Document Type
Article
Abstract
[First paragraph]
From a number of disciplinary perspectives autobiography has always presented a challenge to more or less discrete modes of reading and evaluating the text. To read autobiography as a literary text is to suppress its close relationship to the writer, however fictionalised and evasive the writing subject might be about a textual identity so closely related to his or her public persona. On the other hand, to read it as history or a documentary presentation of "a life" is to fail to acknowledge the heavy use of literary techniques and imbedded subjectivity that makes autobiography what it is. Nor is it sufficient to dismiss the autobiographical text as simply flawed, constructed too heavily from facts to be literary, or too subjective to be history. Like it or not, both the literary critic and the historian cannot leave autobiography alone (although both disciplines would rather ignore its problematic relationship to both literature and history). For the literary critic the problem remains the applicability of extra-textual material to reading of the literary text, and for the historian the reliability of the autobiographical source in relation to the historical archive, elsewhere the contradiction lies much deeper.
Repository Citation
Phillips, Lawrence. "Writing Identity into Space: The Relationship between Ethnography, Autobiography, and Space in Bronislaw Malinowski's A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term and Claude Lévi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 2, no. 3, 2002, pp. 1–15. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol2/iss3/16
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