Acknowledgements I would like to express my gratitude to Michael Sheringham for his invaluable support and encouragement. Many thanks for their insightful comments and suggestions go to Nicholas White, John OBrien, Johnnie Gratton, Laura Marcus, Úlfhildur Dagsdóttir, Orri Vésteinsson, Halldór Guðmundsson and Patrick Crowley. I am also grateful to Thomas MunchPetersen for giving me the opportunity to develop this material in teaching. A special thanks for inspiration and companionship go to Emma Kemp and Svanhildur Óskarsdóttir. And, of course, as ever, to without whom... Örbrún Halldórsdóttir, Guðmundur Georgsson and Dagur Gunnarsson
Borderlines Postmodern Studies 33 Series edited by Theo D’haen and Hans Bertens Borderlines Autobiography and Fiction in Postmodern Life Writing Gunnthórunn Gudmundsdóttir Amsterdam - New York, NY 2003 The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence” ISBN: 90-420-1145-9 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam – New York, NY 2003 Printed in The Netherlands Acknowledgements I would like to express my gratitude to Michael Sheringham for his invaluable support and encouragement Many thanks for their insightful comments and suggestions go to Nicholas White, John O'Brien, Johnnie Gratton, Laura Marcus, Úlfhildur Dagsdóttir, Orri Vésteinsson, Halldór Guðmundsson and Patrick Crowley I am also grateful to Thomas Munch-Petersen for giving me the opportunity to develop this material in teaching A special thanks for inspiration and companionship go to Emma Kemp and Svanhildur Óskarsdóttir And, of course, as ever, to without whom Örbrún Halldórsdóttir, Guðmundur Georgsson and Dagur Gunnarsson This page intentionally left blank Contents Introduction: Autobiography and Fiction Memory and the Autobiographical Process Lillian Hellman, Georges Perec, Paul Auster 11 The Use of Narrative in Autobiography Suzannah Lessard, Peter Handke, Jenny Diski 57 Gender and Fiction in Women's Autobiographical Writing Janet Frame, Marie Cardinal 97 Autobiography and Journeys Between Cultures Eva Hoffman, Michael Ondaatje, Kyoko Mori 141 Biography in Autobiography 183 Photographs in Autobiography 221 Conclusion: Postmodernism and Borderlines 263 Bibliography 275 Index 291 This page intentionally left blank Introduction Autobiography and Fiction The field of contemporary life-writing offers many avenues for exploration In the last thirty years or so, theoretical writing on autobiography has blossomed, autobiographies written from a specifically female perspective or from the perspective of members of ethnic minorities have proliferated, and the genre, or - as we shall see - cluster of genres and sub-genres, has been a fertile ground for experimental writing The reasons for this interest in life-writing are many and varied, but one important factor is that autobiography - in its various guises - can capture and address many contemporary concerns, for example the status of the subject, the relations and representations of ethnicity and gender, and perhaps most importantly questions the individual's relationship with the past Autobiographical writing can thereby reflect some of the main preoccupations of postmodernism,1 which has often been defined in terms of questions about our knowledge of the past and the difficulty of articulating our relationship to it.2 Such issues abound in recent life-writing Postmodernism has also been described as a pluralistic art which 'blurs the boundaries between 'high' and 'popular' culture, as well as between art and every-day experience'.3 This work concentrates specifically on the borderlines between autobiography and fiction in See for instance Leigh Gilmore's discussion where she sees postmodernism as being the perfect mode to 'free' autobiographical discourse in 'The Mark of Autobiography: Postmodernism, Autobiography, and Genre', in Autobiography and Postmodernism, eds Kathleen Ashley, Leigh Gilmore and Gerald Peters (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), pp 