Autobiography - Early Modern Texts
Autobiography John Stuart Mill 1: Childhood and early education •that his opinions in politics and in religion were more odious to all persons of influence and to the common run of prosperous Englishmen in that generation than either before or since; •that he was a man whom nothing would have induced to write against his
Autobiography as a Literary Genre
the author writes his autobiography because “it offers an ideal scope for satisfying that human urge and quest and curiosity about human nature ”1 There are numerous definitions of the term ‘autobiography’ in dictionaries and the books of literary terms; but it is difficult to find an allinclusive definition from the- available sets of
The Veto of the Imagination: A Theory of Autobiography
way, autobiography is the writer's de facto attempt to elucidate his/her present rather than past Thus, Barrett John Mandel essentially argues that the autobiographer's present spawns the aforementioned drama of self-cognition, for no one can "talk about the present at all but by
Educational Autobiography Paper - Purdue University
Educational Autobiography Paper Due: Week 4 Points: 100 Rubric: Blackboard Writing your educational autobiography should help clarify your beliefs about teaching and learning There are three main parts to this assignment: An overview of your educational experiences A description of special events or significant experiences in your education
Creating Your Racial Autobiography
Creating Your Racial Autobiography Start with your Racial Autobiography Bookends What can you recall about the earliest and most recent events and conversations about race, race relations, and/or racism that may have impacted your current perspectives and/or experiences
Cultural Autobiography Kara Roberts Regent University Ayee
definition of family shrunk and I began to consider my family to be made up of just my parents, dogs, and rabbit In our house hold everything was centered on God, trust, and communication It may be hard to believe, but I have no secrets from my parents My home is the one place that I feel safe to be completely myself
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T he Veto of the Imagination: A
Theory of Autobiography*L
ouis A. RenzaI n an autobiography one cannot avoid writing "often" where truth wouldr equire that "once" be written. For one always remains conscious that thew ord "once" explodes that darkness on which the memory draws; andt hough it is not altogether spared by the word "often," either, it is at leastpr eserved in the opinion of the writer, and he is carried across parts whichpe rhaps never existed at all in his life but serve him as a substitute for thosew hich his memory can no longer even guess at.--Franz KafkaI say "memory" and I recognize what I mean by it; but where do I recognizei t except in my memory itself? Can memory itself be present to itself bym eans of its image rather than by its reality? - -St. AugustineI did begin [my autobiography] but the resolve melted away and dis-a ppeared in a week and I threw my beginning away. Since then, about everyt hree or four years I have made other beginnings and thrown them away.- -Mark Twain-1- P erhaps more than any other literary concept, autobiography traps us into circular expla-nations of its being. Is it an indeterminate mixture of truth and fiction? Is it based essentially in factra
ther than self-invention? Or is it a full-fledged "literary" event whose primary being resides in andt
hrough the writing itself--in the "life" of the signifier as opposed to the life being signified?J ames M. Cox doubtless expresses our common-sense response to such questions when heclaims that autobiography is basically a factual rather than a fictional "narrative of a person's lifew
ritten by himself."l But as we learn from instances where fiction mimics autobiography, the nar-rative by itself formally determines and so takes precedence over the putative, factual orientation ofa
utobiographical references. Moreover, along with Northrop Frye and other critics, we can stress thati
n selecting, ordering, and integrating the writer's lived experiences according to its own teleologicalde
mands, the autobiographical narrative is beholden to certain imperatives of imaginative discourse.Autobiography, in short, transforms empirical facts into artifacts: it is definable as a form of "prosefi
ction."2 Cox himself examines particular autobiographies less as a neutral rendering of facts thana s a charged, condensed narrative through which the autobiographer symbolically reckons with his* "The Veto of the Imagination: A Theory of Autobiography" originally appeared in NewL iterary History 9 (1977): 1-26. Copyright@ 1977 by The Johns Hopkins University Press. It wasreprinted by permission in Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. James Olney (Princeton:P
rinceton University Press, 1980), pp. 268-95. I have revised slightly the present web version of thee
ssay. R enza -- "The Veto of the Imagination" 1 life as it was lived in socially dramatic situations--in revolutionary periods, for example, "when pol-i
tics and history become dominant realities for the imagination" (p. 252).In pra ctice, at least, Cox's "factual" conception of autobiography agrees with Frye's and in-de ed with the theoretical bias of contemporary critics, namely that the writing of autobiographyentails a unique act of imagination and not simply the writer's passive negotiation of the constraintsa
