed/freed their authors and their thoughts. On
the one hand, the content and form of these texts was to a considerable extent dictated by
other texts, popular discourses and, of course, dominant ideologies. In this respect, this form
of writing re-enacted the enclosure of these women in their homes and their domestic roles.
On the other hand, however, the discursive and textual games the diarists and autobiographers
were inevitably involved in enabled them to occupy discursive positions that were
contradictory to their familial and social ones. This, in turn, allowed them to develop
capacities and talents unknown even to themselves, and try out masculine and, therefore,
forbidden roles – even if only within the confines of their texts.
So, while this kind of writing is a form of enclosure in that it promotes (especially in
the case of women's texts) a prefabricated representation, it cannot escape becoming a form of
disclosure, too. These writings often enabled women to break free from certain limits, to
express their thoughts, as well as to negotiate and challenge dominant ideas about their sex in
the process of constructing their own self-representations.
Julie Campbell
(University of Southampton)
Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory
My paper will deal with Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory. I will be considering the way
he chooses to construct an identity: what he chooses to highlight, and what he chooses to
elide. I will look at his use of poetic language, thematic patterns, and the use of many
strategies that would usually be associated with fictional writing. The biography concerns the
earlier part of his life: his childhood in Russia and his exile in Europe, and does touch on
many issues related to nationhood and exile. Nabokov has chosen, in terms of the time in
which he wrote his memoirs, an unusual and very interesting form, which manages, in many
respects, to obscure as well as enlighten readers about his life, and follows in many interesting
respects the kind of trajectory he allots to his fictional characters in his novels, and thus in a
sense his own life story becomes a literary construct rather than simply a factual account.
Nephie Christodoulides
(University of Cyprus)
Fiction and Facticity in Helene Deutsch’s Confrontations with Myself: An Epilogue
In this paper, I will attempt to read Helene Deutsch’s autobiography Confrontations with
Myself as an amalgamation of dream and reality, fact and fiction or, as Virginia Woolf would
see it, a “marriage of granite and rainbow” (Collected Essays 235).
Specifically the paper will not try to resolve the issue of the historical truth of the book
but will bring into sharp focus the way Deutsch handles the elements of facticity and ficticity
in it. In the book, she talks about the astounding quality of her memory to recapture
“seemingly unimportant details” (55), but she also talks about the “patina” of time that has
enhanced and mellowed her experiences bringing distortion along with enhancement and
mellowness. At the same time, she alludes to the “amnesic gaps” that were developed after
her psychoanalytic treatment. To remedy the problem and restore order to the broken
narrative, she uses “embellishments” of facts, as she says, and seeks methods to provide the
missing information. Occasionally, she resorts to her non-fiction work, especially Psychology
of Women, to draw material from, thus blurring the boundaries between life and work, or she
merely prefers silence.
Further, an important issue of my discussion will be Deutsch’s admission of
consciously created erotic fabrications, especially what she calls “mythical love experiences,”
the forerunner of her “later tendency to fantasize,” what she traced to “an actual attempt of
[her] brother to seduce her” (54). At this point, the discussion will focus on the tripartite
pattern of abuse, memory and ficticity and the importance of this pattern in the book.
Ines Detmers
(TU Dresden)
F(r)iction(s) and F(r)action(s): Ted Hughes’s Imaginary Autobiography in Verse
Unexpectedly, some months before his death in October 1998, Ted Hughes published his
most personal volume of poetry: Birthday Letters. Comprised of 88 long narrative poems, it
was immediately celebrated as a literary sensation, and the book soon became one of the very
few best-sellers on the British poetry scene, heading the national best-seller lists for more than
17 weeks. Probably, the most obvious reason for this ‘chart-breaking’ success was that both
specialist literary critics and the ‘ordinary reader’ felt that with its publication, Ted Hughes
had finally broken his 35-year-long silence about his relationship with Sylvia Plath, especially
the (mysterious) circumstances of her death.
Dealing with the topic of ‘autobiography’ in Ted Hughes’s late work of poetry, my
presentation has a twofold purpose: Firstly, I’m going to show that Birthday Letters actually
forms the central part of a ‘trilogy’ of autobiographical poems, flanked by two other volumes,
Capriccio (1990) and Howls and Whispers (1998). Secondly, on this extended basis of texts,
I’m going to approach Ted Hughes’s ‘poetic legacy’ from a poetological angle. Taking into
account his critical views on ‘confessional poetry’ and the use of myths, in order to place his
(new) autobiographical ‘voice’ within his lyrical works, I am going to analyse how Hughes
structurally and aesthetically challenges the usual formal character of the autobiography,
generally defined as “retrospective prose narrative” (cf. Lejeune in Todorov, 1982: 193f.). I
am going to argue that Hughes, in contrast, provides us with a complex textual hybrid
composed of different lyrical as well as narrative frames, such as the narrative long poem,
dramatic monologue, elements of epistolary and travel writing, myths, and, last but not least,
various (romantic) quest motives. Applying these experimental techniques to autobiographical
writing enabled Hughes to transgress not only common notions of ‘fact and fiction’, but to
create a highly complex ‘lyrical self’, guiding the reader through the multi-facetted fabric of a
writer’s and lover’s life.