3-21 But note also Michael Sheringham's review of Autobiography and Postmodernism where he explains that some of the qualities Gilmore finds in postmodern autobiographies are intrinsic to autobiography itself in Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 20 (1997) 472-478 See for instance Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (London: Routledge, 1988) Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), p vii Bibliography 281 Burke, Peter, 'History as Social Memory', in Memory: History, Culture and the Mind, ed Thomas Butler (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), pp 97-113 Burke, Sean, The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992) Butler, Thomas, 'Memory: A Mixed Blessing', in Memory: History, Culture and the Mind, ed Thomas Butler (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), pp 1-31 Cairns, Lucille, Marie Cardinal: Motherhood and Creativity (Glasgow: University of Glasgow French and German Publications, 1992) Carr, David, Time, Narrative and History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986) Carruthers, Mary J., The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) Chodorow, Nancy, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1978) Cixous, Hélène, 'From the Scene of the Unconscious to the Scene of History', trans Deborah W Carpenter, in The Future of Literary Theory, ed Ralph Cohen (London: Routledge, 1989), pp 1-18 Clarke, Graham, 'Introduction', in The Portrait in Photography, ed Graham Clarke (London: Reaktion Books, 1992), pp 1-5 Clifford, James, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997) Codrescu, Andrei, 'Adding to My Life', in Autobiography and Postmodernism, eds Kathleen Ashley, et al (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), pp 21-30 Cohen, Ralph, 'Do Postmodern Genres Exist?', in Postmodern Genres, ed Marjorie Perloff (London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1980), pp 11-27 Couser, G Thomas, Altered Egos: Authority in American Autobiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989) Culler, Jonathan, The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981) 282 Borderlines de Man, Paul, 'Autobiography as De-Facement', in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), pp 67-81 Derrida, Jacques, 'The Deaths of Roland Barthes', trans Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, in Philosophy and Non-Philosophy since Merleau-Ponty, ed Hugh J Silverman (London: Routledge, 1988), pp 259-296 Eagleton, Terry, The Illusions of Postmodernism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996) Eakin, Paul John, Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self-Invention (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985) - 'Philippe Lejeune and the Study of Autobiography', Romance Studies (1986) 1-14 - 'Narrative and Chronology as Structures of Reference and the New Model Autobiographer', in Studies in Autobiography, ed James Olney, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp 32-41 - 'Introduction', in American Autobiography: Retrospect and Prospect, ed Paul John Eakin (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), pp 3-25 - Touching the World: Reference in Autobiography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992) Eco, Umberto, Reflections on the Name of the Rose, trans William Weaver (London: Secker and Warburg, 1984) Ellis, David, 'Biography and Friendship: Johnson's Life of Savage', in Imitating Art: Essays in Biography, ed David Ellis (London: Pluto Press, 1993), pp 19-35 - 'Images of D H Lawrence: On the Use of Photographs in Biography', in The Portrait in Photography, ed Graham Clarke (London: Reaktion Books, 1992), pp 155-173 Falk, Doris V., Lillian Hellman (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1978) Felman, Shosana, 'Women and Madness: The Critical Phallacy', Diacritics (Winter 1975) 2-10 Fink, Bruce, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995) Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth, 