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Abstract
Reflecting the authorial self as well as their own production, autobiographic texts are often perceived as “narcissistic.” By drawing on narratological and psychoanalytic theories about narcissism and mirroring, this article argues that autobiographies can go beyond self-involvement and highlight the autobiographer’s search for meaning in dialogue with others.
Notes
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Figure 1. Sedgwick, Dialogue on Love. 1999, 194–95.
Figure 2. Bechdel, Are You My Mother? 2012, 233.
Notes
1 In the following article, we use the terms autobiography, life writing, and memoir to refer to different aspects of the genre. We use “life writing” in the widest sense, as suggested by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010) as a general term for writing that takes a life (one’s own or another’s) as its focus. “Autobiography” is employed when we refer to the traditional concept of the genre as based on autonomous individualism, with the adjective “autobiographical” pointing to writing about the self of the author. However, crucial in our argument is the term “memoir” because a) the categorization of memoir often signals autobiographical works characterized by self-reflexivity about the writing process, b) the term stresses the dynamic between private and public (Nancy K. Miller, Bequest & Betrayal: Memoirs of a Parent’s Death. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, 2), and c) the term’s history reflects our argument: the connection between the individual and the group, between narcissism and public belonging (Julia Rak, Boom! Manufacturing Memoir for the Popular Market. Wateroo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013, 211–212).
2 William H. Gass, “The Art of Self: Autobiography in an Age of Narcissism,” Harper’s Magazine, May 1994, http://harpers.org/archive/1994/05/the-art-of-self/.
3 James Atlas, “Confessing for Voyeurs; The Age of Literary Memoir Is Now,” The New York Times Magazine, May 12, 1996, www.nytimes.com/1996/05/12/magazine/confessing-for-voyeurs-the-age-of-the-literary-memoir-is-now.html?_r=0/.
4 Eva Illouz, Saving the Modern Soul: Therapy, Emotions, and the Culture of Self-Help (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 173.
5 Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York: Norton, 1979).
6 David Goodman and Mark Freeman, “Introduction: Why the Other?” in Psychology and the Other, ed. David Goodman and Mark Freeman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 2.
7 Miller, Bequest & Betrayal, 2.
8 Rak, Boom!, 211–212.
9 Gillian Whitlock, “Autographics: The Seeing ‘I’ of the Comics,” Modern Fiction Studies 52.4 (2006): 966.
10 Julia Watson, “Autographic Disclosures and Genealogies of Desire in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home,” in Graphic Subjects: Critical Essays on Autobiography and Graphic Novels, ed. Michael Chaney (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011), 124–125.
11 Kristin Dombek, The Selfishness of Others: An Essay on the Fear of Narcissism (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016), 137.
12 Linda Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox (New York: Methuen, 1984), 20.
13 Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography, 4.
14 See Ansgar Nünning, “Metabiographies and Metaautobiographies: Towards a Definition, Typology, and Analysis of Self-reflexive Hybrid Meta-Genres,” in Self-Reflexivity in Literature, ed. Werner Huber, Martin Midekke, and Herbert Zapf. (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2005) 195–209.
15 Paul John Eakin, How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 8.
16 Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography, 30.
17 Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative, 35.
18 James Phelan, “Foreword: Before Reading in Its Own Terms,” in Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation, ed. Peter J. Rabinowitz (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998), x.
19 Felicity A. Nussbaum, The Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideology in Eighteenth-Century England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 4.
20 Liz Stanley, The Auto/biographical I: The Theory and Practice of Feminist Autobiography (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), 11–12.
21 John Paul Eakin, Living Autobiographically: How We Create Identity in Narrative (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), 22.
22 Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative, 8.
23 Goodman and Freeman, “Introduction,” 5.
24 Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative, xiv.
25 Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative, xii.
26 Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative, 7.
27 Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative, xii.
28 See Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (New York: Harper Collins, 1993); and Carolyn Williams, “The Gutter Effect in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s A Dialogue on Love,” in Graphic Subjects: Critical Essays on Autobiography and Graphic Novels, ed. Michael Chaney (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011), 195–199.
29 Neil Cohn, “The Limits of Time and Transition: Challenges to Theories of Sequential Image Comprehension,” Studies in Comics 1.1 (2010): 135.
30 Williams, “The Gutter Effect,” 195.
31 Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative, 1.
32 Eve Caligor, Kenneth N. Levy, and Frank E. Yeomans, “Narcissistic Personality Disorder: Diagnostic and Clinical Challenges,” American Journal of Psychiatry 172.5 (2015): 416.
33 Anthony Bateman and Jeremy Holmes, Introduction to Psychoanalysis: Contemporary Theory and Practice (London: Routledge, 2005), 55.
34 Donald W. Winnicott, “The Theory of the Parent-Infant Relationship,” The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 41 (1960): 586.
35 Bateman and Holmes, Introduction to Psychoanalysis, 59.
36 Donald W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (London: Routledge, 2005), 151.
37 Winnicott, Playing and Reality, 154.
38 Alice Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self, trans. Ruth Ward (New York: Basic Books, 1990), 8.
39 Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child, 12.
40 Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child, 9.
41 Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child, 14.
42 Winnicott, Playing and Reality, 158.
43 Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child, 78.