Sarah Herbe
(University of Salzburg)
Frances Bellerby's Autobiographical Fiction
All of Frances Bellerby's narrative production can be seen to belong to the autobiographical
register. The relatively unknown British twentieth-century writer of fiction and poetry had,
throughout her life, a strong desire to rework her life, which was shattered by family tragedies
and illness, in writing. The same events keep coming up in different shapes in her poems, as
well as in her short stories and her novel Hath the Rain a Father? Given the strong
autobiographical impulse, combined with her belief that in writing about the past (especially
about her childhood) she could get back to her beloved, dead family members and even help
them, it is no wonder that she attempted to write an "autobiography proper". Yet she
abandoned the project after years of trying to come to terms with it, caught between the desire
to reveal and suppress facts about her life, and weighed down by the emotional strain going
back to the past meant for her.
Critics agree that her real autobiography can be found in her poems and her fiction. In
my paper, I shall point out the different strategies and techniques of obscuring revealing, and
distancing and approximation, with the help of which Bellerby implicitly or explicitly dealt
with the important and tragic events of her life in her prose work. Keeping in mind different
theories of autobiography, I shall argue that if Bellerby had had the courage to abandon the
restrictive traditional model of autobiography and instead had made use of the associative and
elliptic style and structure, which can be found in the most personal of her stories, she might
have managed to carry out her project.
The close relationship between her life and her fiction, and between her fiction and her
non-fictional writing (her letters and what is known about her autobiography) illustrates the
legitimacy of the question, of central importance incurrent criticism, where the line between
fiction and autobiography can be drawn and if such a line exists at all.
Stefan Herbrechter
(University of Leeds)
Auto/bi/o/graphy
Based on a reading of some autobiographic fictional and theoretical texts like Abdelkébir
Khatibi’s Amour bilingue, Eva Hoffman’s Lost in Translation, Chang-rae Lee’s Native
Speaker and Jacques Derrida’s Monolinguisme de l’autre, the proposed paper addresses the
articulation of otherness and strangeness in the multi-lingual and multi-cultural
autobiographical text.
The concept of ‘auto/bi/o/graphy’ with its various articulations attempts to express the
anxieties and desires involved in the writing of the bi/multilingual ‘self’ and its ‘translations’
of identity. Specific questions that develop out of this reading concern identity, ‘hospitality’
and strangeness, e.g. how to accommodate the strange otherness in ‘me’ (e.g. autohospitality)? But also problems of language and definitions of bilingualism, e.g. what is
Khatibi’s ‘bilangue’ and what is its relation to Derrida’s ‘plus d’une langue’ (i.e.
deconstruction)? And the question of ethics in autobiography, e.g. what are the ethical
imperatives that govern the writing of the bi/lingual self in auto/bi/o/graphy?
This paper is part of a larger project on the processes of inscription that are at work in
the representation of strangers and strangeness.
Beatrix Hesse
(University of Bamberg)
Memories and Memoirs in Vladimir Nabokov's Work
In the course of his writing career, Nabokov became increasingly concerned with mapping the
operations of memory. The reason for this may partly be sought in his biography, since for
him, memoir writing did not mean a “remembrance of things past”, but a remembrance of
things irrevocably lost; in Nabokov’s case the past was quite literally another country, and
one that could not even be visited during the author’s lifetime.
Nabokov’s interest in the working processes of memory logically led him to
experiment with authentic autobiographical material. His autobiography Speak, Memory by
itself invites a closer analysis, particularly an examination of what Nabokov chooses to put in
and what he chooses to leave out. Some of the chapters of Speak, Memory had been
previously published in short story form, and Nabokov relates how he felt alienated from
them as memories as a result of their publication. The practice of publishing chapters of his
autobiography separately also reveals that Nabokov apparently did not think of Speak,
Memory as an organic whole in the way he for instance spoke of Lolita. Writing his
autobiography must have been a particular challenge for Nabokov since he always
vehemently objected to two major twentieth-century schools of thought that, to the ordinary
individual, offer ways of making sense of their life experiences: psychoanalysis and political
theory. Throughout his life, Nabokov rejected psychoanalysis and political ideology (of any
kind) as hopelessly vulgar.
In his fiction, three different ways of using autobiographical material may be
discerned: Firstly, “authentic” autobiographical material may be embedded in the body of the
novel – this applies, for instance, to Mary, The Gift, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and
Ada, or, Ardor. Secondly, Nabokov wrote novels that were centrally concerned with the
problems of memory and memoirs, but the past the protagonist of each of these novels is
trying to retrieve is as distinct from Nabokov’s own life as possible. Examples of this type of
novel are Lolita and Pale Fire and, to a lesser extent, Pnin and Look at the Harlequins!.
