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Shifting relations: Reading autobiographers as they read their audiences
Abstract
Literary critics of the last thirty years have asked readers to focus on everything except their own relationship to writers. Critics of fiction, of narratology, and of reader response, as well as post-structuralists, have all concentrated on the condition and effects of the text. Critics of autobiography have tended to view the genre in James Olney's terms as "metaphors of self," a form in which writers define and represent themselves. Wayne Booth and Philippe LeJeune are among the few critics who recognize that reading can be experienced as a relationship between writer and reader. Autobiography can be viewed as a companionable genre. If writers did not intend to communicate their stories, they would keep journals and not publish them. It can be read as a form of communication in which the writer speaks to an intended audience through the medium of printed words and readers respond. Choosing to read autobiography as communication invites a process of shifting relations. First, the reader watches the writer "read" an audience. To watch writers aim their stories at people who are known to them and also to people they imagine is to recognize them as real people with complex relationships in the real world. This effect is demonstrated in the reading of the autobiographies of Mary Tyler, Mark Twain, Sally Morgan, and Vladimir Nabokov. After an exploration of their recognized and imagined readers, I ask how their efforts to connect to intended readers might also affect unintended readers. If "real" readers, those who were not intended by the writer, choose to shift their attention from the text to the author who wrote the text, they may notice that writers have characteristic ways of relating to intended readers and wonder if they are being treated in the same manner. As a real reader, you can choose to focus on moments when you feel "lost in a book" and merged with the writer, or moments when you feel separate and individual. You may also choose to notice the dynamics of the connection you feel as you respond to the author's gesture.
Subject Area
Comparative literature|American literature|Biographies
Recommended Citation
Gibbons, Christina T, "Shifting relations: Reading autobiographers as they read their audiences" (1993). Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest. AAI9408278.
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI9408278