How many deaths? Auto-bio-graphy as death-writing
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Date
2024-04-08
Authors
Kotásek, Miroslav
ORCID
0000-0002-0784-3153Advisor
Referee
Mark
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Institute of World Literature, Slovak Academy od Sciences
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Abstract
The article concerns various aspects of autobiography as they have been introduced by Jacques Derrida, who himself used the term “autobiographical” to refer to his philosophical writing. Unlike most scholars who stress the link between autobiography and philosophy in Derrida’s writing the article attempts to link it primarily to the “literary”. In this endeavour, most attention is paid to the numerous metamorphoses in which “death” structures and haunts (auto)biographies and our thinking about the genre. Here, the greatest influence, apart from Derrida, was Maurice Blanchot. “Death” and negativity figure at many levels of autobiography, where, unlike in a fictional narrative, they cannot be suspended easily: they can be found in the question about the very usage of language and its relation to the autobiographer, in the construction of the “I”, and in the medial situation of the literary. The article concludes by suggesting a potential transformation of the autobiographical practice brought about by techno-cultural changes and developments regarding both the “archive” and “media”, which are transforming the status of memory, legacy, and the past.
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Citation
World Literature Studies. 2024, vol. 16, issue 1, p. 109-119.
https://www.sav.sk/journals/uploads/04091137WLS_1_2024_Kotasek.pdf
https://www.sav.sk/journals/uploads/04091137WLS_1_2024_Kotasek.pdf
Document type
Peer-reviewed
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Published version
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Language of document
en
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Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/