Thirdly, there is a group of novels that deal with the intense personal experiences of erotic
desire and life in a totalitarian state. In these novels, Nabokov at the same time evades the
confessional mode and rejects the ideological apparatus of psychoanalysis and political theory
by resorting to genre writing. While King, Queen, Knave and Laughter in the Dark are studies
of desire in the shape of conventional erotic melodrama, Invitation to a Beheading and Bend
Sinister deal with the experience of life in a dictatorship in the form of a dystopian fantasy.
In the course of his writing career, Nabokov’s interest in the retrieval process of the
mind gradually seems to supersede the content of the memory itself. This development
becomes most obvious when one considers Mary to Look at the Harlequins!. As far as the
afterlife of the author is concerned, it is interesting to note that certain Nabokovians tend to
read his work largely focussing on its biographical context, and that a cult surrounding the
author’s birthplace has evolved.
Martina Horáková
(Masaryk University of Brno)
Autobiography in Australian Aboriginal Women’s Writing: Sally Morgan’s My Place
and Doris Pilkington’s Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence
Aboriginal women’s autobiography has developed into one of the most dynamic areas of
contemporary Australian literature, although this literary form is foreign to traditional
Aboriginal cultures in Australia. It apparently originated in modes of formalised dialogues
between Aboriginals on the one hand and non-Aboriginal officials and researchers on the
other. Aboriginal lives, similarly to those of Native Americans, have been since then brought
forward as a crucial source of information about Aboriginal peoples, often in the ideological
framework of the “vanishing culture”.
Aboriginal women play an important role in the area of Australian autobiographical
writing. They have been extremely successful in shedding light on their own, their families’
lives and they have helped “rewrite” the official history of Australia’s settlement. Aboriginal
women’s autobiographies started to be widely recognized in the 1970s and are still very
popular today. Bestsellers such as Sally Morgan’s My Place (1987) or Doris Pilkington’s
Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence (1996) are only a top layer of this specific literary tradition.
The presentation looks at the roots of Aboriginal women’s autobiographies in
Australia and the areas it examines include: the relation of Aboriginal women’s
autobiographies to the official historical discourse on one hand and fiction on the other; the
relationship between the “personal” in these life portraits and the “political”, i.e. the use of
autobiographies as means of resistance against oppression; the role that Aboriginal women’s
autobiography has played in Australian literature since 1970 and its position in relation to
other literary genres of Aboriginal literature.
The two novels by Morgan and Pilkington are used as texts of reference and the source
for tracing a change in Aboriginal women’s writing in a decade marked by the years of
publication of the two autobiographies.
Alenka Koron
(Scientific Research Centre of the SAZU Ljubljana)
Fiction, Autobiography and Memoir Intertwined: Frank McCourt's
and Lojze Kovačič's Writings
The paper explores two pieces of autobiographical writing, Frank McCourt's childhood
memoir Angela's Ashes (1996), an international best-seller, and The Immigrants (1984-85),
originally entitled Prišleki, a masterpiece by the Slovene writer Lojze Kovačič, highly praised
by academics and by the wider Slovene reading public, but completely unknown abroad,
since it has not been translated into any foreign language. Although stemming from very
different multi-ethnic and multicultural social backgrounds, each with its own socio-historical
context, the Irish American and the Slovene Central European, these two books exhibit
similarities and interesting parallels not only in content, but also in form and structure.
However, Angela's Ashes has conventionally been classified as non-fiction, whereas The
Immigrants, subtitled A Narrative, has been recognised and acknowledged as a novel –
putting aside questions about its synthetic genericity (I borrow the term from Jean-Marie
Schaeffer), which also corresponds to non-fictional and artistically deprivileged
autobiography and memoir.
I begin the discussion with a brief survey of some theoretical issues concerning the
relations between fiction, truth, reality, and referentiality in autobiography and memoir,
outlining the epistemological uncertainty of autobiography, and renouncing attempts to define
fiction according to its own code. But reading practices constantly defy such theoretical
scepticism and corrosion of traditionally established criteria by indulging in the referential
appeal of the autobiographical genre. The examples of Bourdieu, Eco, Iser, and Sill are then
used to shed light on theoretical arguments against the dichotomy of reality and fiction in
autobiography and to introduce intersubjectivity as a checkpoint for their interaction. I also
assume the analogical model of fiction in the sense attributed to it by Marie-Laure Ryan. The
description of the generic distinctions of the two writings is based on a pragmatic model for
distinguishing between fiction and non-fiction, as developed by Nickel-Bacon, Groeben and
Schreier. To put the analogies in a wider context I finally compare the texts with some trends
in contemporary autobiographical writing in other Central and Western European national
literatures, especially Hungarian and French, in order to discern the cultural specifics and
different socio-historical roles of these writings within the global context of postmodern
literature.
