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Zusatztext the persistent reader will be richly rewarded...The book has something to offer all scholars interested in autobiography as well as lucid critical analyses of individual texts...His work confirms what we already knew: that the French autobiographical tradition is extraordinarily rich. Klappentext This important book uses close readings of sixteen key French autobiographers to provide a major contribution to theoretical discussions of the genre. Sheringham traces the development of autobiography in French from Rousseau, exploring the differing devices with which autobiographers have dealt with enduring challenges: the difficulty of self-scrutiny, the self as textual construct, the relation to the reader, the problem of memory, and the influence of other texts and people. Zusammenfassung This is the first full-scale study of French autobiography. Whereas earlier critics have engaged primarily in theoretical discussion of the genre, or in analyses of individual works or authors, Michael Sheringham identifies sixteen key autobiographical texts and situates them in the context of an evolving set of challenges and problems.Informed by a sophisticated awareness of recent theoretical debates, Sheringham conceives autobiography as a distinctively open form of writing, perpetually engaged with different forms of `otherness'. Manifestations of the Other in the autobiographical process - from the reader, who incarnates other people, to ideology, against which individual truth must be pitted, to the potential otherness of memory itself - are traced through a scrutiny of the `devices and desires' at work in a range of texts from Rousseau's Confessions, to Stendhal's Vie de Henry Brulard and Sartre's Les Mots. Other writers examined include Chateaubriand, Gide, Green, Leiris, Leduc, Gorz, Barthes, Perec, and Sarraute.French Autobiography: Devices and Desires represents both the first attempt to assemble a canon in one volume and a strikingly original contribution to the theory of autobiography....
