ENGLISH LITERATURE & CULTURE ‘I’ IS ANOTHER: AUTOBIOGRAPHY ACROSS GENRES Camelia Elias

the digital self  agency (Reading Autobiography, Smith and Watson) subjects the reader (interpellation, Althusser)  a universal or objective point of view implies a particular ideology of the subject “agents change and change their world by virtue of the systemic operations of multiple ideologies.”  multiple ideologies “expose both the subject and the system to perpetual reconfiguration.” (Elizabeth Wingrove, “Interpellating Sex”, Signs 24, no. 4)

plays with “transverse tactics” (de Certeau) individuals and groups deploy tactics to manipulate the spaces in which they are constrained (ex. work place)  a factory worker may superimpose another system (of language or culture onto the system imposed on him in the factory

plays with imagination imagination negotiates between “sites of agency” (Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy”) imagination negotiates between imagined communities imagination negotiates between “globally defined fields of possibility” individuals as sites of agency deploy their imaginations as a social fact and a kind of work to navigate the disjunctures of global flows that create radically different self- understandings

agency as the possibility of variation performing an (avatar) self (Judith Butler) games of culture the unconscious is a potential site of agency (Teresa de Laurentis, “Eccentric Subjects”) excess is a source of resistance to socially enforced calls to fixed identities

Federman autobiography within criticism the personal as paratext (footnotes, dedications, acknowledgements) have some fun! nobody is perfect instruct! acknowledge the limit of your knowledge subvert politics! mess up the authorial voice: who speaks what to whom, on what and whose authority the personal is both a risk and an opportunity

autobiography as a testimony for culture stage spectacle performance (no authenticity) active agency/engaging

juxtapositions Miloi diary as a self-portrait Je est un autre biographic ego vs the profound ego 1st perosn narrative time Federman I don’t keep a diary I don’t need one writing about oneself is in fact writing about the other selves that exist in all of us 3rd person self- narrative diarists invent things many writers like to write self-portrait of themselves: MY BODY IN NINE PARTS

Miloi why aren’t people (readers and writers as well) interested as they were in prose or poetry and they now prefer the small, insignificant history of a certain individual. Who is talking in the diary, who is being silent and why? Federman So the question should be: why the fuck do you continue to write novels Federman? Why don’t you write a diary? Or why don’t you give up writing?

Christine that there isn’t just one voice speaking in a diary because it is written from different point of views conscious process of writing about oneself I am created through my thoughts and while constructing myself I consider the situation – what is it good for me to tell the person across the table, what do I tell my boss and what is kept in silence. self-portrait belief Camelia decapitated ontology the diarist losing his head marginalia Federman  time in fiction deliberately fucks up time – or what the great Beckett once called that great fornicator -- that double-headed monster.