Leena Kurvet-Käosaar
(Tartu University, Estonia)
Women’s Diary as a Site for Exploring Embodied Subjectivities
Within studies of autobiography, much of the little critical attention the diary has received has
been exclusionary, and the majority of the criticism has been focused on the diaries of
women. The diary, seen as both formally and thematically corresponding to women's pattern
of life and way of thinking, has often been considered to be a ‘natural’ written (private) mode
of self-expression for women.
Drawing on the diaries of three women writers of the first half of the twentiethcentury, Virginia Woolf, Anaïs Nin and the Finnish-Estonian writer Aino Kallas, I would like
to explore features of gendered textual identity and subjectivity that the diary format seems to
enable, in particular the representation of the body as a locus of meaning, a shaper of
subjectivity and the basis of autobiographical identification. In order to properly identify and
position the diary as a space for exploring embodied subjectivities, I will look at the diaries
within the framework of the authors’ other autobiographical writings (autobiographies and
letters) as well as the body of biographical texts concerning the authors.
Gabriele Linke
(University of Rostock)
Autobiographic Texts from the New Scotland
In Scotland, the call for devolution since the 1960s has been closely connected with attempts
to confirm a separate Scottish identity. Although Scotland enjoys a long tradition of
autobiographic writing, there has been a noticeable upsurge in the publication of
autobiographic texts other than literary autobiography, especially since the 1980s. In this
context, I will explore recent Scottish autobiographic texts along two lines, the diversity of the
forms and modes of production of the texts and the construction of a diverse Scottish identity,
assuming a connection between the diversity of forms and identities.
The forms range from traditionally narrated childhood memories (e.g. W. Gordon
Lawrence (ed.), Roots in a Northern Landscape, 1996) to various presentational forms of oral
histories, some even organised into new stories on sociological themes (e.g. Jean Faley, Up
Our Close, 1990). With regard to the construction of Scottish identities, some texts
romanticise, or at least re-appreciate, the rural (Lawrence) as well as the urban past (Faley),
while others emphasise the diversity of the Scottish people with regard to class, religion and
ethnicity (e.g. Colin Bell, Scotland’s Century: An Autobiography of the Nation, 1999).
Through the analysis of the various forms and themes, the paper intends to highlight the
complex and contradictory character of the process of the discursive construction of a national
past and identity and the specific contribution of autobiographic texts to this process.
Martin Löschnigg
(University of Graz)
Narratological Perspectives on Autobiographical Discourse
Theoretical studies of autobiography during the last two decades (Olney, Bruner, Eakin) have
emphasised the role of narrative in constructing a sense of the self and of individual identity.
In the face of this ‘narrative’ turn in the theory of autobiography, which corresponds with
similar developments in other disciplines such as e.g. historiography and psychology, it is
only fitting that narratology, the discipline most immediately concerned with narrative, should
be brought to bear on autobiographical discourse – the more so since narratology has recently
transcended structuralist paradigms in favour of a cognitive and cultural orientation.
Cognitive narratology, in particular, which has provided categories like Monika Fludernik’s
“experientiality”, appears to be highly compatible with narrativist approaches to
autobiography. In my paper, I propose to show that categories like experientiality, narrativity,
unreliability (as understood in the terms of cognitive narratology) and frames of telling and
experiencing (focalization) can be fruitfully applied to the study of autobiographical
discourse. The benefits apply to synchronic as well as diachronic analysis. Thus, a diachronic
investigation of autobiographical discourse along narratological lines may help to modify
accepted views on the relationship between autobiography and the novel as being one-sidedly
mimetic in essence, with fictional life-stories in first-person form imitating (or sometimes
parodying) the model of factual autobiography.
David Malcolm
(University of Gdansk)
The Functions of Autobiographical Material in John McGahern’s Fictions
The literary scholar can have severe reservations about the use of biographical and
autobiographical material in literary studies. After all, much biography is speculative, and
autobiographical accounts are often unreliable. The approach to biography and autobiography
suggested by Edward Balcerzan in his essay “Biografia jako język” (Biography As Language)
provides a useful response to some of the problems raised by the use of autobiography and
biography within literary studies. Balcerzan suggests that we treat autobiography and
biography as attempts by writers to control the reception of their work. His essay provides the
theoretical basis for this paper’s discussion of (auto-)biographical elements in John
McGahern’s fictions.
McGahern is a notable contemporary Irish novelist and short-story writer whose
biography is well-documented. However, it must be noted that in interviews McGahern
emphasizes certain elements of his life (his growing up in the rural Irish Free State, the
disturbing influence on his career of his conflict with the Censorship Board of the Irish
Republic in the 1960s), while eliding others (such as his relationship with his mother and
father). This is all the more striking as dying mothers and oppressive fathers play a very
important role in McGahern’s work. Thus autobiography can be seen as a partial and partly
fictional exercise.