nd/or compulsions native to any act of self-publication. Various ways exist to reinforce this "ima-ginative" conception. Perhaps the most obvious way involves citing the presence of explicit fictionalt
echniques or elements in specific autobiographies.3 But the presence of such elements only showst hat autobiography self-consciously borrows from the methodological procedures of imaginative fic-t ion, and not that autobiography is founded on the immediate requisites of imaginative discourse.A more cogent way to "prove" the imaginative quality of autobiography is to keep in mind, as doesG eorges Gusdorf, that the autobiographical act spontaneously generates epistemological ambiva-l ence. The autobiographer of necessity knows as well as writes about his past from the limited per-s pective of his or her present self-image--ce qu'il est devenu. Wanting to express the "truth" aboutthis past, he or she thus adopts specific verbal strategies in order to transcend this limitation.4 Buti
f we wish to argue for the artistic constitution of autobiography, the writer's self-cognitive dilemmam
ust be seen to permeate the composition of his or her text. Contrary to what Roy Pascal impliesa bout the function of autobiography when he describes it as a mutually delimiting mixture of "de-sign" and "truth," autobiography does not preexist the act of composition by a separate act of self-re
flection.5S o we are theoretically led to a third "imaginative" conception of autobiography: thedyna mics or drama of autobiographical cognition occurs in terms of the written performance itself.A ccording to this conception, a given autobiographical text normally manifests the writer's spon-taneously "ironic" or experimental efforts to bring his past into the intentional purview of his presentna
rrative project.6 The autobiographer cannot help sensing his or her omission of facts from a lifet he totality or complexity of which constantly eludes him--the more so when discourse pressures thewriter into ordering these facts. Directly or indirectly infected with the prescience of incompleteness,t
he autobiographer concedes his or her life to a narrative "design" in tension with its own postu-lations. The result is an autobiographical text whose references appear to readers within an aesthetics
etting, that is, in terms of the narrative's own "essayistic" disposition rather than in terms of theirnont
extual truth or falsity. Thus, apparent discrepancies between the life being signified and them ode of its signification can "[render] suspect," as Jean Starobinski says, "the content of thenarrative, setting up a screen between the truth of the narrated past and the present of the narratives
ituation."7But while some autobiographies seem to exhibit or evince "ironic" discrepancies such asStarobinski perceives (for example, in Rousseau's Confessions), it is also true that in most autobi-og
raphies instances of tension between the act and object of signification are unequally distributedthroughout the narrative. In other words, they are inconsistent with or inessential to the narrative asa
whole. Moreover, though this conception manages to suspend the so-called "truth" import ofautobiographies, it fails to argue for the full aesthetic accessibility of an autobiographical text. Beingm
entally closer to his past than the reader, the writer can best appreciate its anxious complicationof
his or her present narrative and vice versa, whereas the reader can only "suspect" this temporaldi alectic. Clearly, we can argue for autobiography as a genuine imaginative enterprise only if weadopt the reader's a posteriori relation to the text and insist that the writer's references to his or herR
enza -- "The Veto of the Imagination" 2 pa st are subordinate to (as though they were a mere contingent source of "life-images") a narrativeessentially representing the writer's present self-identity apprehended also in the light of his or herfut
ure.8 Here the immediately accessible narrative becomes the autobiography itself. Put anotherw ay, autobiography is the writer's de facto attempt to elucidate his/her present rather than past. T hus, Barrett John Mandel essentially argues that the autobiographer's present spawns thea forementioned drama of self-cognition, for no one can "talk about the present at all but . . . byd istancing and fictionalizing it." Speaking as a would-be autobiographer, Mandel argues that hispr esent creates his past "by inspiring meaningless data with interpretation, direction, suggest-iveness--life. But as long as I live, my past is rooted in my present and springs to life with my present.
. . . I cannot fully give my past to the page because it flows mysteriously out of the incom-pre hensible moods of the present. And as new moods come upon me, my past comes upon me dif-ferently."9 This all but Coleridgean isolation of the writer's creative present at the time of writinga
llows us to view autobiography as a work, like works of poetic fiction, wholly and immediatelya ccessible to readers. But note what we have done: in sacrificing the autobiographer's past to asecondary role vis-quotesdbs_dbs12.pdfusesText_18