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

5 страница из 129

The issue of the southern autobiographical tradition is paradoxical, as it is simultaneously made up of the different impulses that have propelled it and the almost absolute absence of an impulse. In his essay “Autobiographical Traditions Black and White” in Located Lives, James Olney claims that while black writers established a strong autobiographical tradition with both slave narratives and fictional autobiography, white writers (particularly male) lack such a tradition but have channeled their autobiographical impulse through fiction. However, the similarities between blacks’ and women’s autobiographies, Olney suggests, prompt speculation that they might indeed be part of the same tradition:

I wonder if it might not be that women who write consciously and intentionally as women, black writers who write consciously and intentionally as members of a minority (and very few do not), would be included as adopting a kind of paradigmatic form that would make their individual autobiographies sound very much alike, thus establishing a generic tale and a tradition of autobiography. This is only speculation, however, and it is as such that I offer it. (“Autobiographical Traditions” 76)