Further, (auto-)biographical material in McGahern’s fictions can be seen to play an
ambiguous and multi-functional role. On the one hand, McGahern’s novels and short stories
gain authenticity by virtue of their well-advertised grounding in the author’s own life.
However, on the other, the constant recurrence of almost identical figures and situations (the
dying mother, the oppressive father, the ambitious and rebellious son, the rituals of rural life)
over the entire œuvre also emphasizes the fictional nature of McGahern’s enterprise. By
constantly re-working the same biographical material McGahern – paradoxically – makes the
reader aware that s/he is encountering art not biography. A careful reading of the interplay of
autobiography and fiction suggests that McGahern is a much more self-referential and
autothematic novelist than he is usually considered to be.
Sarolta Marinovich-Resch
(University of Szeged)
The Autobiographical Künstlerroman by Late Victorian Women Writers
The objective of this paper is to offer a (re)reading of the distinctive genre of New
Woman fiction in the 1890s. By distinguishing it from those fin-de-siecle novels, often
written by men, which are merely about the New Woman, Ann Heilmann writes: “In its most
typical form, New Woman fiction is feminist fiction written by women, and deals with
middle-class heroines who in some way re-enact autobiographical dilemmas faced by the
writers themselves.” It is a genre at the interface between auto/biography, fiction and feminist
polemic. I shall focus on an important aspect of the New Woman fiction’s engagement with
the woman question in the 1890s: the uses made of the figure of the female artist in the semiautobiographical Künstlerroman, a narrative form which was to become important in
modernist writing.
Reading Ella H. Dixon’s The Story of a Modern Woman (1894), Sarah Grand’s The
Beth Book (1897) and Mary Cholmondeley’s Red Pottage (1899), it is not difficult to see why
the figure of the female artist, and especially the woman writer, should have featured so
prominently and so frequently in the work of the New Woman novelists. It is an example of
their turn to autobiography and of their claims for the authority of a distinctive woman’s
experience, now that woman gets conscious of her individuality as a woman. By making
writing women its subject the semi-autobiographical New Woman fiction foregrounds the
conditions of its own production.
The female artist in the autobiographical Künstlerroman of the 1890s serves as a
compound figure for the exceptional or aspiring woman and for the obstacles that she will
inevitably encounter in attempting to realize her aspirations in the face of dominant social
definitions of femininity. This paper aims to show how the autobiographical and so selfreflexive representation of the woman artist is realized as a complex figure of multiple
significations.
Joseph Eugene Mullin
(University of Minho, Portugal)
The Memoirs of Sherman and Grant
However valuable the contributions of literary criticism of the last thirty years, I persist in
thinking that the continuing publication of volumes in the Library of America is the most
significant event in American Studies in the last generation. Among the books resurrected
from practical obscurity are the Memoirs of both Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh
Sherman. Sherman's personal history covers not only his role in the Civil War but his entire
remarkable career before and afterward: he was stationed in California at the time gold was
struck, he was a banker in San Francisco during the gold rush, and he was superintendent of
the state military college of Louisiana at the time of Southern Secession. Then, he rose to
military command in the West, captured Atlanta, and led the mythical March through
Georgia. Subsequently, he became a major director of the Indian wars, and, finally, he turned
down, with sensational aplomb, the opportunity to be President. Sherman's Memoirs
communicate his single-minded brutality and his energetic, colorful, interesting, and
occasionally unstable personality, as these Memoirs give us, too, an intimate view of
rambunctious nineteenth-century America.
In his Personal Memoirs Grant passes over events in his non-military life, both his
early, troubled time out of the army, as he knocked about for some direction and success, and
his failed presidency after the war. Only in the Civil War itself did he find his moment and
his purpose. Then he surveyed battlefields calmly and described what he wished to do
concisely. He gave clear descriptions of the tumult of battle. He assessed the strengths and
weaknesses of subordinates and opponents coldly. Mark Twain compared his prose in its
clarity and grace to Caesar's writings. He was a favourite too of both Matthew's and Gertrude
Stein's! Throughout the war Grant showed steady and unself-conscious purpose. His
simplicity is arresting. We recognize in him a style of expression which is our own. His is the
image of focussed power, the clever democrat drawing force into undeniable social
organization. I propose a comparative reading of these two prominent, companion memoirs in
American letters.
