The autobiography effect : writing the self in post-structuralist theory

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The autobiography effect : writing the self in post-structuralist theory

Dennis Schep

(Routledge auto/biography studies)

Routledge, 2020

  • : hbk

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Includes bibliographical references (p. [237]-256) and index

Description and Table of Contents

Description

Since the advent of post-structuralism, various authors have problematized the modern conception of autobiography by questioning the status of authorship and interrogating the relation between language and reality. Yet even after making autobiography into a theoretical problem, many of these authors ended up writing about themselves. This paradox stands at the center of this wide-ranging study of the form and function of autobiography in the work of authors who have distanced themselves from its modern instantiation. Discussing Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Helene Cixous and others, this book grapples with the question of what it means to write the self when the self is understood as an effect of writing. Combining close reading, intellectual history and literary theory, The Autobiography Effect traces how precisely its theoretically problematic nature made autobiography into a central scene for the negotiation of philosophical positions and anxieties after structuralism.

Table of Contents

Preface Chapter One: The Subject of Autobiography Barthes' anti-authorialism Copyright and authorship Barthesian autobiography Return of the referent The autobiography effect Notes Bibliography Chapter Two: Bodies in Crisis Pathography Metaphor (Nancy) Contingency (Nietzsche) Interruption (Ronell) Notes Bibliography Chapter Three: Eye Problems Anthropology (Nietzsche) Alterity (Derrida) I (Cixous) Notes Bibliography Chapter Four: Origin Algeria Silence Breaking the silence Discursive proliferation L'Allegorie francaise Notes Bibliography Chapter Five: How Not to Write about Oneself Lack of identity (Levi-Strauss) Posthumous rereadings (de Man) The ecstasy of anonymity (Foucault) Conclusions Notes Bibliography

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