ABSTRACT
For whatever reasons, autobiography has become a flourishing and sophisticated art, and literary critic and theorist alike pay it increasing attention. Both sides are continually preoccupied with a question which, while inescapable, is in part a pseudo-problem: the relation in autobiographical writing of the fictive and the historical, “design” and “truth,” Dichtung und Wahrheit. There is, as Norman Holland observes, nothing in an autobiographical passage itself to distinguish history from fiction. Some autobiographers intend at first to delineate an “I” that is comprehensive, essential, total, while others intend initially only a partial personal truth, chronologically or analytically restricted. Autobiographers share certain intentions in varying degrees and in numerous distinctive patterns of interaction. The correlation of observations and interpretations would seem to be the most promising way to the recognition of meaning and value.