Aparajita Nanda
(Jadavpur University, Calcutta)
Identity Politics and the Voice of Autobiography in Sky Lee’s Disappearing Moon Café
Autobiography is traditionally defined as the narration of self. Roland Barthes in Criticism
and Truth talks about a major relocation of this classified discourse. Writing today has
emerged as “an exchange, an interpenetration, … as regards (its) poetic and the critical
functions [where] the writers themselves practise criticism… (and) their work…articulates the
conditions of its own birth (Proust) or even of its own absence (Blanchot).” The art and
practices of self-writing is not a mere matter of retrieving one’s past but an investigation of
the constructs of the “self” and the“other”. It involves “voice” as an activity by which the
text’s positioning is revealed. Sky Lee’s Disappearing Moon Café explores the creative
aspect of self-narration while addressing questions of representation and re-presentation of
racial, sexual and political inter-realities. By “speaking” her story the author problematizes
the indeterminate borderlines of identity politics where the subject/object paradigm moves in
and out of a “voyeurist” space. Lee’s textual interventions introduce an affirmation of likeness
with her characters (the “others”) while persisting in her difference, which “un-writes” any
established definition of “otherness.” In telling her story Lee moves in “in-between” space –
her chapters entitled, “Ties Overseas – A Ticket In,” “Ties to the Land – A Ticket Out,”
“Identity Crisis,” “Feeding the Dead” and “Suicide.” The different characters circulate
between voices of different people and one person, proving thereby the constituted nature of
subjectivity and its role in the production of meaning. As “difference” becomes a source and
space of interaction, a process where identity refers to the infinity of “I”, “whose center is
everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.” Disappearing Moon Café is an autobiography of constant construction, deconstruction and re-construction of evolving and receding
selves that challenge the divisive and classifying world of meanings.
Pascal Nicklas
(University of Leipzig)
Autobiography and the Archaeology of the Soul
In the eighteenth century, the idea of individual development becomes a topic in
autobiographical writings and psychological research: the formative model employed by
Rousseau implies that childhood experience moulds individual character and identity. This
model becomes poetologically relevant in Sterne's Tristram Shandy and is the basis for
psychological research in the context of the Magazin für Seelenkunde edited by Karl Philip
Moritz in late eighteenth-century Germany. This paper looks at this European context in order
to establish the background for De Quincey's psychological model which anticipates Freud's
metaphor of the inner city of Rome as an archaeological model/paradox for the soul where all
historical inscriptions are simultaneously present.
Robert Rehder
(University of Fribourg)
What Is the Form of Pound's The Cantos?
The question is difficult, because it demands a long, complicated answer, involving a
consideration of the nature of poetic form and autobiography. Pound writes in Guide to
Kulchur (1938, 1970):
Boccherini, Op.8 N.5…is an example of culture. Bartok's
Fifth Quartet … is the record of a personal struggle, possible only to
a man born in the 1880s.
It has the defects or disadvantages of my Cantos. It has the
defects and disadvantages of Beethoven's music … Or perhaps I shd.
qualify that: the defects inherent in a record of struggle (134-5).
What I believe Pound is saying is that Boccherini's music expresses his culture without a
struggle and is less individualistic and personal than that of Bartok. The inclusion of
Beethoven implies that Pound believes that art becomes a personal struggle beginning with
Beethoven. Bartok and Pound, I would argue, express their culture in the same way that
Boccherini does his and that Pound's remark causes us to ask: what is the nature of the
personal struggle in The Cantos? What does the form of The Cantos suggest about the
experiences and states of mind that gave rise to the poem? There is general agreement that The
Cantos are autobiographical, but what exactly does this mean?
Thomas F. Schneider
(University of Osnabrück, Erich Maria Remarque-Friedenszentrum)
Fiction and Autobiography in Literary Texts of World War I
Even at the eve of the Great War. war literature was discussed within the criteria of
authenticity and "truth". Publishing houses and authors were eager to prove to the reader the
authenticity of the text and that the events described relied on the author's experience. The
paper discusses the constraints of these criteria for authors, publishing houses and readers,
and especially for anti-war literature. It shows how autobiographical elements were created
and became main subjects in the discussion of these texts during the period 1914-1933.
Examples are taken mainly from German literature.
Norà Sellei
(University of Debrecen)
Confession and Autobiography in Mary MacCarthy's Memories of a Catholic Girlhood
By relying both on the tradition of autobiography as confession (St. Augustine and Rousseau)
and on Foucault’s analysis of confession in The History of Sexuality, I will investigate how
the confessional mode of discourse defines both the rhetorics and the structure of Mary
MacCarthy’s autobiographical writing. I claim that the text is based on the confession-like
ritual of “telling the truth”—this is how we can interpret the narrator’s repetitive comments on
the autobiographical short stories and on her own mode of narration—, yet, as the stories
follow each other, the initial position of the confessor figuring as absolute power is gradually
transformed into what is closer to the Foucauldian notion of power, which the narrator and the
narrated “I” are able to resist. As a result, the text articulates more and more resistant and
subversive points which locate the validity of this autobiographical truth less in the
confessional ritual, whereas, at the same time, the text never poses as ultimate truth: rather, its
mode of discourse is defined by a certain teleology of the text as fiction.
