1st Edition

The Autobiography Effect Writing the Self in Post-Structuralist Theory

By Dennis Schep Copyright 2020
    268 Pages
    by Routledge

    268 Pages
    by Routledge

    Since the advent of post-structuralism, various authors have problematized the modern conception of autobiography by questioning the status of authorship and interrogating the relation between language and reality. Yet even after making autobiography into a theoretical problem, many of these authors ended up writing about themselves. This paradox stands at the center of this wide-ranging study of the form and function of autobiography in the work of authors who have distanced themselves from its modern instantiation. Discussing Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Hélène Cixous and others, this book grapples with the question of what it means to write the self when the self is understood as an effect of writing. Combining close reading, intellectual history and literary theory, The Autobiography Effect traces how precisely its theoretically problematic nature made autobiography into a central scene for the negotiation of philosophical positions and anxieties after structuralism.

    Preface



     



    Chapter One: The Subject of Autobiography



    Barthes’ anti-authorialism



    Copyright and authorship



    Barthesian autobiography



    Return of the referent



    The autobiography effect



    Notes



    Bibliography



     



    Chapter Two: Bodies in Crisis



    Pathography



    Metaphor (Nancy)



    Contingency (Nietzsche)



    Interruption (Ronell)



    Notes



    Bibliography



     



    Chapter Three: Eye Problems



    Anthropology (Nietzsche)



    Alterity (Derrida)



    I (Cixous)



    Notes



    Bibliography



     



    Chapter Four: Origin Algeria



    Silence



    Breaking the silence



    Discursive proliferation



    L’Allégorie française



    Notes



    Bibliography



     



    Chapter Five: How Not to Write about Oneself



    Lack of identity (Lévi-Strauss)



    Posthumous rereadings (de Man)



    The ecstasy of anonymity (Foucault)



    Conclusions



    Notes



    Bibliography

    Biography

    Dennis Schep is the author of Drugs; Rhetoric of Fantasy, Addiction to Truth (Atropos Press, 2011), and of many academic and journalistic articles. He received his PhD in literary studies at the Humboldt University of Berlin in 2017. His current focus is on the establishment of the Foundry, a residency for intellectuals and artists in rural Galicia.