Virginia Woolf and The Problem of Autobiography

Genre, 2004

Biography, 2014

Arts et Savoirs, 2016

2013

"The proper writing of lives. Biography and the Art of Virginia Woolf" analyses Virginia Woolf’s lifelong interest in the genre of biography and life-writing. Being the daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen, the editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, Woolf was personally connected to the genre of literary life. She made biography the substance of her experimental fiction. In addition to this, biography was the topic of several of her critical writings: Woolf reviewed biographies by contemporary and non-contemporary authors and questioned the literary function and significance of the genre in the context of the modern art of writing. In the wake of these considerations, and by taking into account Woolf’s life and her literary achievement, Claudia Cremonesi’s work traces a different portrait of the modernist writer, less encumbered by the orthodoxy of her age and deeply involved in a constant and fruitful dialogue with the voices of the past. Woolf’s capability to stride over different epochs and to profit from the classical models in the genre biography frames and sustains the present work.

Auto/biography, 2006

Memoir, a genre that dates back, arguably, to Augustine's Confessions, if not even earlier, is today enjoying enormous critical as well as popular success. In this essay, I discuss what I see as the most recent ramification of memoir, namely the development of a distinguishable new subgenre which I will call " critical autobiography. " Stemming from the long and complex tradition of literary memoirs, the critical autobiography flirts closely with fiction and literary criticism while challenging some of the structural and aesthetic features that characterize more traditional autobiographical works. In the course of this paper, I consider such challenges and their impact on the nature and classification of memoir. Grounding my analysis in genre theory (as opposed to strictly intentionalist classificatory strategies), I outline and defend three contra-standard features of the critical autobiography: critical autobiographies problematize the idea of an authentic confession, they refrain from causal narrative connections, and, lastly, they further contribute to the discussion on the nature of the self by providing a perhaps more scattered, but nonetheless compelling picture of what a contemporary autobiographical self may actually be. Autobiographies, or, as it is today more popular, memoirs,1 have gone, in the past two decades or so, through a complete make over. Memoir, in fact, is nothing short of a phenomenon. What is, to wit, phenomenal about memoir is how prismatic it is, how prone to morphing, to play, crisscross, and perhaps even violate the boundaries and definitions that philosophy and literary criticism have, throughout the centuries, attached to different genres – in fiction and nonfiction alike.

2014

Creative nonfiction is a form of uncommon colloquy, resistant to easy answers, to information mongering, and to definition itself. No wonder, then, that both the practice of creative nonfiction and rhe thought inspired by it are sites of envy-producing jouissance. As rhe essay is to the article, so creative nonfiction is to journalism. I If conventional [oumalism transcribes, then creative nonfiction transforms; where one recounts, the other remakes. Rather than take experience as its orienting, originating ground, creative nonfiction (urns to language first and last. It docs not know what happened without recourse [0 rhe narratives available for saying so. It knows that words and their interpretations are everything (nothing neutral in its variegated land), that experience has a syntax, that feelings have a gramlnar, that rhetoric is nor confined to politics, and that the self is equivalent to the set of questions that preoccupies

• ‘On the Genre of Autobiography: Typology and Evolution’, The Delhi University Journal of the Humanities and the Social Sciences, Vol. 2, pp 76-86 , 2015

In this paper I explore autobiography, a subgenre of literary writing at the intersection of other disciplines like history and anthropology. Most theoreticians classify autobiography as literary nonfiction; others who refuse to take these self-explorations at face value derisively refer to them as fiction. The most intriguing signifier of an autobiography is the first-person 'I', the subject as well as the object of the autobiographical narrative. This 'I' is however all the time in a flux and, by definition, the story of a Being written by the person himself-on a daily basis as a diary, in retrospect as memoirs, scattered in the works in a disguised manner or recorded as oral history-is full of contradictions and complexities. The genre is traditionally rooted in the West in the Catholic tradition of confessions. Like the genre of novel, autobiography too is not indigenous to the Indian literary landscape. I refer to Saint Augustine's Confessions, Günter Grass' Peeling the Onion, Gandhi's The Story of my Experiments with Truth and autobiographies of Dalit writers Omprakash Valmiki (Joothan), Baby Kamble (The Prisons we Broke) and Vasant Kamble (Growing up Untouchable in India) in order to trace the evolution of this genre and also to compare the typology of these texts which are otherwise very different in terms of content. The intricate relationship of autobiography to memory is also discussed.

De Gruyter eBooks, 2007

The aim of this paper is briefly to review some of the ways in which different disciplinary perspectives have shaped our understanding of early modern autobiography. My special concern is with the relation between autobiography and the rise of individualism and a sense of selfhood and subjectivity, the latter being not only the subject of this conference but also the standard framework within which the long history of autobiographical writing is invariably interjected. I take as my point of departure two suppositions. The first is that the recent intervention of historians has transformed the study of autobiography-something that seems obvious enough if one compares works done now and those published, say, a generation ago. Whether the study of autobiography has changed history is more open to question. The growing interest in autobiography among historians does not necessarily mean that this question has moved toward the forefront of our discipline. In any event, from what I can see there has been very little reflection on either of these issues. How historians have changed the general understanding of autobiography, and how changing understandings of autobiography have affected historiography are questions still searching for answers. My second supposition is that three disciplines in particular have contributed most to our present understanding of early modern individualism and how this was refracted through the literary form of autobiography-once again, the connection that is the central concern of our discussion. They are literary history and criticism, philosophy, and history. I wish to focus on the two outer poles of this spectrum, literary studies and history. This is not because I regard the contribution of philosophy as unimportant; rather, I simply lack the knowledge and experience to say anything worthwhile about it 1. To further drive home this point, I will deliberately indulge in over-generalization, by focusing on broad and fairly obvious trends at the expense of individual cases and exceptions. Over-generalization does not in my opinion mean abstraction, which as a stout empiricist I will do my best to avoid.

Literator, 2017

Achieving Autobiographical Form is a scholarly study of a selection of autobiographical works, published during the 20th and early 21st centuries, aiming to bring a new perspective on the carefully crafted nature of such texts. The authors under consideration are William Butler Yeats (Irish), Joseph Conrad, Martin Amis, Frank Kermode, Andrew Motion (all British), Richard Murphy (Anglo-Irish), Roy Campbell and J.M. Coetzee (both South African). Meihuizen's reading of these works is informed by the main issues in contemporary theoretical debates on autobiographical forms of writing, such as the representation of the past versus the configuration of the past, the reflection of selfhood versus the creation of selfhood, the centred self versus the fragmented self and fact versus fiction. The author emphasises the highly reflexive nature of these texts and convincingly argues that these are carefully crafted works of art of which the sum is always more than the parts. In other words, there is a Levinasian 'saying' that always exceeds the 'said'. This argument, one may add, is reminiscent of Roland Barthes's conviction about the multiplicity of meanings embedded in the structure of literary texts. Meihuizen, for his part, highlights the fact that every word in these texts is weighed and that their style also conveys a form of autobiographical truth.