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Subjective Contingency and Autobiographical Writing
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Svend Erik Larsen
Published/Copyright:
February 20, 2008
Abstract
An autobiography deals with a specific case of historical contingency – the temporary nature of individual life. It is anchored in two interdependent contexts: a referential one (of the life it refers to) and a discursive one (of the narrative trajectory that shapes the reference). Through a reading of three autobiographies – St. Augustine's Confessiones, Montaigne's Essais, and Breytenbach's Dog Heart – the paper sets out to show how they in different ways use a double contextuality in a (vain) attempt to give the contingent subject a stable foundation. Autobiography is an ongoing process that exemplifies the contingency it tries to overcome.
Published Online: 2008-02-20
Published in Print: 2004-11-19
© Walter de Gruyter
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- “Bridge to Antiquity“. Nostalgia, Exile, and Stoicism in the Poetry of Durs Grünbein
- OΔYΣΣEYΣ OYTIΣ: Odysseus Nobody
- Darstellungen von Dora. Thomas Pynchons Gravity's Rainbow im Spannungsfeld von fiktionalen, historiographischen und erinnerungsbasierten Repräsentationen des Konzentrationslagers Mittelbau-Dora
- Die erlebte Rede als temporales Phänomen
- Rezensionen
Articles in the same Issue
- Adressen der Mitarbeiter
- Introduction. Framing Contingency: History and Heterology
- Framing the Frame: Contingency, Connection and Divestiture in Literary History and Criticism
- Naming and Contingency, and Some Implications for Begriffsgeschichte
- About Artful Production of Contingency
- Zufälligkeitssinn. Adalbert Stifters Umgang mit der Kontingenz
- Subjective Contingency and Autobiographical Writing
- Counter-Memory and Phantasma
- La Panique Historique. History Encountering Contingency
- History as Effects of Power
- Neutralizing Contingency: Ammianus Marcellinus as a Participant in Julian's Persian Campaign, 363 AD
- “Der Einbruch der Zeit in das Spiel”: Hamlet from Berlin (East)
- “Bridge to Antiquity“. Nostalgia, Exile, and Stoicism in the Poetry of Durs Grünbein
- OΔYΣΣEYΣ OYTIΣ: Odysseus Nobody
- Darstellungen von Dora. Thomas Pynchons Gravity's Rainbow im Spannungsfeld von fiktionalen, historiographischen und erinnerungsbasierten Repräsentationen des Konzentrationslagers Mittelbau-Dora
- Die erlebte Rede als temporales Phänomen
- Rezensionen
