‘Which I Presume is Permitted, Since We Are Talking About A Writer.’ Lateness, Memory, and Imagination in Literary Autobiography

In Summertime, a fictional biographer, Mr Vincent, conducts interviews with contemporaries of the novelist J.M. Coetzee for a biography of the late author. However, every claim made about the late Coetzee by the characters in Summertime is composed by the author himself, so the hidden, yet obvious presence of the novelist gives the book’s supposedly biographical outlook an autobiographical twist. Summertime’s Coetzee is distinctly both alive and dead. I propose to analyse works such as Summertime as literary autobiographies that employ narrative strategies otherwise found in fiction in order to creatively explore lateness, belatedness, and a sense of ending with regard to their writing life. Performative contradiction, as a deliberate stylistic manifestation of paradoxical contradictions, is a result of such narrative strategies. This enables a portrayal of memory and sincerity in autobiography that acknowledges the fraught nature of these notions. Drawing on autobiographical writing by novelists, such as Coetzee, Philip Roth, and Günter Grass, this article analyses the use of tense and fictionality to create performative contradiction. It shows how the novelist’s memory and imagination engage with the ever-present possibility of death to subvert traditional ideas of lateness as well as perceived limitations to the temporality of autobiographical writing.

A Self-Centered Story about Yourself in the Text of Literary Autobiography

The article demonstrates the narrator’scomplexity in the autobiographical text of the literary biography at the basis of which egocentrism lies as a principle of this prose type construing. Layering refers both to the author and to the narrator. However, layering of the author causes a change of the narrator’s point of view and its transfer to the 3-rd person’s narration while layering of the narrator is caused by a temporary interval between the time of the narration and the time of the autobiographical event. Ambivalence and a poly discourse character of the autobiographical narration are determined by an ability of the speech person to create texts of different genres and various types.

The history of Russian literature of the 19th and the early 20th centuries according to Ivan Bunin (a page from the unpublished notebook)

The article is a detailed commentary to a page from Ivan Bunin’s unpublished notebook (1944). The page lists the names of writers, poets, critics and publishers from the time of Bunin’s youth. According to the author of the article, this listing gives much more objective information about the influences on Bunin’s own early work recognized by himself than all autobiographical notes and memoirs published by the writer. The list of prose writers is dominated by Narodnik authors (he met many of them thanks to his brother, Yuly Bunin) and the writers close to them, who were considered “progressive”. In the list of poets, the authors of “pure art” are connected with the poets of “civil sorrow”, members of the Surikov circle and some senior Symbolists. The list of critics and publishers brings us back to populism. The article concludes that the list presents an attempt of an objective literary autobiography, in contrast to such official autobiographical texts as “Memoirs”.

In-Between Proust and Neuroscience

In his autobiography allusive of Marcel Proust’s literary autobiography À la recherche du temps perdu, Kandel describes and explores his own development as a molecular scientist who started out as a student of history and psychoanalysis with more than just a penchant for literature. Despite his conversion to neuroscience, which is told in great detail, Kandel’s motives in studying the brain are informed mainly by humanist ideals and episodes from his personal past. The author creates an image of himself as a scientist who is guided in his molecular research by both his good intuitions and received theories from the humanities. Hence, the aim of the present paper is to show how the author succeeds in modelling his scientific ethos at the interface of the humanities and the natural sciences and in what ways he generates a public image of himself as a ‘self-made man’ or, rather, scientist.