Autobiography, autofiction, representation, interrogation, remembering and forgetting

Introduction to the Autobiography edition articles

Yeats and individuation: an exploration of archetypes in the work of W.B. Yeats.

Abstract available in pdf file

Spectrality in Plutarch, Shakespeare, Freud and Derrida

Cassius’s exposition on the self-induced nature of visions, as presented in North’s Plutarch, is akin to Freud’s rational understanding of spectral visitations. Cassius’s consequent fall into superstitious thought is all the more notable. Shakespeare’s Brutus, in Julius Caesar, if not at the mercy of such mental swings as Cassius, is subject at one point in the play to a different type of indeterminacy, that regarding the nature of the future. On the day of the final battle he says: “O that a man might know/The end of this day’s business ere it come” (5.1.122–23). This “end”, however, is connected with the promised appearance of Caesar’s ghost. What does this future, containing both anticipated and unknown elements, mean to Brutus? Unlike the predictable future of everyday, this future (though involving the return of the ghost) cannot be prepared for, must remain unforeseen, as it depends on the fortunes of war. My article draws on Freud’s understanding of spectrality and Derrida’s linking of this to his sense of the unforeseen future, to examine Brutus’s relation to it, from the point of view of both classical antiquity’s daimonic lore and the dramatic sensibility of Shakespeare

Autobiographical techniques and the problems of memorial reconstruction: Amis, Coetzee, Kermode and Motion

This article examines the various ways Martin Amis, J.M. Coetzee, Frank Kermode and Andrew Motion approach the problems associated with memorial reconstruction and veracity in their autobiographical writings. Using as a starting point James Olney’s notion of the “free conceptual construction” involved in our general way of making sense of the world, the article goes on to consider the means employed by these writers to negotiate with “the archive of the ‘real’” and the “archive of ‘fiction’”, to draw on Derrida’s terms (1992), in their various engagements with the conceptual construction of life stories. A special emphasis is placed on what Derek Attridge (2004) calls the “singularity” of that construction, its truth to itself as writinghttp://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rscr20/current]http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rscr20/18/1DOI:10.1080/18125441.2013.80371

The persistence of spirit

No abstract available

An age of vampires

No abstract available

Achieving form in autobiography

This article argues that, unlike biographies which tend to follow patterns based on conventional expectations, salient autobiographies achieve forms unique to themselves. The article draws on ideas from contemporary formalists such as Peter McDonald and Angela Leighton but also considers ideas on significant form stemming from earlier writers and critics such as P.N. Furbank and Willa Cather. In extracting from these writers the elements of what they consider comprise achieved form, the article does not seek to provide a rigid means of objectively testing the formal attributes of a piece of writing. It rather offers qualitative reminders of the need to be alert to the importance of form, even if the precise nature of this importance is not possible to define. Form is involved in meaning, and this continuously opens up possibilities regarding the reader’s relationship with the work in question. French genetic critic Debray Genette distinguishes between ‘semantic effect’ (the direct telling involved in writing) and ‘semiological effect’ (the indirect signification involved). It is the latter, the article argues in summation, which gives a work its singular nature, producing a form that is not predictable but suggestive, imaginative