ABSTRACT

This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts discussed in this book. The book highlights many reasons why the reader should not take a traditional, passive approach to reading autobiographical texts, but adopt a more active, critical one instead. It shows the autobiography figured as a feminine space, a memorializing space, a space for the expression of marginalized identities, but most often, as an impossible space. The book also shows Philippe Lejeune's model of the autobiographical pact embeds within it the idea that autobiography is the site of a play of power relations between the reader and writer of autobiography. Lejeune's model of autobiography lays bare that the autobiographical self depends on the reading other for its self-realization. They emphasize the opacity of language and the distortions of representation; the fallibility of memory and the obscure workings of the unconscious as factors which inhibit the production of a faithful image of the author in the medium of text.