ebook Authors on authors Robert Kusek

Wydawca: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego

Rok wydania: 2012

e-ISBN: 978-83-233-8734-3

Among many types of life-writing genres that recently have not only become central to contemporary academic discourse, but also attracted wide readership, the biographical novel deserves special attention. Authors on Authors examines biographical-novel-about-a-writer – a sub-genre of biographical novel which takes a real writer and his/her life story as the subject matter for imaginative exploration. The study identifies all the major examples of the genre written in English between 1990 and 2010, while discussing a variety of approaches and methods used by contemporary authors in rewriting the lives of other authors. An original taxonomy of the genre based on Gerard Genette’s Palimpsests is introduced in this work, following a claim that life and, consequently, life-writing are derivational practices and as such are inherently intertextual and ontologically palimpsestuous. Seen as the most representative and accomplished achievements of the genre, four specific attempts at a biographical-novel-about-a-writer (Author, Author by David Lodge, The Master by Colm Tóibín, The Hours by Michael Cunningham and The Master of Petersburg by J.M. Coetzee) are singled out for an in-depth analysis in this multi-dimensional study which works dialectically across the borders of history, biography, literary criticism, philosophy and textual analysis.

Spis treści ebooka Authors on authors

Acknowledgments 9
Introduction. The Age of Authors, the Age of Biography 11

Chapter One. Biographical-Novel-about-a-Writer – the Genre and Its Hybridity 25
1.1. A Biographical Novel: towards a Definition of the Genre 25
1.2. Hybridity of Biographical Novel: on the Palimpsestuous Nature of the Genre 30
1.2.1. Pastiche 32
1.2.2. Forgery 33
1.2.3. Unfaithful Continuation or Supplement 35
1.2.4. Transposition 36
1.2.4.1. Translation 37
1.2.4.1.1. Translation Simple 38
1.2.4.2. Augmentation/Excision 39
1.2.4.3. Thematic Transformations (Semantic, Diegetic, Pragmatic) 43
1.2.4.4. Transmotivation 47
1.2.4.5. Transvaluation 49

Chapter Two. The Many Lives of Henry James 53
2.1. Time and Spirit 53
2.2. Lost in Translation 57
2.3. The Story Won’t Tell 94

Chapter Three. Versions of Virginia Woolf: ‘No More False than They Are True’? 97
3.1. Truth and Falsity of Life-Writing 97
3.2. Stories Re-Told, Lives Re-Lived 100
3.3. ‘There Are Some Stories that Have to Be Retold by Each Generation’ 122

Chapter Four. J.M. Coetzee and the Labyrinth of Life-Writing 127
4.1. Authority and Fiction 127
4.2. Rewriting Lives, Retelling Stories 128
4.3. Age of Iron, Age of Disguise 141
4.4. Writing the Other, Writing the Self 150
4.5. The Double 161

Conclusion: Et apres? 165