'My Statue, My Self: Autobiographical Writings of Afro-American Women', in The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women's Autobiographical Writings, ed Shari Benstock (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp 63-89 Bibliography 283 Friday, Nancy, My Mother/My Self: The Daughter's Search for Identity (London: Sheldon Press, 1979) Friedman, Susan Stanford, 'Women's Autobiographical Selves: Theory and Practice', in The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women's Autobiographical Writings, ed Shari Benstock (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp 34-62 The Future of Literary Theory, ed Ralph Cohen (London: Routledge, 1989) Garber, Marjorie, 'Postmodernism and the Possibility of Biography', in The Seductions of Biography, eds Mary Rhiel and David Suchoff (New York: Routledge, 1996), pp 175-177 Gearhart, Suzanne, The Open Boundary of History and Fiction: A Critical Approach to the French Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1984) Gernsheim, Helmut, Creative Photography (New York: Bonanza, 1972) Gilmore, Leigh, 'The Mark of Autobiography: Postmodernism, Autobiography, and Genre', in Autobiography and Postmodernism, eds Kathleen Ashley, et al (Amherst: University of Massachussetts Press, 1994), pp 3-21 Goldberg, Vicki, The Power of Photography: How photographs changed our lives (New York: Abbeville Press, 1991) Gratton, Johnnie, 'Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes: Autobiography and the Notion of Expression', Romance Studies (1986) 57-65 - 'Postmodern French Fiction: Practice and Theory', in The Cambridge Companion to the French Novel: From 1800 to the present, ed Timothy Unwin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp 242-260 Halbwachs, Maurice, Les Cadres sociaux de la mémoire (Paris: Librairie Félix Alcan, 1925) - On Collective Memory, ed and trans Lewis A Coser (Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press, 1992) Hall, Colette, 'L'Ecriture féminine and the Search for the Mother in the Works of Violette Leduc and Marie Cardinal', in Women in French Literature, ed Michel Guggenheim (Saratoga, CAL: Amna Libri, 1988), pp 231-238 Harris, Mark, Saul Bellow: Drumlin Woodchuck (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1980) 284 Borderlines Hassan, Ihab, The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971) Hewitt, Leah D., Autobiographical Tightropes (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990) Hirsch, Marianne, 'Mothers and Daughters', Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (Autumn 1981) 201-220 Hoffmann, Gerhard, 'The Absurd and its Forms of Reduction in Postmodern American Fiction', in Approaching Postmodernism, ed Douwe Fokkema and Hans Bertens (Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamin, 1986), pp 185210 Hogan, Rebecca, 'Engendered Autobiographies: The Diary as a Feminine Form', in Autobiography and the Questions of Gender, ed Shirley Neuman (London: Frank Cass, 1991), pp 95-107 Holmes, Richard, 'Biography: Inventing the Truth', in The Art of Literary Biography, ed John Batchelor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp 15-25 Hutcheon, Linda, 'Running in the Family: The Postmodernist Challenge', in Spider Blues: Essays on Michael Ondaatje, ed Sam Solecki (Montreal: Vehicule Press, 1985), pp 301-314 - A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (London: Routledge, 1988) Imitating Art: Essays in Biography, ed David Ellis (London: Pluto Press, 1993) Jacobus, Mary, 'The Question of Language: Men of Maxims and The Mill on the Floss', in Writing and Sexual Difference, ed Elizabeth Abel (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982), pp 37-52 Jameson, Fredric, 'Postmodernism, Or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism', New Left Review 146 (1984) 53-92 Jay, Paul, Being in the Text: Self-Representation from Wordsworth to Roland Barthes (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984) Jefferson, Ann, 