Customer Reviews

Aesthetic Autobiography: From Life to Art in Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Anais Nin

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

While Nalbantian has veiled it in "neutral" academic prose and by using the particular cases of a few famous writers, her argument is just another example of memoir-hating. While I think it's an interesting exercise to try to trace author experience through fiction, doing so in a way that bashes an entire other category of writing should certainly make us suspicious. And while I agree that many readers are obsessed with memoir for all the wrong reasons, there are memoirists who do more than regurgitate facts, who actually write in literarily complex ways. The search for a pithy, simple thesis has unfortunately led S.N. astray in what might otherwise have been very interesting work.

Aesthetic Autobiography is a fascinating study of the transmutation of life fact into fiction. Nalbantian's basic premise is that one's fictionalization of one's own life reveals more about an individual than an individual's earnest attempt at self documentation by way of a "memoir." The first chapter is an analysis of autobiography proper; in the second chapter Nalbantian introduces theories of "aesthetic autobiography," and in the subsequent chapters she relates her model of a shared aesthetics to the giants of twentieth-century autobiography. For example, writers of aesthetic autobiography share a concentration on a place, a childhood memory, and a beloved family member. In additon, they each utilize a concrete element as an anchor in time. It is a very creative work, and any individual interested in the creative process, the transmuation of life fact into fiction, will find this study essential and illuminating.

The constant edification of authors reaches a sickening degree when their lives are marched out like so much cannon fodder. Are they interesting people? Undoubtedly. Worthy of print? Surely. Worthy of endless reams of print that never stops? You get the idea