EAKIN, Paul John, Living autobiographically. How We Create Identity in Narrative, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2008 208 p.
ISBN 978-0-8014-7478-1
RÉSUMÉ
Autobiography is naturally regarded as an art of retrospect, but makingautobiography is equally part of the fabric of our ongoing experience.We tell the stories of our lives piecemeal, and these stories are notmerely about our selves but also an integral part of them. In this waywe “live autobiographically”; we have narrative identities.
Inthis book, noted life-writing scholar Paul John Eakin explores theintimate, dynamic connection between our selves and our stories,between narrative and identity in everyday life. He draws on a widerange of autobiographical writings from work by Jonathan Franzen, MaryKarr, and André Aciman to the New York Times series “Portraits ofGrief” memorializing the victims of 9/11, as well as the latestinsights into identity formation from the fields of developmentalpsychology, cultural anthropology, and neurobiology. In his account,the self-fashioning in which we routinely, even automatically, engageis largely conditioned by social norms and biological necessities. Weare taught by others how to say who we are, while at the same time oursense of self is shaped decisively by our lives in and as bodies. ForEakin, autobiography is always an act of self-determination, no matterwhat the circumstances, and he stresses its adaptive value as an artthat helps to anchor our shifting selves in time.
AUTEUR
Paul John Eakin is Ruth N. Halls Professor Emeritus of English atIndiana University. He is the author of How Our Lives Become Stories:Making Selves, also from Cornell; The New England Girl: Cultural Idealsin Hawthorne, Stowe, Howells, and James; Fictions in Autobiography:Studies in the Art of Self-Invention; and Touching the World: Referencein Autobiography. He is the editor of The Ethics of Life Writing, alsofrom Cornell; On Autobiography by Philippe Lejeune; and AmericanAutobiography: Retrospect and Prospect.