Читать книгу Constructing the Self. Essays on Southern Life-Writing онлайн

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The preeminence of the self and the boundaries between fact and fiction have been constant in studies on autobiography. James Olney discusses the issue in Metaphors of Self: The Meaning of Autobiography (1972) by presenting autobiography as one more example of the self, saying that “the self expresses itself by the metaphors it creates and projects, and we know it by those metaphors” (188). Other important autobiography theorists like Paul John Eakin have emphasized the fictive element present in autobiography and the absence of an absolute truth. Autobiography, for Eakin, is an act of self-creation and self-invention at the moment of writing. In Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self-Invention (1985), he claims that “autobiographical truth is not fixed but an evolving content in an intricate process of self-discovery and self-creation, and further, that the self that is at the center of all autobiographical narrative is necessarily a fictive structure” (3). Similarly, and in the context of self and development, Mark Freeman argues in Rewriting the Self: History, Memory, and Narrative (1993) that “the process of narrating the past has a markedly fictive dimension” (9), which points to the autobiographer’s inevitable distortion or interpretation of the past. In his analysis of the relationship between the self and the text, Timothy Dow Adams focuses on the fact that autobiographers are unreliable narrators and, as such, they may compose a self based on the image they want to project for the reader. In Telling Lies in Modern American Autobiography (1990), Adams argues that autobiography is paradoxical because it

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