Research Catalog

Title

Self-same songs : autobiographical performances and reflections / Roger J. Porter.

Author

Porter, Roger J., 1936-

Publication

• Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press, [2002]
• ©2002

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

xx, 272 pages; 23 cm

Summary

"Self-Same Songs constitutes a major contribution to the growing literary study of autobiography. Using a range of authors, including Homer, Edward Gibbon, Benjamin Franklin, Somerset Maugham, Franz Kafka, and Eugene Delacroix, Roger J. Porter offers a broad-based examination of the autobiography and the varied techniques used by its practitioners over time. In a style that is both graceful and erudite, Porter focuses on the diverse motivations and rhetorical functions that the act of self-writing serves for particular writers. He reflects on the texts not only as an exploration of self-identity but also as the writers' attempts to modify the life in the act of writing about it. Then, stepping out of his critical role, Porter ends each chapter with an autobiographical discussion of his professional and personal engagement with the autobiographer under discussion, creating an intriguing and absorbing literary autobiography within the critical text."--Jacket.

Subject

• Porter, Roger J., 1936-
• Autobiography
• Autobiography > Authorship
• Autobiography in literature
• Report writing
• Autobiographies as Topic
• autobiography (genre)
• Autobiography
• Autobiography > Authorship
• Report writing
• Autobiografische Literatur
• Aufsatzsammlung

Genre/Form

• Autobiography
• autobiographies (literary works)
• Autobiographies
• Literary criticism.
• Autobiographies.
• Critiques littéraires.

Note

• "A Bison original"--P. [4] of cover.

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (p. [247]-258) and index.

Contents

The singer in the song: autobiography in The odyssey -- The pleasures of Nostos: Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, memory -- Filling up the silent vacancy: Edward Gibbons' Autobiography -- Unspeakable practices, writable acts: Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography -- The sorrows of autobiography: Somerset Maugham's The summing up -- Redemptive evasions: Edwin Muir's The story and the fable -- Autobiographical writing as death weapon: Thomas Bernhard's gathering evidence and Franz Kafka's Letter to his father -- Figuration and disfigurement: Herculine Barbin's Memoirs of a nineteenth-century French hermaphrodite -- Annulled selves: Barbara Grizzuti Harrison's An accidental autobiography and Michel Leiris's Biffures -- Romantic posing: the life and death writing of Benjamin Robert Haydon -- "A serpent in the coils of a pythoness": self-dramatization in Eugene Delacroix's Journal -- conflict and incorporation: Edmund Gosse's Father and son -- My mother and myself: Edward Dahlberg's Because I was flesh -- Self and other is one flesh: double voicing in Nathalie Sarraute's Childhood, Ronald Fraser's In search of a past, and Howard and Arthur Waskow's Becoming brothers.

ISBN

• 0803237308
• 9780803237308
• 0803287674
• 9780803287679

LCCN

• 2001044596
• 9780803287679

OCLC

• ocm47805080
• 47805080
• SCSB-1260489

Owning Institutions

Princeton University Library