Description

A cross-section of current work in autobiographical studies, Soi-disant brings together essays on Raymond Queneau, Georges Perec, Jean Genet, Jeanne Hyvrard, Amelie Nothomb, Yves Navarre, Catherine Pozzi, Marie Bashkirtseff, and the history of Maghreb literature. It highlights the intertextual nature of autobiographical writing, the ways in which it is shaped by other texts of various genres and bears the traces of these textual intersections. Reflecting contemporary preoccupations in autobiographical studies, the collection demonstrates that the aim has moved beyond the policing of a genre. Autobiographical practices are taken to be plural and considered as sets of discursive manoeuvres. The essays are thus concerned less with defining what life-writing is than with raising questions about what it can do performatively, whether in diaries, autobiographies subtitled as such and novels read as autobiographies, or in such unlikely genres as fourteenth century travel writing in Arabic and the elaborate games of OuLiPo texts.