1. Autobiography as a way of making an identity(from Studying Culture)
Personal narratives are an attempt to impose meaning and coherence on the often random and chaotic experiences which constitute lives as they are lived, to order experiences by placing them within a narrative frame. Telling or writing a life story involves interpretation. The act of selecting, from the mass of lived experience, which events and people to include and emphasize is itself an act of interpretation. The personal narratives we tell are never simply mirror reflections of a lived reality, but are mediated by the need to represent the self as possessing a sense of identity and control. Autobiographical representation is one of the ways in which we shape our experiences into some form of meaning and construct particular identities for ourselves.
2. Philippe Lejeune's definition
A retrospective prose narrative produced by a real person concerning his own existence, focusing on his individual life, in particular on the development of his personality.
There must be 'identity between the author, the narrator, and the protagonist.'
3. Autobiography and Authorship
Within critical discussions of autobiography, ¡®intention¡¯ has had a necessary and often unquestioned role in providing the crucial link between author, narrator and protagonist. Intention, however, is further defined as a particular kind of ¡®honest¡¯ intention which then guarantees the ¡®truth¡¯ of the writing. Trust the author, this rather circular argument goes, if s/he seems to be trustworthy...(For the critics who have such notions) autobiographies are seen as providing proof of the validity and importance of a certain conception of authorship: authors who have authority over their own texts and whose writings can be read as forms of direct access to themselves.
4. Romantic notion of selfhood, James Olney
It seems that there is little apparent difference for these critics between realizing the self and representing the self, and autobiography gets drawn seamlessly into supporting the beliefs and values of an essentialist or Romantic notion of selfhood. According to this view, generated at the end of the eighteenth century but still powerfully present in the middle of the twentieth, each individual possesses a unified, unique selfhood which is also the expression of a universal human nature. For Olney, for instance: ¡®the explanation for the special appeal of autobiography . . . is a fascination with the self and its profound, its endless mysteries¡¯ (Olney 1980: 23).
At the same time, however, autobiography, understood in terms of a similarly transcendent or Romantic view of art, is turned to in the first place because it offers an unmediated and yet stabilizing wholeness for the self. Autobiography exemplifies ¡®the vital impulse to order¡¯ which has always underlain creativity (Olney 1972: 3).
5. Poststructuralism and Autobiography
For the group of critics we are discussing here, the apparent neutrality or ¡®liberalism¡¯ of their approach to the subject both disguised and supported their critical authority. Autobiography was important to them because it helped to shore up an approach to the meaning of literary works through the author. The critic could have ¡®objective¡¯ knowledge of the work, thus ratifying their own place and authority, precisely because autobiography could be seen to supply a subjecthood which was both ineffable and discrete. The author stood behind the work guaranteeing its unity, while the critic interpreted what the author really meant to say, reducing the different elements of a work to a central message.
Poststructuralism, in particular, by positing language or discourse as both preceding and exceeding the subject, deposed the author from his or her central place as the source of meaning and undermined the unified subject of autobiography.
6. Autobiography, a story of development or not?
According to Clifford Siskin, ¡®development¡¯ in the nineteenth century becomes ¡®an all-encompassing formal strategy underpinning middle-class culture: its characteristic way of representing and evaluating the individual as something that grows¡¯ (Siskin 1988: 12).
However, to return to Felicity Nussbaum¡¯s point, such a view comes later, and it would be wrong to see earlier eighteenth-century writers of journals and diaries as ¡®failing¡¯ to write developmental narratives. Instead, what they found ¡®most ¡°natural¡± was . . . something that recounted public and private events in their incoherence, lack of integrity, scantiness and inconclusiveness¡¯ (Nussbaum 1989: 16).
The writing and rewriting of the self over a period of time, through constant revisions or serial modes, which was common across a range of autobiographical forms and writers before the nineteenth century, confounds the notion that there is one definitive or fixed version.
7. Autobiography as a "construction of an Identity"
Autobiography is a form of writing in which we find the relationship between narrative and human identity, and the question of how we construct what we call our lives and how we create ourselves in the process. In this context, many people share the conviction that the question of what type of construction is at stake here, can neither be separated from the question of what type of identity is being created in this construction, nor isolated from the question of the cultural and historical context of this construction. They also share the assumption that these questions are productively engaged from the perspective of narrative.