Table Of ContentThe Phenomenology
of Autobiography
Taking a fresh look at the state of autobiography as a genre, The
Phenomenology of Autobiography: Making It Real takes a deep dive
into the experience of the reader. Dr. Schmitt argues that current trends
in the field of life writing have taken the focus away from the text and
the initial purpose of autobiography as a means for the author to com
municate with a reader and narrate an experience. The study puts auto
biography back into a communicational context, and putting forth the
notion that one of the reasons why life writing can so often be aestheti
cally unsatisfactory, or difficult to distinguish from novels, is because it
should not be considered as a literary genre but as a modality with radi
cally different rules and means of evaluation. In other words, not only
is autobiography radically different from fiction due to its referentiality,
but, first and foremost, it should be read differently.
Dr. Arnaud Schmitt is a Senior Lecturer and Professor at the University
of Bordeaux.
Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature
For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com.
67 Landscape, Seascape, and the Eco-Spatial Imagination
Edited by Simon C. Estok, I-Chun Wang, and Jonathan White
68 Auto/Biography across the Americas
Transnational Themes in Life Writing
Edited by Ricia Anne Chansky
69 Ecocriticism and Indigenous Studies
Conversations from Earth to Cosmos
Edited by Joni Adamson and Salma Monani
70 Representations of Anne Frank in American Literature
In Different Rooms
Rachael McLennan
71 Hospitality in American Literature and Culture
Spaces, Bodies, Borders
Ana Mª Manzanas Calvo and Jesús Benito Sánchez
72 Transcultural Poetics and the Concept of the Poet
From Philip Sidney to T.S. Eliot
Ranjan Ghosh
73 Steampunk and Nineteenth-Century Digital Humanities
Literary Retrofuturisms, Media Archaeologies, Alternate Histories
Roger Whitson
74 Food and Foodways in African Narratives
Community, Culture, and Heritage
Jonathan Bishop Highfield
75 The Phenomenology of Autobiography
Making it Real
Arnaud Schmitt
The Phenomenology
of Autobiography
Making It Real
Arnaud Schmitt
First published 2017
by Routledge
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© 2017 Taylor & Francis
The right of Arnaud Schmitt to be identified as author of this
work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections
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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
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CIP data has been applied for.
ISBN: 9781138710290 (hbk)
ISBN: 9781315173504 (ebk)
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For Héléna, Melvil and Sofia-Louise
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Contents
Introduction 1
1 The G Word and the H Word 26
2 The Modality of the “I” (Part 1) 49
3 The Modality of the “I” (Part 2) 76
4 Tone and Intimacy 134
Conclusion 161
Works Cited 167
Index 175
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Introduction
What happened? What happened to you? Did it really happen? Did it
really happen as you now describe it? And then more sophisticated ques
tions: Why are you telling me this? If it did not happen as you described
it in your book, how do you justify this discrepancy? Did you misre-
member or did you lie? Is memory trustworthy anyway (it seems not)?
Why did you decide to publish this autobiography in the first place?
Why does one share privacy, and with a large audience? Where does this
satisfaction as a published autobiographer stem from?
These questions can be dubbed primary and secondary: the primary
questions focus on events, and more particularly events told. Secondary
questions center on the status of the events told and of the teller. Lately,
literary theory has predominantly considered secondary questions (or, as
we will see in Chapter 1, has decided to introduce an altogether new set
of questions—implying radical answers), but primary questions remain
highly relevant for readers, at least for readers who are the source of this
contemporary literary phenomenon referred to as the memoir boom.1
They read for facts, they read for events, and, as opposed to readers of
historiographic novels or autofictions, they certainly do not read to be
taught a metalesson on the impossibility of telling one’s life or having
access to somebody else’s. Actually, for many of us, telling one’s life, in
one form or another, remains a phenomenological reality and belongs to
our everyday experience; so does listening to somebody else’s account.
Without this yearning to know what goes on in somebody else’s (real)
life, the memoir boom would have never existed. But because we have
been working for so long on secondary questions, and for some of us on
the most sophisticated versions of secondary questions (myself included),
we have developed a tendency to forget that primary questions remain
exactly that: primary, even primal.
Also, these primary questions are a reader’s questions. The tendency
to mistake readers’ motivations for writers’ motivations is not something
new—actually, the reader’s point of view is a fairly recent preoccupa
tion in literary studies—but remains highly problematic, as the reasons
why you decide to write your life are distinct from the ones that drive
you to read somebody’s autobiography, even though, quite similarly to
