Paul Theroux: Refusing Autobiography in Autobiographical Writing
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Stephan Kohl
Abstract
An autobiography is commonly understood to be the record of an individual’s past, and readers untouched by literary theory believe an autobiographical text informs them about its author’s behaviour in the past. Yet, as autobiographical texts are written according to narrative conventions this simple view of autobiography will not do justice to texts written with some literary ambition: writers of autobiographies do not base their texts on the assumptions made by the common reader - that they are going to read an authentic life narrative or a piece containing historical truth. Taking some of Paul Theroux’s autobiographical texts as examples, a poetological reading of these writings shows how these assumptions are systematically demolished by the use of remembered events as metaphors for the writer’s present state of mind and by incongruities in the matching of narrators with protagonists which cannot be resolved by applying standards of plausibility and probability.
© 2014 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co.
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelei
- Inhalt
- Editorial
- Unauthorized Intercourse: Early Modern Bed Tricks and their Under-Lying Ideologies
- “But Why Always Dorothea?” Omniscient as Unnatural Narration Revisited
- “I am an American!” The Thrill of American Citizenship
- Paul Theroux: Refusing Autobiography in Autobiographical Writing
- The Agency of Awareness: Masculine Performance and Authorship in Louisa May Alcott’s “Behind a Mask”
- Buchbesprechungen
- Bucheingänge
- Die Autoren dieses Heftes
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelei
- Inhalt
- Editorial
- Unauthorized Intercourse: Early Modern Bed Tricks and their Under-Lying Ideologies
- “But Why Always Dorothea?” Omniscient as Unnatural Narration Revisited
- “I am an American!” The Thrill of American Citizenship
- Paul Theroux: Refusing Autobiography in Autobiographical Writing
- The Agency of Awareness: Masculine Performance and Authorship in Louisa May Alcott’s “Behind a Mask”
- Buchbesprechungen
- Bucheingänge
- Die Autoren dieses Heftes
