Autobiographical Acts

Roy Pascal was the major pioneer of the modem study of autobiography in the English language, in his book Design and Truth in Autobiography (1960). This was primarily a literary history, and was of particular value because of Pascal’s wide knowledge of continental European literature and criticism. Pascal’s volume was absorbed relatively slowly, and the critical study of autobiography in English only ‘took off’ in the 1970s and 1980s, with books like Karl Weintraub’s The Value of the Individual: Self and Circumstance in Autobiography ( 1978), and W. C. Spengemann’s The Forms of Autobiography (1980). James Olney’s selection of various papers in Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical (1980) is a useful guide to the state of autobiography studies today.

Every autobiography reflects the conventions and contexts present at its conception. Literary and historical criticism is still at an early stage of recognition of this complex mix of individual and social elements in particular texts. Indeed, there is no agreement about the nature of the reading process itself – a structuralist, a semiotician, a sociologist or an historian will often read a discourse in radically different ways. Autobiographies can be particularly deceptive and difficult because they can create the illusion of direct contact between the self of the writer and the self of the reader. Any reader who wants to penetrate beneath these surface effects will benefit from two recent books, one edited by Doireann MacDermott, and the other written by Richard Coe, formerly Professor of French at the University of Melbourne, now at the University of California.