Contemporary Second- and Third-Person Autobiographical Writing

Narrating the Male Self

Christina Schönberger-Stepien (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

200 Seiten

2024
Routledge (Verlag)
978-1-032-38505-1 (ISBN)

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This book explores 21st-century uses of the second- and third-person perspective in Anglophone autobiographical narratives by canonical male writers. Through detailed readings of contemporary autobiographical works by Paul Auster, Julian Barnes, J.M. Coetzee, and Salman Rushdie, the study demonstrates the multiple aesthetic, rhetorical, and un/ethical implications of the choice of narrative perspective as well as the uncommon step of articulating the self from a perspective which is not I. Drawing on (rhetorical) narratology and autobiography theory, the book engages with questions and tensions of subjectivity and relationality, the interplay of distance and proximity resulting from the narrative perspective, and its effects on the relationship between autobiographer, text, and reader. In addition, the book traces relevant guiding principles that the authors use to navigate their self-narratives in relation to others, such as questions of embodiment, visuality, grief, ethics, and politics. Situating the narratives in their socio-political and cultural context, the book uncovers to what extent these autobiographical narratives reflect the authors’ position between self-withdrawal and self-promotion as well as their response to questions of male agency, self-stylisation, and celebrity status.

Christina Schönberger-Stepien is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Augsburg in Germany. Her research areas include life-writing, Victorian literature and culture, and working-class literature. She has published essays on autobiographical writing, on the feminist biopic, and on contemporary workingclass anthologies.

Acknowledgements

Towards a Poetics of Second- and Third-Person Autobiographical Writing

Embodiment and Self in Paul Auster’s Winter Journal

Visuality and Self in Paul Auster’s Report from the Interior

Personal and Exemplary Grief in Julian Barnes’s Levels of Life

The Personal and the Ethical in J. M. Coetzee’s Summertime

The Personal and the Political in Salman Rushdie’s Joseph Anton

Perspectives and Conclusions

Index

Erscheinungsdatum	20.02.2023
Reihe/Serie	Routledge Auto/Biography Studies
Verlagsort	London
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Gewicht	385 g
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
ISBN-10	1-032-38505-7 / 1032385057
ISBN-13	978-1-032-38505-1 / 9781032385051
Zustand	Neuware