ABSTRACT
Autobiography takes many forms. Though confessional autobiography continues to attract large numbers of readers and critics, this chapter will suggest that another form of autobiography – a form which I am calling ‘remembrance’ – has recently risen to prominence. This rise of literary autobiographical remembrance cannot be extricated, however, from a more general contemporary fascination with memory. Indeed, contemporary Western societies have recently been described as experiencing a memory ‘boom of unprecedented proportions’ (Huyssen 1995: 5) and of being ‘obsessed by’ (Hamilton 1994: 10) memory. This explosion of interest in memory (Radstone 2000: especially 1-12) has made itself felt not only in texts, but also in the academy and in popular practices (Samuel 1994) and has been associated by many with an epochal shift from modernity to the postmodern (see, for instance, Huyssen 1995). This association rests on an account of the divergent temporalities of modernity and postmodernity. While modernity is linked with a future-oriented temporality aligned with ideas of progress, postmodernity is connected, rather, with a temporality that folds the future back onto the past (ibid.). In this chapter, however, I suggest that contemporary autobiographies do not fit neatly into this account of epochal temporalities, since the latter takes no account of the temporalities of sexual difference. In offering a reading of contemporary autobiography, temporality and sexual difference, then, this chapter suggests that the very idea of an epochal shift rests on an unproblematised and reductive understanding of temporalities.