'Autobiography as Intertext: Barthes, Sarraute, RobbeGrillet', in Intertextuality: Theories and Practices, eds Judith Still and Michael Worton (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), pp 109-128 Jelinek, Estelle C., 'Introduction: Women's Autobiography and the Male Tradition', in Women's Autobiography: Essays in Criticism, ed Estelle C Jelinek (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), pp 1-20 Bibliography 285 Johnson, Barbara, A World of Difference (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1989) - 'Whose Life is it, anyway?', in The Seductions of Biography, eds Mary Rhiel and David Suchoff (New York: Routledge, 1996), pp 119-121 Kermode, Frank, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967) - The Genesis of Secrecy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979) Klinkowitz, Jerome, and James Knowlton, Peter Handke and the Postmodern Transformation: The Goalie's Journey Home (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1983) Knight, Diana, 'Roland Barthes, or The Woman Without a Shadow', in Writing the Image After Roland Barthes, ed Jean-Michel Rabaté (Philadephia: University of Pennsylvania, 1997), pp 132-143 Krell, David Farrell, Of Memory, Reminiscence and Writing: On the Verge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990) Kristeva, Julia, Des Chinoises (Paris: Éditions des Femmes, 1974) - 'About Chinese Women', trans Seán Hand in The Kristeva Reader, ed Toril Moi (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp 139-159 Lee, A Robert, 'The Mirror of Biography: Henry James's Hawthorne', in Imitating Art: Essays in Biography, ed David Ellis (London: Pluto Press, 1993), pp 67-80 Lejeune, Philippe, Le Pacte autobiographique Nouvelle édition augmentée (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1996) - 'W or the Memory of Childhood', trans David Bellos, Review of Contemporary Fiction (Spring 1993) 88-98 Lernout, Geert, 'Unfamiliar Voices in Ondaatje's First Two Novels', in Multiple Voices: Recent Canadian Fiction, ed Jeanne Delbaere (Sidney: Dangaroo Press, 1990), pp 91-102 Lionnet, Francoise, Autobiographical Voices: Race, Gender, SelfPortraiture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989) Lloyd, Genevieve, Being in Time: Selves and Narrators in Philosophy and Literature (London: Routledge, 1993) Lury, Celia, Prosthetic Culture: Photography, Memory, Identity (London: Routledge, 1998) 286 Borderlines Lyotard, Jean-François, La Condition postmoderne: Rapport sur le savoir (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1979) McCord, Phyllis Frus, '"A specter viewed by a specter": Autobiography in Biography', Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly (1986) 219-228 Marcus, Laura, Auto/biographical Discourses: Theory, Criticism, Practice (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994) Memory: History, Culture and the Mind, ed Thomas Butler (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989) Miller, D A., Narrative and its Discontents: Problems of Closure in the Traditional Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981) Mitchell, W J T., 'The Ethics of Form in the Photographic Essay', Afterimage (1989) 8-13 Moi, Toril, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (London: Methuen, 1985) Nadel, Ira Bruce, Biography: Fiction, Fact and Form (London: Macmillan, 1984) Neefs, Jacques, and Hans Hartje, Georges Perec: Images (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1993) Nussbaum, Felicity A., 'Eighteenth-Century Women's Autobiographical Commonplaces', in The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women's Autobiographical Writings, ed Shari Benstock (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp 147-171 Perec, Georges, 'Statement of Intent', trans David Bellos, Review of Contemporary Fiction 13 (Spring 1993) 21-22 Perloff, Marjorie, 'Introduction', in Postmodern Genres, ed Marjorie Perloff (London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988), pp 