ENGLISH LITERATURE

1
ENGLISH LITERATURE CULTURE

• I IS ANOTHER
• AUTOBIOGRAPHY
• ACROSS GENRES
• Camelia Elias

2
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)

3
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

4
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

5
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

6
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

7
autobiography as a testimony for culture

• stage
• spectacle
• performance (no authenticity)
• active agency/engaging

8
juxtapositions

• Miloi
• diary as a self-portrait
• Je est un autre
• biographic ego vs the profound ego
• 1st perosn narrative
• time

• Federman
• I dont keep a diary
• I dont 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

9

• Miloi
• why arent 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 dont you
  write a diary? Or why dont you give up writing?
  

10

• Christine
• that there isnt 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.