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'According to Roland Barthes, the autobiographic act of remembering and reclaiming the past commits the fallacy of conflating the author, narrator and protagonist, and giving the first two power over the latter. The past self is a fictional ‘other’, and the writing of memoir is a reading of the past self as a text. JM Coetzee therefore calls his meta-autobiographies (the three-part Scenes from a Provincial Life) autrebiographies, or ‘other-life-writing’. In this paper, I discuss the need for writers of memoir and autobiography to construct a past self as ‘other’, and argue for the impossibility of any kind of authentic representation of the ‘self’ in memoir or autobiography.' (Publication abstract)
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Last amended 15 Nov 2019 08:53:57
http://www.textjournal.com.au/oct19/paulwilliams.htm
Writing the Self as Other : Autrebiography
TEXT : The Journal of the Australian Association of Writing Programs
Subjects:
- Boyhood : Scenes from Provincial Life 1997 single work novel
- Youth : Scenes from Provincial Life 2002 single work novel
- Summertime : Scenes from Provincial Life 2009 single work novel
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