ROMANTICISM
 
Modern Autobiography and Poetic Confession

Modern Autobiography and Poetic Confession: Rousseau, Wordsworth, and Eliot

Autobiography is an account of a man¡¯s private life written by himself. That the narrator, the author¡¯s present ¡®writing¡¯ self and the protagonist, his past ¡®written¡¯ self are the same person makes it problematic to define the autobiography as genre; it is neither a historical record nor a literary fiction. This paper examines the formal logic of autobiography in Rousseau¡¯s Confessions, the first classic example of modern autobiography; the author¡¯s identity is ¡®constituted¡¯ rather than simply ¡®represented¡¯ by the narrator¡¯s ¡®recollection¡¯ and ¡®recapitulation,¡¯ which reveals that the author¡¯s very act of writing means much more than what has really happened to him or her in the making of a modern autobiography. Rousseau¡¯s ¡®recapitulation¡¯ seldom leads to a reasonable account of a past significant event but becomes more often a digressive memory of a particular pleasurable event that is found a pivotal moment both in maintaining the autobiographical narration itself and in holding together his fragmented selfhood. Rousseau¡¯s regressive recollection of such kind, in fact, has been a formal paradigm for many later writings of autobiographical nature from Wordsworth to Eliot. Wordsworth¡¯s The Prelude, his life-long autobiographical project, is the most faithful poetic scion of Rousseau¡¯s Confession. The episodes of ¡°spots of time" impressively reenact Rousseau¡¯s pleasurable ¡®recapitulation¡¯ bringing about an equally redemptive sense of restored selfhood to Wordsworth. Eliot's poetics of ¡®impersonality¡¯ was apparently intended as an antidote to Wordsworth¡¯s poetic theory of injudiciously personal nature. But Eliot himself is found to be another inheritor of Rousseau¡¯s autobiography in his poems such as ¡°The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and ¡°Little Gidding."

In/Out 11(2001): 173-198

 

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