Autobiography : Toward a Poetics of Experience / Janet Varner Gunn.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Gunn, Janet Varner, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Autobiography.

Genre:

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (165 pages)

Place of Publication:

Philadelphia, Pa. : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2017]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

Autobiography, Gunn argues, must be reunderstood as a cultural act of "reading" the self, not as a private act of "writing" the self. Moreover, the self that is read (both by the autobiographer and the reader of autobiography) is the displayed self, not the hidden self-the self that appears in the world and can be experienced, and thereby realized, by others. Drawing on narrative theory, phenomenology, and hermeneutics, Gunn locates the literary features of autobiography in the larger anthropological context of what she calls "the autobiographical situation."An elegantly constructed interdisciplinary analysis, this book renders the hybrid genre of autobiography freshly problematic.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgments

1. The Autobiographical Situation

2. The Autobiographical Impulse: Walden and the Temporal Mode of Autobiographical Narrative

3. The Autobiographical Perspective: The Hermeneutic of Landscape in Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey"

4. The Autobiographical Response: The Stereoscope of Readership in Proust's Remembrance of Things Past

5. The Worldliness of Autobiography: Augustine's Confessions, Black Elk Speaks, and the Credo Ut Intelligam

Selected Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Includes index.

Bibliography: p. 148-151.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed Apr. 18, 2017)

ISBN:

9781512816525

1512816523

OCLC:

1016783131