| In the last thirty years a body of work has developed about autobiography as a literary genre and its ontological value. Philippe Lejeune's essay "The Autobiographical Pact" is now a classic in autobiographical studies. The essay was published in 1975 and translated into English in 1989 when it was anthologiesed by Paul John Eakin with its revision "The Autobiographical Pact (bis)" in which Lejeune revisits his original formalist definition of autobiography. James Olney's edited volume Autobiography, Essays Theoretical and Critical published in 1980 is generally recognized as the beginning of autobiography studies in the United States. The book, which does not include Lejeune's essay, represents an important ground for the study of autobiography and for its place as a genre distinct from the novel, a genre that, as Olney states, "like the life it mirrors refuses to stay still long enough for the genre critic to fit it out with the necessary rules, laws, contracts, and pacts [my emphasis]; it refuses, simply, to be a literary genre like any other." (Autobiography, Essays Theoretical and Critical, 25);In his introduction to the collected essays, Olney relates his experience in reading, and later translating, the 1956 important essay "Conditions et limites de l'autobiographie" by French critic Georges Gusdorf, "In translating `Conditions et limites de l'autobiographie' into English for the present volume, I have been repeatedly astonished at the overwhelming similarities between that essay and my book." (Autobiography, Essays Theoretical and Critical, 10). With this statement Olney endorses Gusdorf's problematic views on autobiography as an act of "conscious awareness", not possible "in a cultural landscape where consciousness of self does not, properly speaking, exist. But this unconsciousness of personality, characteristic of primitive societies such as ethnologists describes to us, lasts also in more advanced civilizations that subscribe to mythic structures, they too being governed by the principle of repetition." ("Conditions and Limits of Autobiography", 31) Gusdorf's view leaves out the rest of the nonwestern world and creates an image of the autobiographical self as male, isolated, individualistic.;In my dissertation I seek to further discuss Eakin's work on the relationality of the self. I will show how in a small group of 20th century autobiographies such as Dust Tracks on a Road, Family Sayings, Borderlands/LaFrontera, Storyteller and Keeping House stories come to express or represent the relation between the identity of the self and the community. I will examine the ways in which these relations are manifested in the body of the text. Stories of mythological figures as Yellow Woman in Leslie Marmon Silko's Storyteller and stories of family members as in Natalia Ginzburg's Family Sayings passed down from one generation to the next, provide the foundation of the history of a community and/or a family. As Mary Mason observed, female authors use stories to affirm their identity, but the stories used by the authors aforementioned, come straight from the traditions, myths and rituals shared with the community to which they belong and form an essential point of junction with its members. These autobiographies besides representing the story of the life of the author, delineate and affirm the history of a family and a community; they take on the characteristics and functions of storytelling, those of counseling, teaching, comforting and critiquing. |