310 - '"What has occurred only once": Barthes's Winter Garden/Boltanski's Archives of the Dead', in Writing the Image After Roland Barthes, ed Jean-Michel Rabaté (Philadephia: University of Pennsylvania, 1997) pp 32-58 Plantinga, Theodore, How Memory Shapes Narratives: A Philosophical Essay on Redeeming the Past (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1992) Poirier, Richard, 'Introduction', in Lillian Hellman, Three: An Unfinished Woman, Pentimento, Scoundrel Time (New York: Little Brown, 1979), pp vii-xxv Bibliography 287 The Portrait in Photography, ed Graham Clarke (London: Reaktion Books, 1992) Postmodern Genres, ed Marjorie Perloff (London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1980) Pratt, Mary Louise, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992) The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women's Autobiographical Writings, ed Shari Benstock (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988) Ray, Sangeeta, 'Memory, Identity, Patriarchy: Porjecting a Past in the Memoirs of Sara Suleri and Michael Ondaatje', Modern Fiction Studies 39(1993) 37-58 Ricœur, Paul, Temps et récit, vols (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 19831985) - Time and Narrative, vols, trans Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press, 1984-1988) - Soi-même comme un autre (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1990) Rugg, Linda Haverty, Picturing Ourselves: Photography and Autobiography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997) Rushdie, Salman, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 19811991 (London: Granta Books, 1991) Rutherford, Anna, 'Introducing the Writers', in Multiple Voices: Recent Canadian Fiction ed Jeanne Delbaere (Sidney: Dangaroo Press, 1990), pp 24-41 Sanderson, Richard K., and Rena Sanderson, 'Suicide and Literary Biography: The Case of Hemingway', in Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 20 (1997) 405-436 The Seductions of Biography, eds Mary Rhiel and David Suchoff (New York: Routledge, 1996) Sekula, Allan, 'The Body and the Archive', October 39 (Winter 1986) 3-65 Sheringham, Michael, French Autobiography: Devices and Desires Rousseau to Perec (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993) - Review of Autobiography and Postmodernism in Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 20 (1997) 472-478 Shiach, Morag, Hélène Cixous: A Politics of Writing (London: Routledge, 1991) 288 Borderlines Showalter, Elaine, Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997) Smith, Barbara Herrstein, Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968) Smith, Paul, Discerning the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988) Smith, Robert, Derrida and Autobiography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) Smith, Sidonie, A Poetics of Women's Autobiography: Marginality and the Fictions of Self-Representation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987) Sontag, Susan, Illness as Metaphor (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978) - On Photography (London: Penguin Books, 1979) Spacks, Patricia Meyer, 'Selves in Hiding', in Women's Autobiography: Essays in Criticism, ed Estelle C Jelinek (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), pp 112-132 Spider Blues: Essays on Michael Ondaatje, ed Sam Solecki (Montreal: Vehicule Press, 1985) Stanton, Domna C., 'Autogynography - Is the Subject Different?', in The Female Autograph: Theory and Practice of Autobiography from the Tenth to the Twentieth Century, ed Domna C Stanton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp 3-20 Studies in Autobiography, ed James Olney, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988) Sturken, Marita, 'Personal Stories and National Meanings: Memory, Reenactment and the Image', in The Seductions of Biography, eds Mary Rhiel and David Suchoff (New York: Routledge, 1996), pp 31-41 Sturrock, John, The Language of Autobiography: Studies in the