Autobiography

precarious totality

Michael Barber

pp. 237-260

in: Lester Embree (ed), Alfred Schutz's "sociological aspect of literature", Berlin, Springer, 1998

Abstract

Based on the eight aspects of the sociological relationship between author and beholder sketched by Alfred Schutz "s "Construction" and using Simone de Beauvoir "s memoirs as an example, this chapter examines autobiography as mixed literary type. It illustrates how the autobiographer constructs from her solitude a totality centered upon her relevances and motives, shaped by her interconnecting of events, and dissimulated by the sincerety of her autobiographical I. Such totalizing, though, encounters and succumbs to detotalizing counterforces in the personal relationships between autobiographers, characters, and readers; in the continual, restless capacity of the autobiographer to reflect; and in the passage of time that leaves every event open-ended.

Cited authors

Schütz Alfred