44 Antonino Ferro, Psychoanalysis as Therapy and Storytelling, trans. Philip Slotkin (London: Routledge, 2006), 17.
45 Norman N. Holland, The Dynamics of Literary Response (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 79.
46 Thomas H. Ogden, Subjects of Analysis (Northvale: Jason Aronson, 1994), 1–3.
47 Paul Gediman and Charlotte Abbott, “Forecasts: Nonfiction,” Publishers Weekly 246.22 (1999): 74.
48 Nancy K. Miller, “Reviewing Eve,” in Regarding Sedgwick: Essays on Queer Culture and Critical Theory, ed. Stephen M. Barber and David L. Clark (New York: Routledge, 2002), 218.
49 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, A Dialogue on Love (Boston: Beacon, 1999), 4.
50 Sedgwick, A Dialogue on Love, 106.
51 Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child, 5.
52 Sedgwick, A Dialogue on Love, 192.
53 Sedgwick, A Dialogue on Love, 30.
54 Sedgwick, A Dialogue on Love, 54.
55 Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child, 6.
56 Sedgwick, A Dialogue on Love, 11.
57 Sedgwick, A Dialogue on Love, 139.
58 Sedgwick, A Dialogue on Love, 7.
59 Miller, “Reviewing Eve,” 220.
60 Sedgwick, A Dialogue on Love, 60.
61 Sedgwick, A Dialogue on Love, 139.
62 Sedgwick, A Dialogue on Love, 163.
63 Elizabeth Stephens, “Queer Memoir: Public Confession and/as Sexual Practice in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s A Dialogue on Love,” Australian Humanities Review 48 (2010): 38.
64 Sedgwick, A Dialogue on Love, 86.
65 Sedgwick, A Dialogue on Love, 115.
66 Kathryn R. Kent, “‘Surprising Recognition’: Genre, Poetic Form, and Erotics from Sedgwick’s ‘1001 Seances’ to A Dialogue on Love,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 17.4 (2011): 507.
67 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Teaching/Depression,” The Scholar and Feminist Online 4 (2006), sfonline.barnard.edu/heilbrun/sedgwick_01.htm.
68 Sedgwick, A Dialogue on Love, 115.
69 Sedgwick, A Dialogue on Love, 76.
70 Sedgwick, A Dialogue on Love, 192.
71 Sedgwick, A Dialogue on Love, 200.
72 Sedgwick, A Dialogue on Love, 207.
73 Sedgwick, A Dialogue on Love, 194.
74 Tyler Bradway, “‘Permeable We!’: Affect and the Ethics of Intersubjectivity in Eve Sedgwick’s A Dialogue on Love,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 19.1 (2013): 84.
75 Bradway, “‘Permeable We!,’” 82.
76 Sedgwick, “Teaching/Depression.”
77 Sedgwick, A Dialogue on Love, 194.
78 Sedgwick, A Dialogue on Love, 194.
79 Williams, “The Gutter Effect,” 196.
80 Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative, xii.
81 Alison Bechdel, Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing, 2012), 285.
82 Dwight Garner, “Artist, Draw Thyself (And Your Mother and Therapist),” The New York Times, May 2, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/03/books/are-you-my-mother-by-alison-bechdel.html?mcubz=0/.
83 Bechdel, Are You My Mother, 22.
84 Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child, 23.
85 Bechdel, Are You My Mother, 22.
86 Bechdel, Are You My Mother, 18.
87 Bechdel, Are You My Mother, 149.
88 Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative, xiii.
89 Bechdel, Are You My Mother, 31.
90 Bechdel, Are You My Mother, 6–7.
91 Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child, 7–8.
92 Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child, 7.
93 Bechdel, Are You My Mother, 110–11.
94 Bechdel, Are You My Mother, 19.
95 Bechdel, Are You My Mother, 53.
96 Bechdel, Are You My Mother, 53–54.
97 Bechdel, Are You My Mother, 130.
98 Bechdel, Are You My Mother, 11.
99 Bechdel, Are You My Mother, 11.
100 Bechdel, Are You My Mother, 199.
101 Bechdel, Are You My Mother, 182.
102 Bechdel, Are You My Mother, 228–229.
103 Bechdel, Are You My Mother, 123.
104 Bechdel, Are You My Mother, 122.
105 Bechdel, Are You My Mother, 288.
106 Bechdel, Are You My Mother, 134.
107 Bechdel, Are You My Mother, 136.
108 Bechdel, Are You My Mother, 142.
109 Bechdel, Are You My Mother, 51.
110 Bechdel, Are You My Mother, 80.
111 Bechdel, Are You My Mother, 71.
112 Tirdad Derakhshani, “Graphic Memoir an Exercise in Exorcism,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, May 3, 2012, tinyurl.com/y3hqldop.
113 Bechdel, Are You My Mother, 242.
114 Watson, “Autographic Disclosures,” 124, emphasis added.
115 Watson, “Autographic Disclosures,” 124.
116 Bechdel, Are You My Mother, 234.
117 Bechdel, Are You My Mother, 233.
118 Bechdel, Are You My Mother, 56.
119 Hillary L. Chute, Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 6.
120 Tzvetan Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogic Principle, trans. Wlad Gadzich (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 109.
121 Goodman and Freeman, “Introduction,” 2.
122 Goodman and Freeman, “Introduction,” 2.
123 Anita Wohlmann, “Illness Narrative and Self-Help Culture: Self-Help Writing on Age-Related Infertility,” European Journal of Life Writing 3 (2014): 21. See also Barbara Ehrenreich, Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World (London: Granta, 2010); and Micki McGee, Self-Help, Inc.: Makeover Culture in American Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
124 Chute, Graphic Women, 4.