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Altered Egos - Authority in American Autobiography (Hardcover)
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Altered Egos - Authority in American Autobiography (Hardcover)
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This work explores the "authority" of autobiography in several
related senses: first, the idea that autobiography is authoritative
writing because it is presumably verifiable; second, the idea that
one's life is one's exclusive textual domain; third, the idea that,
because of the apparent congruence between the implicit ideology of
the genre and that of the nation, autobiography has a special
prestige in America. Aware of the recent critiques of the notion of
autobiography as issuing from, determined by, or referring to a
pre-existing self, Couser examines the ways in which the authority
of particular texts is called into question--for example, because
they involve pseudonymity (Mark Twain), the revision of a
presumably spontaneous form (Mary Chesnut's Civil War "diaries"),
bilingual authorship (Richard Rodriguez and Maxine Hong Kingston),
collaborative production (Black Elk), or outright fraud (Clifford
Irving's "autobiography" of Howard Hughes). Couser examines both
the way in which canonical autobiographers may playfully and
purposely undermine their own narrative authority and the way in
which minority writers' control of their lives may be compromised.
Autobiography, then, is portrayed here as an arena in which
individuals struggle for self-possession and self-expression
against the constraints of language, genre, and society.
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