Autobiography: Toward a Poetics of Experience - Hardcover

by Janet Varner Gunn (Author)

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.

Author Biography

Janet Varner Gunn teaches in the Department of English at Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa. She is the author of Second Life: A West Bank Memoir.