"There is no such thing as autobiography, only art and lies."
excavation. shaken from the grave.
Rembrandt painted himself into biblical passages, for example there would be fourteen on the boat rather than the traditional thirteen, as the artist would insert himself.
The interest of autobiography, then, is not that it reveals reliable self-knowledge—it does not—but that it demonstrates in a striking way the impossibility of closure and of totalization (that is the impossibility of coming into being) of all textual systems made up of tropological substitutions.
(Paul de Man, Autobiography As De-Facement, 70)
"The dominant figure of the epitaphic or autobiographical discourse is, as we saw, the prosopopeia, the fiction of the voice-from-beyond-the-grave; an unlettered stone would leave the sun suspended in nothingness." (Autobiography As De-Facement 77)
Rousseau's autobiographical writings: his Confessions, which initiated the modern autobiography, and his Reveries of a Solitary Walker (along with the works of Lessing and Goethe in Germany, and Richardson and Sterne in England), were among the pre-eminent examples of the late eighteenth century movement known as the "Age of Sensibility", featuring an increasing focus on subjectivity and introspection that has characterized the modern age.
Reference point in the history of literature are St-Augustine's Confessions, and Essays of Montaigne. Rousseau continued the emphasis of introspection / recollection as a mode of writing, but how does Rousseau expand? linking to character to childhood and legitimicizing a mode of writing that advocated the pursuit of self-fulfillment as worthwhile , even noble. Later to influence Wordsworth, Shelly, Byron, etc, the romantics embraced this as well as the contempt for social mores, dislike of authority.
(Winterson, Art & Lies, p. 69).
excavation. shaken from the grave.
Rembrandt painted himself into biblical passages, for example there would be fourteen on the boat rather than the traditional thirteen, as the artist would insert himself.
The interest of autobiography, then, is not that it reveals reliable self-knowledge—it does not—but that it demonstrates in a striking way the impossibility of closure and of totalization (that is the impossibility of coming into being) of all textual systems made up of tropological substitutions.
(Paul de Man, Autobiography As De-Facement, 70)
"The dominant figure of the epitaphic or autobiographical discourse is, as we saw, the prosopopeia, the fiction of the voice-from-beyond-the-grave; an unlettered stone would leave the sun suspended in nothingness." (Autobiography As De-Facement 77)
Rousseau's autobiographical writings: his Confessions, which initiated the modern autobiography, and his Reveries of a Solitary Walker (along with the works of Lessing and Goethe in Germany, and Richardson and Sterne in England), were among the pre-eminent examples of the late eighteenth century movement known as the "Age of Sensibility", featuring an increasing focus on subjectivity and introspection that has characterized the modern age.
Reference point in the history of literature are St-Augustine's Confessions, and Essays of Montaigne. Rousseau continued the emphasis of introspection / recollection as a mode of writing, but how does Rousseau expand? linking to character to childhood and legitimicizing a mode of writing that advocated the pursuit of self-fulfillment as worthwhile , even noble. Later to influence Wordsworth, Shelly, Byron, etc, the romantics embraced this as well as the contempt for social mores, dislike of authority.
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