First Person Singular (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) - 'Introduction' in Stendhal, The Life of Henry Brulard (London: Penguin, 1995), pp vii-xxvii Tagg, John, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (London: Macmillan Education, 1988) Thieme, John A., '"Historical Relations": Modes of Discourse in Michael Ondaatje's Running in the Family', in Narrative Strategies in Canadian Literature: Feminism and Bibliography 289 Postcolonialism, eds Coral Ann Howells and Lynette Hunter (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1991), pp 40-48 Thompson, Becky, and Sangeeta Tyagi, 'Introduction: Storytelling as Social Conscience: The Power of Autobiography', in Names We Call Home: Autobiography on Racial Identity, eds B Thompson and S Tyagi (New York: Routledge, 1996) White, Hayden, '"Figuring the nature of the times deceased": Literary Theory and Historical Writing', in The Future of Literary Theory, ed Ralph Cohen (London: Routledge, 1989), pp 1944 Women's Autobiography: Essays in Criticism, ed Estelle C Jelinek (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980) Wong, Sau-Ling Cynthia, 'Immigrant Autobiography: Some Questions of Definition and Approach', in American Autobiography: Retrospect and Prospect, ed Paul John Eakin (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991) pp 142-170 Wood, Mary Elene, The Writing on the Wall: Women's Autobiography and the Asylum (Urbana, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994) Woolf, Virginia, A Room of One's Own (London: Hogarth Press, 1929) - 'The Art of Biography', in Collected Essays, vol 4, ed Leonard Woolf (London: Chatto and Windus, 1969), pp 221228 - 'The New Biography', in Collected Essays, vol 4, pp 229235 Worthen, John, 'The Necessary Ignorance of a Biographer', in The Art of Literary Biography, ed John Batchelor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp 227-244 Wright, William, Lillian Hellman: The Image, the Woman (London: Sigdwick and Jackson, 1987) Writing the Image After Roland Barthes, ed Jean-Michel Rabaté (Philadephia: University of Pennsylvania, 1997) This page intentionally left blank Index Ackerley, J R 7, 10, 196, 197, 199, 202-204, 207, 213 Ackroyd, Peter 185 Anderson, Linda 100n Antin, Mary 149 Apter, Emily 175 Attridge, Derek 242n Austen, Jane 156 Auster, Paul 7, 8, 19, 11, 13, 14, 16, 17, 25-31, 33, 44, 51,-54, 91, 183, 189, 198, 199, 208217, 219, 229, 244, 249-255, 260, 266, 269, 270, 272 Barnes, Julian 185, 190n, 256, 268 Barone, Dennis 26n Barthes, Roland 7, 10, 228-242, 244, 247, 249, 250, 255, 258260, 267, 268, 272 Bassnett, Susan 169n Beckett, Samuel 93 Bell, William 186, 187, 257 Bellos, David 37 Bellow, Saul 189 Benabou, Marcel 247 Benjamin, Walter 77n, 87, 237n, 239, 252n Benstock, Shari 99n Bergland, Betty 147 Berliner, Alan 200, 201, 268 Billson, Marcus K 20n Boelhower, William 142n, 148, 151, 178n Bolton, Richard 228 Boswell, James 189 Brilliant, Richard 226, 227, 233, 248 Brooks, Peter 54, 59, 71, 74, 83, 87, 88n, 89, 95 Broughton, W S 103n Brown, Maurice F 14n Browning, Elizabeth Barrett 221, 241 Burke, Peter 39, 47 Burke, Sean 231n Burton, Tim 268 Butler, Thomas 31 Buttinger, Muriel Gardiner 21n Byatt, A S 185 Cairns, Lucille 117n, 127n, 135, 137 Calvino, Italo 191, 192, 197 Cardinal, Marie 7, 8, 9, 98, 101, 107-112, 115-120, 122, 125, 127-130, 134-139 Carr, David 59n Carruthers, Mary 11, 15 Chatwin, Bruce 174 Cheever, Susan 199 Chodorow, Nancy 121n, 123 Cixous, Hélène 101, 116, 121, 122, 130, 133n Clarke, Graham 236 Clifford, James 177, 178 Codrescu, Andrei 75, 148 Cohen, Ralph 7n Conrad, Joseph 161 Couser, G Thomas 163n Culler, Johnathan 59n De Beauvoir, Simone 129 De Man, Paul 3, 225n DeLillo, Don 45 Derrida, Jacques 237n Diski, Jenny 7, 9, 61, 92-96, 267, 269 Duchamp, Marcel 252 292 Duras, Marguerite 5, 64, 118n, 119, 124, 125, 127, 128, 227, 244 Eagleton, Terry 1n Eakin, Paul John 4n, 52, 84, 147, 163, 185, 186, 187, 231n, 237, 271, 272 Eco, Umberto 265 Ellis, David 189, 226 