Presentation/chapter four notes and thoughts

I expected this chapter to be more about how autobiographies could illuminate history, but it turned out to be mostly a history of autobiography, and more particularly how autobiography has constituted the subject over time.

In this chapter there were references to how the subject fit into society, or failed to, but the emphasis remained on the "creation of the self."

The book seemed a bit overwhelmed by the job of surveying the whole history of and therefore the different styles of autobiography, and sent me off to Appendix A to read through 52 different types of autobiography, which is a useful overview, though almost every autobiographical work must fit into more than one of these categories.

The overall impression from the chapter was that autobiography has been a tool of the project of modernisation and Western domination of the world; that when "underdog" types write an autobiography it is inevitably in response to the unfriendly world they have met. They give plenty of examples in the chapter - in fact it makes me realise how many historical figures we know basically because they wrote about themselves - the most notable examples were St Augustine (as an example of a person effectively talking himself into the Christian faith (even though his most famous quote is possibly: “Lord, make me good (or chaste). But not yet.” and Rousseau’s Confessions, but there is also Casanova and Samuel Pepys, and I wonder how much we’d know about these people if they hadn’t thought their lives were worth recording.



some questions and criticisms:

-I’m not sure why they include fictional lives as examples in this chapter, for instance on page 101 where they give Dicken’s David Copperfield and Bronte’s Jane Eyre as examples of the “Bildungsroman” or story of coming of age and character, and on 87 when they introduce the “secular subject” they claim Shakespeare’s sonnets for the form. Do we think that fictional and non-fictional stories can perform the same function if they follow the same form?

- Do we agree that autobiography is essentially a Western or modern form? Smith and Watson basically assert this, but as they “limit their focus to written life narrative as it has developed in the West,” (84), it’s hard to know if they’re right. The book doesn’t mention, for instance, Sei Shonagon’s The Pillow Book, written in Japan by a woman around the year 1000.

-Do we accept that the writing of an autobiography can change a person’s sense of self, specifically by undershoring their sense of being an individual separate to society and/or asserting themselves against adversity?

- how helpful is it to have a list of “52 varieties” of autobiography? If you are about to write your own story or the story of another person, how would you decide how you wanted it to function? In other words, is the story more affected by the form and emphasis you choose or by the underlying facts and turning points of a particular life?

other thoughts not related to the reading as such: saw an article on the SMH jobs site about "personal branding" and in a way autobiographies and autobiographical statements - pretty much any sentence starting in "I" - are part of that work - defining the self against the random perceptions of outsiders.