ABSTRACT
Written autobiography and memoir include works as diverse as classical apologia and confessions, from Augustine of Hippo’s Confessions (c. 397) and the Book of Margery Kempe (1436) to Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), Zitkalasa’s Impressions of an Indian Childhood (1900), and Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz (1958). But life-writing can also be “experimental” (see Kacandes, this volume): one can point to fictional autobiographies and mixed-genre memoirs such as Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), Maxine Hong Kingston’s A Woman Warrior: Memories of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (1975), Gao Xingjian’s Soul Mountain (1990/2000), N. Scott Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969), or Lyn Hejinian’s My Life (2002) (see McHale, this volume). Often the experimentation of autobiographical writing is linked to the aims of specific literary movements or groups: the Beat ethos is apparent in Jack Kerouac’s autobiographical nonfiction (see Lee, this volume); Georges Perec’s W (1975) has a clear link to OuLiPo experimentation (see Baetens, this volume); Raymond Federman’s The Twofold Vibration (1982) illustrates the precepts of surfiction (see Berry, this volume); Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place (1988) serves postcolonial politics as it recounts her own personal history in Antigua (see Gopal, this volume); J.M. Coetzee’s Summertime (2009) recalls the strategies of metafiction; Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Le Miroir qui revient (1984) should, as Ann Jefferson (1991) has noted, be viewed in relation to the nouveau roman (see Marx-Scouras, this volume).
