ABSTRACT
This chapter is primarily concerned with three twentieth-century theorists and practitioners of autobiography: Sigmund Freud, Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida, whose writings, chronologically, succeed the autobiographies analysed in the previous chapter. However, their work has already, to some degree, been anticipated. This is because, in attempting to survey a historical tradition of autobiographical writing, however sketchily, it is important to take account of how that tradition has been formed by certain key assumptions which are also open to question. The modern disillusionment with the unitary subject does not simply create a break, opening up a new critical perspective; it also casts a backward shadow, transforming how we read previous writing. As Candace Lang argues, ‘not only is autobiography “in the Augustinian sense” no longer possible, it never was’ (Lang 1982: 5). It is not that a unified self was once available and can be rediscovered in past autobiographies; there is a sense in which it always was a historical and ideological construct, an effect of discourse.
