Content area
Full Text
Arguing that the study of autobiography is driven by questions that mirror the practice and theory of larger critical trends-from the philosophy of language to the politics of cultural identity in recent criticism-this essay traces the evolution of autobiographical theory in the 20th century.
Critical attempts to establish a theory of autobiography are fairly recent despite the long history and great variety of the subject. In 1981 Albert E. Stone could still describe the study of autobiography as "an important new field for scholars and critics" ( 1). Only two years later, however, in 1983 Avrom Fleishman complained that, "No one can tell what autobiography is, yet that has not dispelled a surge of recent efforts to define it" (53). These efforts, of course, raised more questions than answers, and the growing competition of voices soon itself became the subject of criticism. Indeed, as Robert Smith remarked in his 1995 study, Derrida and Autobiography, "The theory of autobiography has become very well trodden terrain. So much so, in fact, that there are now not only many theories of autobiography, but there is also a growing number of theories of those theories" (51).
My purpose in the following essay is to explore how what twenty years ago was seen as a "new field" could have so quickly become a contested area, and in the course of doing so I wish to address a series of related questions: is there a coherent theory of autobiography to unite its many different forms? how does the study of autobiography mirror the evolution of literary criticism in the 20th century? why is the discussion of autobiography as a genre so mindful of the need to discover or invent its own history? This essay is neither a complete survey of theories of autobiography, nor a particular study of one critical approach, but rather an exploration of how this growing field reflects the larger academic study of literature and history.
After looking briefly at the origins of autobiography as a genre and the way that critical trends in historical writing and literary criticism in the first half of the 20th century limited the study of autobiography, I explore how changing definitions of fact and fiction then moved questions of autobiographical theory...