ENGLISH LITERATURE & CULTURE
‘I’ IS ANOTHER:
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
ACROSS GENRES
Camelia Elias
the digital self  agency (Reading
Autobiography, Smith and Watson)
• subjects the reader (interpellation,
Althusser)
 a universal or objective point of view implies a
particular ideology of the subject
• “agents change and change their world by
virtue of the systemic operations of
multiple ideologies.”
 multiple ideologies “expose both the subject and
the system to perpetual reconfiguration.”
(Elizabeth Wingrove, “Interpellating Sex”, Signs
24, no. 4)
plays with “transverse tactics” (de
Certeau)
•
individuals and groups deploy tactics
to manipulate the spaces in which
they are constrained (ex. work place)
 a factory worker may superimpose
another system (of language or culture
onto the system imposed on him in the
factory
plays with imagination
• imagination negotiates between “sites of
•
•
•
agency” (Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and
Difference in the Global Cultural Economy”)
imagination negotiates between imagined
communities
imagination negotiates between “globally
defined fields of possibility”
individuals as sites of agency deploy their
imaginations as a social fact and a kind of
work to navigate the disjunctures of global
flows that create radically different selfunderstandings
agency as the possibility of
variation
•
•
•
•
performing an (avatar) self (Judith
Butler)
games of culture
the unconscious is a potential site of
agency (Teresa de Laurentis,
“Eccentric Subjects”)
excess is a source of resistance to
socially enforced calls to fixed
identities
Federman
• autobiography within criticism
• the personal as paratext (footnotes,
•
•
•
•
dedications, acknowledgements)
have some fun! nobody is perfect
instruct! acknowledge the limit of your
knowledge
subvert politics! mess up the authorial
voice: who speaks what to whom, on what
and whose authority
the personal is both a risk and an
opportunity
autobiography as a testimony for
culture
•
•
•
•
stage
spectacle
performance (no authenticity)
active agency/engaging
juxtapositions
Miloi
• diary as a self-portrait
• Je est un autre
• biographic ego vs the
profound ego
• 1st perosn narrative
• time
Federman
• I don’t keep a diary
• I don’t need one
• writing about oneself
is in fact writing about
the other selves that
exist in all of us
• 3rd person selfnarrative
• diarists invent things
• many writers like to
write self-portrait of
themselves: MY BODY
IN NINE PARTS
Miloi
• why aren’t people
(readers and writers
as well) interested as
they were in prose or
poetry and they now
prefer the small,
insignificant history of
a certain individual.
• Who is talking in the
diary, who is being
silent and why?
Federman
• So the question should
be: why the fuck do
you continue to write
novels Federman?
Why don’t you write a
diary? Or why don’t
you give up writing?
Christine
• that there isn’t just one
voice speaking in a diary
because it is written from
different point of views
• conscious process of
writing about oneself
• I am created through my
thoughts and while
constructing myself I
consider the situation –
what is it good for me to
tell the person across the
table, what do I tell my
boss and what is kept in
silence.
• self-portrait
• belief
Camelia
• decapitated ontology
• the diarist losing his
head
• marginalia
• Federman  time in
fiction deliberately fucks
up time – or what the
great Beckett once called
that great fornicator -that double-headed
monster.