Ellroy, James 7, 10, 204-206, 213, 218 Ernaux, Annie 7, 8, 10, 57, 59, 117n, 118n, 120, 128, 193, 194, 196-198, 211 Falk, Doris V 49n Fellini, Frederico 268 Felman, Shosana 110n Forster, Margaret 10, 64, 194, 195, 197-200, 205, 211, 212, 218 Fowles, John 92 Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth 137 Frame, Janer 7, 8, 9, 97, 98, 101108, 110-113, 115-118, 123, 125-139, 145, 146, 229, 230 Fraser, Ronald 194, 206 Friday, Nancy 118 Friedman, Susan Stanford 99n, 100n Garber, Marjorie 263, 264 Gearhart, Suzanne Gellhorn, Martha 21n Gilmore, Leigh 1n Goldberg, Vicki 250, 251, 254 Gosse, Edmund 2n, 196 Grant, Linda 2n Gratton, Johnnie 4, 231n, 235, 267 Guðbergur Bergsson 208 Borderlines Halbwachs, Maurice 25, 34, 45, 49, 50 Hall, Colette 100, 127n Handke, Peter 7, 8, 9, 57, 58, 61, 77-87, 90-92, 96, 183, 193, 194, 198, 216, 269, 270 Hellman, Lillian 7, 8, 13, 14, 15n, 17-21, 25-27, 32-34, 36, 38, 39, 42-45, 47-50, 52-54, 60, 269, 270 Hemingway, Ernest 52 Hewitt, Leah D 5, 121n Hirsch, Marianne 101n Hodgins, Jack 146n Hoffman, Eva 7, 9, 141-144, 147152, 156, 163-167, 173, 174, 177-181, 267, 268, 269 Hogan, Rebecca 26n Holmes, Richard 206, 207, 263n Hughes, Ted 187 Hutcheon, Linda 1n, 86n, 143n, 160n, 264, 265, 266, 267, 268 Irigaray, Luce 116, 121n, 138 Jacobus, Mary 138 James, Henry 190n Jameson, Fredric 265 Jay, Paul 270 Jefferson, Ann Jelinek, E C 99 Johnson, Barbara 97, 116, 121, 187 Johnson, Samuel 189 Kermode, Frank 83n, 92, 93, 195 Kingston, Maxine Hong 118n, 163n Klein, Melanie 121 Krell, David F 15 Kristeva, Julia 119n, 121n Kuhn, Annette 227 Lawrence, D H 170, 171 Index Leduc, Violette 135n Lee, A Robert 190n Leiris, Michel 86 Lejeune, Philippe 2, 3, 22n, 37, 38 Lernout, Geert 160n Lessard, Suzannah 7, 9, 10, 57, 58, 61-77, 87-91, 96, 183, 202-204, 207, 211-213, 221, 270 Lessing, Doris 222, 224, 227 Lott, Tim 2n, 194, 198, 204, 211 Lury, Celia 221n, 240n Lyotard, Jean-François 86n, 270n Mann, Thomas 201n Marcus, Laura 139, 184 Marquez, Gabriel Garcia 201n Martinez, Ursula 268 Maxwell, William 271 May, Henry F 10, 52, 132n, 194, 195, 197, 199, 205, 211, 212, 218 McCarthy, Mary 21n McCord, Phyllils Frus 185, 187, 218 McCourt, Frank 6, 64 Miller, D A 87n Mitchell, W J T 258 Moi, Toril 121, 130 Mori, Kyoko 9, 142, 167-169, 174n, 179, 269 Morrison, Blake 2n Nabokov, Vladimir 91, 151, 190n, 224-226 Nadel, Ira Bruce 195, 201, 203, 215, 218 Nussbaum, Felicity 99 Ondaatje, Christopher 154n, 162 Ondaatje, Michael 7, 8, 9, 10, 142, 143, 147, 152-162, 168172, 174, 176, 179-181, 183, 293 185, 191, 219, 229, 250, 254, 255-260, 266, 268, 269, 271, 272 Perec, Georges 7, 8, 10, 11, 13, 15, 21-25, 27, 34-42, 45-47, 50, 52-54, 229, 242-250, 260, 269, 270, 272 Perloff, Marjorie 242n, 264 Plantinga, Theodore 41 Plath, Sylvia 128 Poirier, Richard 42 Pratt, Mary Louise 169, 172 Ray, Sangeeta 143n Riceour, Paul 57, 59, 60, 62, 66, 67, 69n, 74, 75, 77, 83, 86, 87, 91 Rousseau 61, 87 Rugg, Linda Haverty 223, 225, 250, 252, 259 Rushdie, Salman 141, 143, 151, 165n, 167, 172, 268 Sanderson, Rena 198n Sanderson, Richard K 198n Sarraute, Nathalie 118n, 121n Schweig, Stefan 87 Sekula, Alan 253 Sheringham, Michael 1n, 3n, 23, 74, 75, 135n, 216 Sherman, Cindy 227 Shiach, Morag 101, 123 Showalter, Elaine 117n Smith, Barbara Herrnstein 87 Smith, Paul 233 Smith, Robert 5n Smith, Sidonie A 20n, 98n Sontag, Susan 111, 247, 250, 254, 255 Spacks, Patricia Meyer 98 Spence, Jo 227 Stanton, Domna C 129 Stendhal 61, 227 294 Sturken, Marita 269 Sturrock, John 4n, 61n Symons, A J A 207 Tagg, John 223, 226, 239, 259 Thieme, John A 176n Thompson, Becky 143n Tyagi, Sangeeta 143n White, Hayden 59n, 265n White, Stanford 58, 62, 63, 65, 67,-72, 74, 89, 204 Wicks, Susan 2n, 198 Wong, Say-Ling Cynthia 148n Wood, Mary Elene 111, 116 Woolf, Leonard 170 Woolf, Virginia 16n, 31, 124, 129, 207n, 215, 217, 218 Worthen, John 188, 191 Wright, William 21n Borderlines [...]