ABSTRACT
This final chapter will return to an issue raised briefly in the Introduction, namely the interrelationship of criticism and autobiography. So far we have mostly surveyed either autobiographical texts or theoretical and critical texts about autobiography. The exceptions have been texts by Barthes and Derrida which have interrogated the boundary between different kinds of discourse and used the autobiographical, albeit in an attenuated or fragmented form, as a source of pleasure and critique. Not surprisingly, therefore, it is poststructuralism that has seemed to provide the intellectual atmosphere in which claims to critical objectivity have been questioned over the past fifteen years and that has opened to debate the function, or indeed the necessity, of the personal or autobiographical within criticism.
