Autobiography and the Autobiographical Mode as Narrative Resistances. An Interdisciplinary Perspective

Abstract

If every human gesture is autobiographical, then autobiographical genres and modes are being enriched day by day by contemporary and emerging disciplines and fields which do not necessarily belong to life writing. When it comes to trauma and war studies, the autobiographical imposes itself in a variety of thematic and structural ways in order to express the subjectivity of the oppressed, not without difficulties. This international and inter-disciplinary cluster of articles proposes to explore autobiography through the filiation narrative, autofiction, the anecdote, the body, the rewriting of the Grand Historical narratives, namely World War Two and the Franco-Algerian conflict, and the deconstruction of such binary oppositions as War Vs Peace and Lived Trauma Vs Narrated Trauma. The present introduction to the cluster will first introduce the genre of life writing in general, and autobiography in particular, by tracing its evolution towards a postmodern, more metabiographical stance. It will then summarize and comment on each article in the cluster so as to highlight their shared thematic patterns and the various findings which are pertinent to the fields of autobiography, trauma and war studies. The final section of the introduction will provide a new perspective on Freudian studies through the lens of auto/biography and metabiography.

Keywords

• autobiography
• metabiography
• war narratives
• memory
• selfhood
• identity
• trauma