... Borderlines postmodernist life- writing The aim is to see how by demarcating and investigating these borderlines we can come to a better understanding of the role of fiction in autobiography, and this can then enable us to examine the representation of the past in current life- writing It is not my aim here to pinpoint one definitive border between autobiography and fiction, 4 rather I attempt to outline... memory and fiction interact in autobiography: firstly in memory's relationship to writing, secondly in the role of forgetting in life- writing, and thirdly in the connection between private memories and public events In her study of the role of memory in medieval culture Mary Carruthers explains that in the memory schemes so common in that era, iteration - or reciting texts in 1 Paul Auster, The Invention... and the truth-value of photographs In the next section I look at the links between memory and photographs in Georges Perec's autobiography, at photographs as clues to the past in Auster's text and finally at Ondaatje's use of documents in his book on Billy the Kid and in his autobiography, Running in the Family In attempting to demarcate the borderlines between autobiography and fiction in recent life- writing. .. author and his intention, is built into the very structure of autobiography considered as a figure of reading.' 'Philippe Lejeune and the Study of Autobiography' , Romance Studies 8 (1986) 1-14 (p 11) Reference in autobiography is Paul John Eakin's main theme in his two books, Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of SelfInvention (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985) and Touching the... at writing the painful, almost forgotten, past, a private loss that has been overshadowed by public events and the death of millions Perec's unique way of intertwining fictional chapters and autobiographical chapters, shows that an investigation of memory can be a fertile ground for experimental lifewriting 2 Writing and Memory: The Presence of the Past Writing and memory have long been entwined in. .. between writing and memory In the first section I focus specifically on that relationship, asking, for example, what are the connections between writing and memory and what processes are at work in writing memories, and how do we remember in writing? The writers I discuss in this chapter are all very much concerned with an aspect of memory one can term recollection as investigation In this context the investigation... memory and history, and manifestations of the process of remembering in the texts and what these tell us about the process of writing autobiography Autobiography and Fiction 9 The questions I raise in the second chapter on narrative in autobiography concern the way in which autobiographers organise their memories, and how narrative structure affects the relationship between autobiography and fiction in. .. to be reminded of the past: And he wondered at this trick his mind continued to play on him, this constant turning of one thing into another thing, as if behind each real thing there were a shadow thing, as alive in his mind as the thing before his eyes, and in the end he was at a loss to say which of these things he was actually seeing And therefore it happened, often it happened, that his life no... role of memory in the autobiographical writings of Lillian Hellman, Georges Perec, and Paul Auster It examines how writing an autobiography involves negotiation between the public and the private, and between individual histories and history writ large I also investigate the other side of memory, i.e forgetting, in order to look more closely at the role fiction plays in the texts Of interest here is... qu'un inoubliable cauchemar.2 1 Introduction: Recollection as Investigation Writing an autobiography involves a dialogue with, in Paul Auster's terms, the voice of memory, since, as some critics have stressed, autobiography is inherently the genre of memory In this chapter I will examine the role of memory and how it marks out one of the borderlines between fiction and autobiography There are three main