Christopher Smith
(University of Norwich)
Thomas Hardy's A Pair of Blue Eyes
That Hardy quarried his novels out of his own experience (supplemented with some special
investigations for what he called 'padding') is well known. It has also become more and more
clear that The Life that appeared under Florence Hardy's name is a work of autobiography,
albeit in the third person, produced under the direct control of the novelist, who was very
anxious to shape his posthumous image. My proposal is to take one of the earlier, less highly
rated novels, A Pair of Blue Eyes, and trace the way in which Hardy massages his own
experience to make it into a novel. The scope will, of course, have to be fairly restricted, if it
is to fit the format, but I think something worthwhile could well be done. The aim will be, of
course, more to explore Hardy's methods of working than to complain.
Krystyna Stamirowska
(Jagiellonian University, Krakow)
Versions of Autobiography in B.S. Johnson’s Novels
For the British novelist B.S. Johnson (1933-1973) who claimed that “telling stories is telling
lies” and pledged himself “to write truth in the form of a novel” the use of autobiographical
material was a natural choice. In his three “middle stage” autobiographical novels (Albert
Angelo, Trawl and The Unfortunates) Johnson sets out to convey the truth about his own
experience. This commitment to truth leads him to confront - and to try to resolve – a
contradiction between the subjectivity and randomness of his données and the restrictions
imposed by rigidity of language and form. His experimental techniques and the artificiality of
narrative devices are therefore employed in the interests of achieving verisimilitude, and not
to promote experimentation as such.
The paper explores the tensions between a truth-telling autobiographical impulse (and
thus a commitment to realism) and the frequently alienating techniques employed to
undermine the structures which order and therefore distort the subjective “truth”.
Gulshan R. Taneja
(University of Delhi)
History and the Autobiographical Impulse in Nirad Chaudhuri
Abstract. In the context of autobiography, Wilhelm Dilthey located the principle of unity in
the human mind and understanding rather than in the organising structures of textual artefacts.
He insisted that history and the individual must always be perceived in relation to each other,
with the individual at the center of the connective structure. In his two-volume autobiography
Nirad Chaudhuri achieves a balance between the subjective self and the objective world. In
the process he successfully defines his own life in the context of the historical times during
which he lived, provides a valuable interpretation of the march of history through the eyes of
a “truly unknown Indian” through remarkable insights, wisdom and scholarship.
Synopsis. Even though Indian literary endeavour in English has found expression chiefly
through the novel--India’s single most valuable contribution to English letters is in non-fiction
prose. The first volume of Nirad Chaudhuri’s autobiography, The Autobiography of an
Unknown Indian appeared in 1951 (London: Macmillan) and immediately established itself as
a classic. No other author excited so much attention in the West since Tagore was awarded
the Nobel Prize in 1931. The publication of the 1400 page second volume, Thy Hand Great
Anarch!, (London: Chatto & Windus, 1987) drew a similar response.
Chaudhuri’s life (1897-1999) runs parallel to the course of Indian freedom movement at its
most effective and was marked by typical colonial aggression and violence. Volume I of the
autobiography, The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, describes the first twenty-five
years of Chaudhuri’s life in an obscure village in East Bengal. Thy Hand, Great Anarch!, the
second volume, goes on to recount his life as low-paid clerk in the military accounts
department, many years of subsequent unemployment and dependence on his family, a stint
as the secretary to the Indian nationalist leader Sarata Bose, and his work as war commentator
with All India Radio. These were the decades of poverty, want and humiliation. The thirtytwo year period covered by the second volume was also a time for literary apprenticeship,
during which, through persistence and hard work, Chaudhuri trained himself to appreciate the
best there was in music, art, literature, and history of European civilization.
Chaudhuri devotes considerable attention to political and socio-cultural developments in
India during this period and sets down his thoughts and feelings about public events--the
Indian freedom movement--to which he was an extraordinary witness for more than half a
century. The title of the second volume (borrowed from Pope’s Dunciad), indicates his view
of the inexorable march of history towards the inevitable decay and putrefaction of human
civilization, a pervasive decline affecting his own ancient Indian civilization and culture as
well as England and her art, culture, political ideals, and achievements. These highly
negative assessments often led him to vitriolic argument and waspish phraseology on such
subjects as Gandhi or Nehru, as well as British culture and politics.
The intellectual basis of Chaudhuri’s criticism is often misunderstood, his nostalgic
expression of regret at the disappearance of the British Empire from India even more so. It is
not that he does not value the status of a free citizen in a free state, but rather that history
pursues logic of its own; in the march of history empires “emerge as creators and preserves of
civilization.” He draws a distinction between European colonization and European
imperialism, regarding the latter as “a constant of history.” “The emergence of every new
civilization and of every new value in human life is accompanied by and is inseparable from
the domination of a particular group,” he asserts. Neither is imperialism for him inconsistent
“with moral principles, with freedom, and with human dignity.”
