Helga Schwalm - Autobiography

Reading Journal - Session 5 - 22/11/2016

Helga Schwalm – Autobiography (The handbook of narratology)

·         as a literary genre signifies a retrospective narrative that undertakes to tell the author’s own life, or a substantial part of it

·         seeking (at least in its classic version) to reconstruct his/her personal development within a given historical, social and cultural framework

·         claims to be factual and non-fictional, but is inevitably constructive, imaginative

·         self-fashioning

·         governing structural and semantic principle: comprehensive and continuous retrospection (based on memory)

·         struggle for truthfulness and creativity, between oblivion, concealment, hypocrisy, self-deception and self-conscious fictionalizing

·         Bildungsgeschichte, personality formation

·         focus on psychological introspection, sense of historicity, link btw author’s life and literary work

·         generally first-person narration with some exceptions (3^rd person, verse)

o   narrating I: experiencing subject

o   narrated I: narrating subject

o   present both as the end and condition of its narration

o   as subject continues to live, no “real” end  until “quasi-death”

o   real, historical I not always in tune with the narrating and experiencing I’s, but considered the real author and external subject of reference

·         ideological I

o   covert operation: concept of a personhood culturally available to the narrator when he tells the story

o   reflects the social and intertextual embedding of the autobiographical narrative

o   only through engagement with socially/culturally prefigured models can individuals represent themselves as subjects

·         sociological angle: form of social action making sense of a personal experience in terms of general relevance

·         historically: emergence of autobiography as a genre at the same time as the modern subject (~1800)

·         temporalization of experience

·         represent a unique individual

·         fragmentation: modern writers subvert chronology and split the subject, foregrounding visual and scenic/topographical components, highlighting role of language, conflating auto- and heterobiography, transforming lives into fiction

·         linked to critical history of subjectivity

·         past endowed with meaning in the light of the present

·         constructs an individual life as a coherent, meaningful whole

·         memoir: representing the individual as social type, confirming autographer’s place in the world

·         autobiography: focus on identity and memory

·         inextricable connection btw narrative and identity with autobiography as the prme generic site of enactment

·         autobiographical pact:

o   autobiography as an institutionalized communicative act where author and reader enter into a particular ‘contract

o   The author’s proper name refers to a singular autobiographical identity, identifying author, narrator and protagonist as one, and thus ensures the reading as autobiography.

·         new considerations: gender, postcolonial, eco-autobiography (relationship btw natural setting and the self, topographical figurations)

·         shifted from literary genre to a broad range of cultural practices that draw on and incorporate a multitude of textual modes and genres

This text tries to define autobiography in a changing historical context, mapping the development, different theories concerning it and the way it has changed in newer times, not only taking identity and memory into account, but also different influences and purposes that shape this identity, like consciousness of topography, gender, etc.). It is definitely easier to follow than Lejeune’s text which goes very much into detail concerning the different positions a narrator can occupy and how the reader has to be conscious of that. I certainly never thought of the many distinctions and developments concerning autobiographies that one can be aware of, but this text is a useful reference for the purpose and different trends in this genre, as well as a good reference for further reading material.