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

45 страница из 129

It was George Gusdorf who said that the autobiographical impulse is “the desire to endure in . . . memory” (qtd. in Fleischner 3), but in the case of southern writers, the urge to tell about the self and the South usually stems from a different need. While some authors indeed seek to record a private life and achieve greater self-knowledge, the impulse of southern writers is still strongly linked with the history of the region. Life-writing allows them precisely to construct their identity, which invariably involves, in Jerome Bruner’s phrasing, “not only the construction of self, but also a construction of one’s culture” (35). And although the autobiographical impulse has become more multifaceted and diverse, exploring new territories and adding new voices that have before been marginalized, perhaps the only thing that has not changed for southern writers is their need to tell, to engage in “conversation”—even if it is with the self. Regardless of the motives they may have to explore the self in hindsight, this impulse has produced some of the best literature in the South and, we dare say, despite Thomas Larson’s omissions, some of the best literature in the US. Rather than weaken in the globalization era, the autobiographical impulse in the South endures, flows and merges with the literary currents and critical theories of the twenty-first century.