Not all autobiographies possess the artistic power and depth of imaginative literature. It is
here that the chief merit of Chaudhuri’s work lies. The two volumes have an organic unity
and are controlled by a central idea. No inner inconsistencies and false notes or endless
details mar the integrity of design and form. Chaudhuri achieves a balance between the
subjective self and the objective world. He renders other characters vividly alive and reveals
insight into their motives and passions. As one of the finest masters of English prose in India,
Chaudhuri belongs not with the Indian English novelists but with writers of reflective prose
such as Emerson, Vivekananda and Rammohun Roy. To their long and supple sentence he
adds sinewy strength and vitality. A relatively abstract diction is accorded a richer, more
evocative metaphorical life. His prose has majestic grandeur. Passages of great beauty and
poetically vivid descriptions nestle with others heavy with opinionated vigour. Despite its
severe thought and strenuous scholarship, the two volumes of Nirad Chaudhuri’s
autobiography are a joy to read for passionate energy of its prose, its sparkling wit, lively
anecdotes, varied allusion, and irony possessed of extraordinary range and depth.
Merle Tönnies
(University of Bochum)
Radicalising Postmodern Biofictions:
British Fictional Autobiography of the 21st Century
The mode of fictional autobiography has become very prominent in established British prose
writing from the year 2000 onwards. It can be seen as taking the basic impetus of the socalled postmodern biofictions (Martin Middeke) one step further: The unreliability of any
information about biographical subjects and postmodern self-referentiality have reached the
point where fictional narrators focus on their own selves but find them far too unstable to
function as a coherent centre of the narrative. The dividing line between the present of writing
the autobiography and the past events that are narrated is continuously blurred as well. Most
significantly, the writing process itself starts to shape the narrators' past and present reality;
life-writing encroaches upon living.
The paper will analyse three representative examples. Graham Swift's The Light of
Day (2003) is relatively cautious, concentrating on the interplay between apparently distinct
time levels, as the narrator becomes increasingly conscious of the power of writing in and
over his life. In Ian McEwan's Atonement (2001) the protagonist not only brings literary
models to life, but ultimately turns out to have deliberately fictionalised the periods of her and
the other characters' lives that the reader thought to be presented by an omniscient narrator.
As the title hints, A.S. Byatt's The Biographer's Tale (2000) introduces a meta-perspective.
Her narrator is trying to write a biography, but the unsuccessful quest for 'the truth'
unwittingly makes him compose an (in itself fictional) autobiography instead. Since this
narrator (in contrast to McEwan's) does not diverge from facts on purpose but is driven to do
so, Byatt's novel can be seen to convey increasing postmodern uncertainties particularly
vividly, while at the same time pinpointing their effect on contemporary British writing.
Smatie Yemenedzi-Malathouni
(University of Thessaloniki)
Personal Accounts and Puritan Politics in New England
The precise depiction of one's life events is contemporaneous with American Puritan dogma,
American Puritan philosophy, and of course with the American Puritan ideology. The
Puritans' ardent desire to prove their Godly mission to their descendants as well as their
preoccupation with salvation, which presupposed continuous self-examination, inspired a
considerable number of narratives which could be described as autobiographical testimonies.
Though far from modern norms of autobiography, these "early inscriptions of self" were
definitely records of Purian individual life and experience infused with Biblical references
and sometimes with poetic imagination. This paper examines the interaction between fact and
imagination, fiction and experience in the early "autobiographical" records of Colonial
American Literature.
Heiko Zimmermann
(University of Leipzig)
E. M. Forster’s Autobiographies: Modes of Telling a Life in Fiction
E. M. Forster was the author of many texts dealing with either Germany as the main topic, or
with Germany, the Germans or typical German characteristics as a means of contrast or
background for the discussion of the state of England. As a young man, he experienced at
close quarters German culture, language and landscape. In his early autobiographical texts,
Forster presented an image of Germany that corresponded with the image used in the author's
fiction. This relation between autobiography and fiction changed dramatically during the war,
and Forster used other ways of dealing with his national identity and his relationship with
Germany. This essay will explore this development of E. M. Forster's fiction and non-fiction.
The author’s adaptation to the language of his target audience in his writings during the war,
as well as his complex differentiation between Germany, the Germans and the Nazis in his
non-fictional writings, hint at a conflict between the author's values and the wartime context
(e.g. in the commentary to Humphrey Jennings’ A Diary for Timothy, his BBC broadcasts, his
third ‘course’ in the collaborative text with Christopher Dilke, A. E. Coppard and James
Laver "Three Courses and a Dessert"). Starting with a biographical account of Forster's
contacts with Germany, this essay will look at the relative images of Germany in the author's
fiction and non-fiction. The topic of the German war and its impact on the author and his
writings will be discussed in a subsequent chapter, which will lead to a description of the
alterations of Forster's beliefs. Before conclusions are drawn, the exceptions in Forster's way
of approaching Germany and the Germans in his writings, both fictional and autobiographical,
will be detailed, thus presenting a more complex view of the interaction between
autobiography and fiction of E. M. Forster.